Saturday 29 June 2019
Kingham to Charlbury
Length: 17.6 km (11 miles)
Toughness: 2 out of 10
Catch the 09:22 train from London Paddington to Kingham, arrives 10:49. Buy a day return to Kingham. Return trains: 16:07, 17:04, 18:04, 19:07, 20:07, 21:08, 22:16
A relaxing walk along the Oxfordshire Way, passing through charming Cotswold villages.
Lunch at Wychwood Inn in Shipton under Wychwood after 4 miles or The Swan pub at Ascott under Wychwood after 5½ miles.
Longer 35km map walk option.
L=swc.246
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7 comments:
Re the 21.7m long walk option: er shurely shome mishtake (;>) over the toughness rating of 2/10 on the walk 341 page? A typo perhaps as the short 11m version is also a 2/10? More like a 7 or 8 at least I'd have thought.
The rating presumably reflects the fact that both the short and long walk are fairly flat. If the longer walk had a much higher rating just because it was long - a fact that is already evident from its length - a reasonable person might assume it had a lot more hills than the short walk, which I am assuming it does not.
Sorry Peter I think your logic is wrong. A reasonable person would think a 22 mile walk would require more physical effort than one half its length. By your reasoning a 200m walk across a flat desert in 50C heat would just be like doing a Thames path walk from Greenwich to London Bridge.
The two Profile charts show that the original walk has a total ascent of 80m and the longer one 340m. On any reasonable criteria the longer one should be higher rated.
None of our walks are (yet) 200 miles and none are in the Sahara. Nor do we include the expected weather (or mud amounts or numbers of stiles) in our ratings. The two factors we take into account are length and how hilly the walk is. I would say state them separately. But if you are going to bundle then together, then I would note that the Moreton Grand Circular, which is 26 miles and quite hilly, is rated 10 out of 10. On this basis shouldn’t any walk under 13 miles be 5 out of 10 at most? Or is the Moreton Grand Circular a 15 or 20 put of 10?
In TOCW1 it was stated that "these ratings are only relevant to the walks published here...and would be considerably lower if put in the context of hillier parts of Britain". Several walks like the Moreton Grand Circular are way off this original scale in both their length and total ascent, as of course are most of those on the Scottish and other SWC expeditions.
I would say that the simplest solution would be to drop the "out of 10" and just give a single toughness number as a means of comparing walks. On my criteria the Moreton walk is currently the "toughest" south-east walk on the SWC site and to compare it with the original book walks it deserves to be rated 16. There are a handful of other new walks which I would rate as higher than 10, eg. last Saturday's Rowlands Castle walk would be 14.
n=3 of us, 2 for the standard walk all talk being about the Swan PH at Ascott under Wychwood having recently been taken over - can't say how that went as we parted 2 miles into the walk. Unlike Clacton it was W=very_hot. Lunch after 2pm at the first pub in Bruton. A couple of miles out of Bruton took a wise decision to rest for quite a while under a tree, setting off after 5pm by which time the sun was not so fierce on taking an easier route to Charlbury.
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