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white_hartAs we've increased the mileage of our walks, we've increasingly found that the walks in the AA and Ordnance Survey books are often a bit short for us; even the longest are only 9 or 10 miles, and particularly as we build up for a walking holiday that's the absolute minimum we really want to do, so I recently bought a Cicerone guide to Walking in the Thames Valley, which promised "adventurous walking routes" and had walks of 10-20 miles in length.
Today we picked a 12-mile circuit which went from Buckland, near Faringdon, through the villages of Hinton Waldrist and Longworth to the Thames at Newbridge, and then back to Buckland via the Thames Path.
While at 12 miles it was certainly longer than the walks in our other books, describing it as adventurous seemed like a bit of a stretch. It was perfectly pleasant, but mostly flat, across fields, through small woods and along country lanes before reaching the Thames Path, and then back along the river where a lot of the time the waterside vegetation was so high that the river was completely hidden, though we did see lots of geese and goslings when the river was visible and huge numbers of electric-blue damselflies all along the path. Probably the most interestiing stretch would have been the bit of the Thames Path that went through the Chimney Meadows nature reserve, but by that point it had started raining quite heavily, which is a good thing generally speaking (the dry pond we passed in Longworth and dry ditches where there should have been streams feeding into the Thames stood as a testament to how little rain we have had lately) but makes me more inclined to put my head down and trudge on rather than looking around at the scenery.
On returning to the car at Buckland, I nabbed a Mary Stewart novel from the former phone booth next to the village hall car park, which had been turned into a free book exchange (Dan Brown, E.L. James and Stephenie Meyer all very much in evidence). Since getting home, I have also been eyeing up daypacks on the Decathlon website, having been annoyed enough by the way my (rather expensive) Osprey pack slumps into a boomerang shape when I put the waterproof cover on (the fundamental problem is, and always has been, that it is too long for my back) it to wonder about having a dedicated walking backpack instead of trying to make do with one for work and walking.
Today we picked a 12-mile circuit which went from Buckland, near Faringdon, through the villages of Hinton Waldrist and Longworth to the Thames at Newbridge, and then back to Buckland via the Thames Path.
While at 12 miles it was certainly longer than the walks in our other books, describing it as adventurous seemed like a bit of a stretch. It was perfectly pleasant, but mostly flat, across fields, through small woods and along country lanes before reaching the Thames Path, and then back along the river where a lot of the time the waterside vegetation was so high that the river was completely hidden, though we did see lots of geese and goslings when the river was visible and huge numbers of electric-blue damselflies all along the path. Probably the most interestiing stretch would have been the bit of the Thames Path that went through the Chimney Meadows nature reserve, but by that point it had started raining quite heavily, which is a good thing generally speaking (the dry pond we passed in Longworth and dry ditches where there should have been streams feeding into the Thames stood as a testament to how little rain we have had lately) but makes me more inclined to put my head down and trudge on rather than looking around at the scenery.
On returning to the car at Buckland, I nabbed a Mary Stewart novel from the former phone booth next to the village hall car park, which had been turned into a free book exchange (Dan Brown, E.L. James and Stephenie Meyer all very much in evidence). Since getting home, I have also been eyeing up daypacks on the Decathlon website, having been annoyed enough by the way my (rather expensive) Osprey pack slumps into a boomerang shape when I put the waterproof cover on (the fundamental problem is, and always has been, that it is too long for my back) it to wonder about having a dedicated walking backpack instead of trying to make do with one for work and walking.
