Friday Night Special: Greenwich Park and the Spark

Greenwich Park and the Spark T=short.12

Distance:          Approximately 4.0 miles or 6.4 km for those more metrically minded

Difficulty:         2 out of 10

Meet:                Island Gardens (DLR) at 18:45

Return:             Greenwich mainline train, DLR or even Thames Clipper

This interesting exploration of Greenwich Park is being posted by special request to coincide with the Spark, a free art installation taking place on Friday night at 9pm on the grounds of the Queen’s House. It is part of the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival -- GDIF 2022, an annual outdoor performance art festival. You should have plenty of time to complete the walk route and grab a drink and/or bite at one the many watering holes in Greenwich (in the past we have found the Old Brewery, on the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College, a pleasant outdoor venue) before the performance.

More information and the walk route can be found here.

Enjoy the walk and the Spark!

Evening Walk - Trent Country Park and Enfield Chase

Length: 7.9 km/4.9 mi

Meet 18.45 hours prompt outside Cockfosters Station (Northern Terminus of the Piccadilly Line in Zone 5), travel time from King’s Cross 31 minutes, from Finsbury Park (Victoria Line) 23 minutes.

Parkland at the end of the line in leafy Northern London. Trent Park is a former part of Enfield Chase, a royal hunting ground.

Refreshments: The Cock Inn, Cockfosters.

For a detailed route map, gpx/kml file and some directions click here. T=short.10

Wednesday Walk Bow Brickhill to Woburn Sands - Back Wood, Woburn, Woburn Park, Safari Park, Aspley Guise then on to Woburn Sands

Book 1 Walk 17 - Bow Brickhill to Woburn Sands

Length: 18.7 km (11.6 miles)    Ending walk in Aspley Guise - 10.7 miles

Toughness: 6 out of 10    no steep hills but several ups and downs 

London Euston: 10-15 hrs   West Midlands service to Northampton 

Arrive Bletchley: 10-49 hrs   Change trains

Leave Bletchley:  11-01   West Midlands service to Bedford

Arrive Bow Brickhill:  11-08 hrs

Return

Woburn Sands to London Euston, changing at Bletchley: 15-26, 16-26, 17-19, 18-26, 19-21 and 20-26 hrs

Aspley Guise:  2 minutes before Woburn Sands

Rail ticket:   buy a day return to Woburn Sands

The highlights of today's walk comes in the afternoons, when having enjoyed the vast expanses of Woburn Park, with its herds of deer, you walk along a public footpath alongside Woburn Safari Park. From this path you usually have fine views of buck, zebra, rhinos, elephants, giraffes then later, wallabies. 

Before this, in the morning, the walk starts with a leg through Back Wood, where many a SWC walkers has gone off piste. Once negotiated, the walk continues along the edge of Woburn Golf Club before continuing through a mixture of light woodland and open fields into the attractive town of Woburn, where we stop for lunch. A favourite with SWC walkers is the Black Horse, towards the top of Bedford Street. Further down this street is the Bell Inn, which often has good value offers at lunchtime.

After leaving the Safari Park and Woburn Park, we exit the estate through the gates of Crawley Lodge,  to climb steadily up a road to and through the village Aspley Guise. Once past the Parish Church of St Botolph, you have the choice of finishing today's walk at Aspley Guise railway station - by keeping ahead for some 600 metres down the road, or continuing on to Woburn Sands, via a golf course. Your refreshment stop in Woburn Sands is the Station Hotel, surprisingly situated next door to the railway station.

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Walk Directions are here: L=1.17 

Sunday Walk: Loughton to Epping.

