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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.

Saturday 9 November 2019

Saturday Walk Hildenborough to Hadlow

Hildenborough to Hadlow

Length: 13.3km (8.2 miles) option of 21.5km (13.4 miles) walking on to Tonbridge
 2/3 out of 10

Typical Wealden countryside of fields, meadows and the occasional wood. At Shipbourne (pronounced Shibbun) you join the Greensand Way for a short section to the hamlet of Dunk's Green, then head south-east along the valley of the River Bourne to Hadlow. On this last stretch you find yourself heading towards one of the more peculiar sights you are likely to encounter on a Home Counties walk: a multi-tiered Gothic folly, taller than Nelson's Column.

Note: If walking on to Tonbridge. Apparently the route has been updated quite recently, but the new PDF is not yet loaded but the GPX for that section is the new route.

Trains:
Get the 1000 Tunbridge Wells train from Charing Cross arriving 1042, London Bridge 1007. Buy a return to Tonbridge
Return is by a bus from Hadlow to Tonbridge High Street, Arriva route 7 every 30 mins approx xx17 xx47 from Hadlow College, journey time 18 minutes

Lunch: Halfway through the Main Walk the Chaser Inn in Shipbourne serves food all afternoon. Half an hour further on you come to the Kentish Rifleman, Dunk's Green. It serves homemade food up to 2pm

Tea:  Broadview Gardens Tearoom open to 5pm & convenient for the bus
T=swc.219

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A lovely misty start redolent of old poems like Horses by Ted Hughes.
.... And I saw the horses:
Huge in the dense grey — ten together —
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move.........
The mist cleared by the sun never happened as the sun never made it out and the day was w=grey-and-damp for the most part.
Lunch was at Shipbourne during which we dried off shoes and socks by the fire and discussed bailing out with a bus from there but in the end decided to continue to Hadlow.
For all the the greyness the day was lovely and a thoroughly enjoyable walk and we wouldn't have had any rain at all if it hadn't been for a newbie out of the blue announcing 'Well we seem to have dodged the rain'. Four of us dashed to touch wood which to a great extent nipped the damage in the bud and we only had a few spots of rain. Three of us had tea and the other four took the bus before us N=7
Grey but great day.