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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 15 September 2019

Sunday Walk – A Surrey racecourse and a Community Orchard

Extra Walk 329 – Dormans to Lingfield
Length: 17 km (10.6 miles), with optional extensions (†‡). Toughness: 3/10

09:51 East Grinstead train from Victoria (Clapham Jct 09:58, East Croydon 10:09), arriving Dormans at 10:46. Buy a return to Dormans.

† Or take the train half an hour earlier, get off at Lingfield, and see if you can do the walk's 3¼ km ‘preamble’ to Dormans in 36 minutes to meet the next train.

Return trains from Lingfield are half-hourly at xx:19 & xx:49; or three minutes earlier from Dormans if you take the post-walk extension (‡).

This newish walk had its début six months ago in rather dismal conditions, so I hope the weather gods are kinder this time. The morning section is a circuit of Dormans Park to the south of Lingfield; a short gallop up the finishing straight of its Racecourse should get the pub-lunchers to The Star at around 12:30-12:45pm. The afternoon route is a circuit to the north of the village, where you might like to linger in a nice Community Orchard. The directions point out various ways of shortening the walk if you want to finish early.

‡ There's also a 4 km extension back to Dormans station if you want a longer walk.

You'll need to bring the directions from the Dormans to Lingfield walk page.
T=swc.329

2 comments:

Sean said...

n=10 walkers on a w=warm-sunny day. As is fairly normal on a Sunday only two wanted a pub lunch, prompting the thought that we should ignore the lunch options and just post walks with a suitable space for people to eat their sandwiches, at least on Sundays. Two others drifted into The Star afterwards so four set off together for the afternoon, but by then the rest had all done their own thing: at least one had gone straight to the station; another had gone off to sunbathe au naturel; and two following the route on a gizmo were later discovered doing the afternoon loop in the reverse direction, a not uncommon occurrence.

At the Community Orchard the four laggards discovered that the low-hanging fruit had all been snaffled, but vigorously attacked the trees with sticks and collected a fair haul of pears and other goodies. Google was consulted about medlars but the answer ("not to everyone's taste") persuaded us to move on. Returning to Lingfield we were irritated to find that the preferred tearoom no longer deigns to open on Sundays, but somewhat mollified by cold drinks from the local Co-op.

PS. There was some understandable grumbling from those with bulging rucksacks about having to cart their plunder around for a couple of hours, so the author has now graciously tweaked the route to visit the orchard near the end of the walk.

Anonymous said...

That author is a lovely chap