13.4km (8.4miles) Difficulty 3/10. I was going to send you further afield today but I didn’t trust the trains.The morning takes you through the ancient woodland of Epping Forest.  The afternoon goes through open countryside with good views around Copped Hall Park.
The forest is renowned for its ancient pollarded trees, primarily oak, beech and hornbeam, which support a wealth of rare insects and fungi.
Transport: The walk starts from Loughton Underground Station at 10.30am. Meet outside near the ticket gates.
Loughton and Epping are both in Travel Zone 6 on the Central Line. Trains are frequent. It takes about 37 minutes to travel from Oxford Circus to Loughton. Use the TfL journey planner to calculate your journey time from other stations. 
There is car-parking at both Loughton and Epping underground stations.
Lunch
You first reach High Beach Visitor Centre where there is a refreshments kiosk (cash-only), toilets, café and the Kings Oak pub (0208 508 5000). There are also picnic benches nearby.
The Horseshoes pub (01992  712745 ) in Copthall Green is better placed, with friendly service and good food. (Their website’s kaput but they assure me they are still there). Nearby, the entrance gate to St Thomas’ Church leads to a pleasant grassy area with wooden benches suitable for a picnic.
 Tea
You pass an (untried ) inn at point 31, The Forest Gate. Otherwise, you should find places in Epping High Street.  Note that  the Verde café is permanently closed.
Walk Directions here 
GPS app or map are recommended. You can shorten the walk to about 5 miles by staying on the 3 Forest Way between paragraphs 7 and 30 .

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Sunday Walk: Totteridge Circular

Explore  London‘s ‘Northern Heights’ - the hills above and behind Hampstead and Highgate. At one point on this walk you can actually look down on Alexandra Palace and Highgate Hill. Don’t get dizzy.
Trains: get the Northern line to arrive at Totteridge for 10:30 (a train departs Tottenham Ct Road at 9:45, arriving  1022) use journey planner to plot your own route.
Return trains are frequent.  
Directions: here  The Option b ending via Totteridge Village is suggested.
Lunch: The recommended pub is the Three Hammers in Mill Hill, 020 8959 2173, after 7.6km (4.7 miles).
Other possibilities are the Rising Sun and The Summer House, the cafe of Finchley Nurseries.
Tea: If you take option b, you pass the Orange Tree in Totteridge village. This upmarket pub offers comfortable seating and has some outside tables by a duck pond (It also serves hot drinks)
Nearer Totteridge & Whetstone station, if you carry up the hill from the station for 250 metres to the High Road, there is a Costa Coffee, open till 5.30pm, with Coffee Culture just beyond it, open until 6pm. There is also a pub - The Griffin - opposite Costa Coffee.
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Saturday Walk - East London Double Bill (II): Dagenham Parks, Rivers and Ponds

Length: 10.1 km (6.3 mi) [shorter walk possible, see below]

Ascent/Descent: negligible

Net Walking Time: ca. 2 ¼ hours 

 

Arrive at Dagenham East station for a 14.00 start. Dagenham East is in Zone 5, on the District Line to Upminster. Journey time from Aldgate East is 32 minutes, from Victoria 49 minutes. You can shave off a few minutes by taking mainline trains from Fenchurch Street (or from Limehouse or West Ham) to Barking for part of the journey (half-hourly today).

 

This is an exploration of several linked green areas in an otherwise densely populated East London suburb, leading through some Local Nature Reserves, two Country Parks, an ex-landfill site and ex-quarry, a river floodplain and along the recently restored beds of the Wantz Stream and the Beam and Rom Rivers.

This walk has a large variety of landscapes, from acid grassland, fenland and woodland to marshland and sandy shrubland via woods and a tranquil meandering valley. 

 

Beam Parklands provides functional flood prevention and public open space for the community, while the Beam Valley Country Park was formerly derelict land after having been partly worked for gravel, leaving a wide diversity of habitats, with wet and dry grassland, tall herbs and scrub, and one small area of willow woodland, a scarce habitat in London. 

The Chase Local Nature Reserve has large areas of marshland and contains 6 of only 600 mature female Black Poplar trees left in the UK as well as a fenced off Bird Sanctuary (The Slack).  

Eastbrookend Country Park, now an interesting, undulating landscape, was formerly a gravel quarry then a dumping ground for the rubble left over from the blitz. 

 

A shortcut at the northerly end of the walk reduces the length by 2.3 km.

 

For a summary, walk directions, map, height profile, photos and gpx/kml files click here. 

 

Refreshments at the end: The Pipe Major. T=short.33

Saturday Walk: Angel to Limehouse or Tower Bridge

7 miles / 11.5 km to Limehouse

This is an easy walk following the Regents Canal to Victoria Park and on through Mile End to Limehouse.  From here you can extend the walk by a couple of miles to Tower Bridge following the Thames Path.

Meeting Place:  Angel Underground Station 11:30 a.m.

