Backup Only

This Week's Walks - Archive

Please see the Saturday Walker's Club This Week's Walks page.

This is an archive of walks done by the Saturday Walker's Club. You should only need to use this page if the SWC website is down.

Sunday 17 March 2019

Sunday walk: Surrey heaths and landscaped gardens

Oxshott Cicular
Length: 16.3km(10.3miles) Toughness: 3/10

10:00 Portsmouth Harbour train from Waterloo, changing at Surbiton (arr 10:22; dep 10:33) to arrive at Oxshott at 10:43.

Return trains are at xx:14 (journey time 45 minutes).

Heaths, woodland and water meadows are all encountered on this walk, whose main feature is the beautifully restored gardens of Painshill, “England’s most elegant 18th century landscaped garden” (adult tickets £8:00). Please note that Painshill closes at 4:00pm (last entry 3:00pm).

Suggested lunch pubs on the outskirts of Cobham (both fairly expensive) are The Cricketers (01932 862105) and The Plough (01932 589790). Another option nearby is The Medicine Garden restaurant/café. Directions to all of these are in the Walk Directions.

The walk directions and other information can be found here.

T=swc.305

2 comments:

David said...

After a continuously windy week, it was rather surprising that only n=7 walkers turned up on what was a w=bright_sunny_and_generally_very_pleasant_day for walking. Perhaps this was because the walk is hardly challenging (I would give it 2 out of 10 on the toughness scale). And it only intermittently has a rural feel to it. In spite of that, the walk has the obvious attraction of Painshill and some truly impressive houses on the edge of Cobham, so if you want to see how far removed your lifestyle is from those who live in this wealthy part of Surrey, this is the walk to do. We stayed together as a group only as far as Littleheath Common, just after crossing the Guildford line for the second time. At this point, there were two different views about the direction to take so, instead of the directions instructing the walker to "turn half-right", it would have been better to say "take the middle path of three". Three of us did that; the other four took the righthand most of the three paths. We didn't see them again after that! At lunch, one of our number decided to make for The Plough, while we ate our sandwiches in St Andrew's churchyard and pressed on. We completed the full walk in time to catch the 3.14 train back to Surbiton and miss the mid-afternoon showers.

David said...

Just to add a brief note that I very much enjoyed the variety of the walk: the lakes and ponds, heathland, landscaped gardens and sumptuous properties (apologies if my report suggested otherwise). There was one slightly waterlogged field to contend with, but otherwise it was a nice easy stroll for those who like it that way.