Lunch/Refreshments - There a couple of cafes in Victoria Park, and plenty of eating and drinking places in the surrounding streets.  The Thames Path will take you past several historic waterside pubs.

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Classic Chilterns: Chesham Circular or Chesham to Amersham

Classic Chilterns: Chesham Circular or Chesham to Amersham (Book 2 Walk 4/Book 1 Walk Combo 5) t=2.4

Distance:  For the Chesham Circular via The Lee -- 10 miles/16.1 km

                   For Chesham to Amersham – approximately 16 miles/25.7 km

Difficulty:  3 out of 10 for Chesham circuit and 5 out of 10 for Amersham ending

Train:  Take the 9:45ish AM Chesham bound Metropolitan Line from Baker Street, arriving at Chesham at 10:49. Return tube trains are twice an hour from Chesham (28 and 58 past the hour) and Amersham (20 and 50 minutes past the hour).

Desperate times call for creative measures….With the massive rail strike options are limited – so on offer today are two Chilterns classics, either a Chesham circular or a longer experimental route from Chesham to Amersham. The Chesham circular route goes via the The Lee, a pretty village for lunch at the Cock and Rabbit with instructions here. Note I do not think that there is a GPS file for the circular route via The Lee – so text will be key!

The Amersham ending is a bit of an experiment – using the short cut for the Chesham to Great Miss walk, then picking up the Great Miss to Amersham walk with lunch either in Great Miss or later on in Little Miss. More information and instructions for both walk components are here and here.

Check the walk notes for post walk refreshies – though I note in Chesham the Drawing Room is now closed….

Enjoy the walk!

Saturday Walk - East London Double Bill (I): Open water, grassland, woodland, marshland, fenland, green spaces - The Ingrebourne Valley

Open water, grassland, woodland, marshland, fenland via a series of linked green spaces along the Ingrebourne River: Hornchurch to Upminster

Length: 11.7 km/7.3 mi; 

Height Gain: 90m

Net Walking Time: 2 ½ hours

 

Meet 10.15 hours prompt outside Hornchurch Station (District Line to Upminster, in Zone 6), travel time from Tower Hill 43 minutes, from West Ham (Jubilee Line, DLR and Mainline trains) 25 minutes, from Barking 14 minutes, from Upminster 3 minutes. 

Your fastest option will be to take the 09.35 Shoeburyness train from Fenchurch Street (West Ham 09.52, Barking 09.56), arrives Upminster 10.00 and travel back on the District Line to Hornchurch. [Fenchurch Street Mainline Station is a 2-minutes walk from Tower Hill tube and 10 from Bank)] 

Return trains from Upminster: xx.16, xx.46. 

Return District Line: every few minutes 

 

The part of the Ingrebourne Valley walked through on this walk comprises a varied and unique mixture of interlinked and partly overlapping local green spaces - Ingrebourne Valley Greenway, Berwick Glades, Berwick Woods, Hornchurch Country Park, Ingrebourne Hill and the Sutton, Hacton and Gaynes Parkways. These include habitats ranging from river, open water, grassland, secondary and ancient woodland, marshland, fenland (with the largest continuous area of freshwater reed beds in Greater London), and – not to forget – some arable farmland.

Partly former airfield, ex-quarries, farmland or landfill site, it is now a continuous green space and contains – pound for pound – one of the best viewpoints of London’s Skyline, from all of 11 metres above sea!

Walk Options: 

Several shortcuts are possible, as the southerly parts of the outbound and return routes are running close to each other, these are obvious on the route map. 

Bus Stops for services to District Line stations are located close to the route after 8.0 km and 9.2 km. 

Follow the outbound route back to Hornchurch station instead of going to Upminster: cut 1.8 km. 

An Extension through Berwick Woods to the reed-fringed Berwick Pond adds 1.4 km. 

An Alternative Ending at Rainham station links up with the start of SWC 172 - Rainham to Purfleet (via RSPB Rainham Marshes); Hornchurch to Rainham is a 7.2 km/4.5 mi walk.

 

Refreshments: 

Ingrebourne Valley Visitor Centre in Hornchurch Country Park. The visitor centre is located 3.9 km from the end of the walk.

Several Restaurants, Pubs and a Tap Room in Upminster, see the pdf or webpage for details. 

 

For a detailed route map, gpx/kml file, photos and pdf directions click here. T=short.34