Round and round we go: circular walks around London

When is running in circles a good thing? When following a path through villages, forests and fields via open access paths starting and ending at the same train station.

Britain is known as a country of walkers, with thousands of miles of footpaths and bridleways open to the public (for example, Scotland has a law commonly known as the right to wander). Even just watching other people has become part of popular culture in Britain, with prime-time television programs featuring single celebrities capturing the rural landscape using a high-tech selfie camera or groups thereof religious pilgrimage walks in Portugal or Spain.

But there are plenty of options from London if you just want to get out of the city.

I found that I could easily escape the noise and bustle of the city and experience the poet William Blake’s “pleasant meadows seen” without having to own or rent a car; drive on the left side of the road; or try to overcome complicated roundabouts.

I did it by following the maps and text in the lightweight guide “The homelands from London by train: excellent circular walks” (£12.99, or about $16, Milestone Publishing).

The book is part of a series of paperbacks produced in a collaboration between Pathfinder Guides and the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency. It describes 27 hikes of varying intensity levels and ranging in length from two to nearly twelve miles, each starting after a relatively short time. train ride from one of London’s main stations. (Although much of the terrain is not suitable for those with physical difficulties, Pathfinder has recently added its first collection of accessible trails on harder surfaces in ‘Lake District and Cumbria: accessible walks for all’, with 38 routes, 20 of which are considered circular.)

“The sidewalk network exists,” says Kevin Freeborn, the editor of the travel guide series, “because people needed to get from one place to another, like from a farm to a village or from a village to a city. And of course, walking used to be the way to do that. So a lot of the trail networks are based on rights of way that have been around for a long time – hundreds of years.”

Each of the walks in the guide can be completed as a day trip or as a more relaxing overnight stay. The time required depends on your own speed and whether you stop at a village pub for a pint or pause for a picnic on a riverside bench.

For example, a 70-minute train ride from Liverpool Street station to the town of Manningtree in Essex is the starting point for discovering the Stour Valley landscape that inspired painter John Constable. The approximately 3.5 hour, 12.5 kilometer route passes through the village of Dedham, once a thriving textile centre, and where Constable attended secondary school.

Depending on the season, you’ll see five-petaled primroses in sunlit hedgerows, primroses on grasslands where sheep graze, graceful white wood anemones or even orchids. On the four-hour, eight-mile walk from Limpsfield in Surrey (30 minutes from London Bridge station), famous for its carpet of sweet-smelling bluebells in late spring, birdwatchers can listen to nightingales or spot hawks circling overhead .

One of the more challenging routes starts in Wye, about an hour by train from London’s St. Pancras station, and covers 9½ miles, reaching a height of 1,000 feet in 4½ hours through woodlands, past a Norman church and along the summit of the Crundale Downs. , a ridge of chalk hills close to the village of Crundale.

Grazing sheep, warm scones and a ‘kissing gate’

My first guided walk was the 2.5-hour, 5.5-mile route from the town of Sandwich, on Kent’s English Channel coast, almost two hours by train from St. Pancras station. I chose this destination because it is home to the pebble beach along Sandwich Bay and because I have always wanted to tick a box off my bucket list by having a sandwich in Sandwich.

The route passed the centuries-old St. Bartholomew’s Chapel, over a footbridge and through orchards and fields; beyond the Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory through the Royal St. George’s Golf Club of course while people were playing, going to the beach. Then through a field of quietly grazing sheep, a ‘kissing gate’, a stile and another footbridge, along a riverbank and finally back to Sandwich station. (About that sandwich: Although I stopped halfway for a pint of beer in a village pub, making the walk almost an hour, I waited until I got back into the city itself for that long-planned snack.)

I opted for an overnight stop for another walk – a three-hour, six-mile trek from Rye through the village of Iden and back to Rye (the historic former port town about an hour and 15 minutes from St. Pancras station) – so I’d later explore the city’s medieval architecture, enjoy a warm scone and a pot of tea in a quaint café, and take a tour of the 18th century Lamb House, where American author Henry James lived and wrote. (The English author of ‘Black Narcissus’, Rumer Godden, also lived at Lamb House and is buried in Rye).

Some of the paths on this walk were slippery with mud immediately after a rain shower, but were still passable if you stayed on the edges. Sheep and their lambs jumped out of the way as people approached.

And I checked the guide regularly to make sure I wasn’t straying off course.

Only rarely does Mr. Freeborn, the editor, hear from people who say they followed the guide’s directions but still got lost.

“Sometimes people write or email us to say, for example, that a transfer has turned into a gate,” he says. “Or in a forest, trees are sometimes harvested and cut down. So it may not be as wooded as the description in the book. I mean, actually the countryside in Britain is kind of a working environment, it’s usually an agricultural or forestry environment and things change.

However, one change is now affecting the Rye walk I did in April. About 15 minutes after leaving the station and walking through a 14th century stone gate, down a slope and over a bridge, I found signs saying that the next stretch of footpath along the River Rother would be closed until October 2024 due to work at the station. improve the flood defenses. But the intrepid can, wary of traffic, transfer to Military Road, Mr. Freeborn said, and reconnect with the trail just before a steep climb through the woods to an open field.

If you go

Be prepared before taking a walking tour. Please note that timetables sometimes change during weekends and public holidays and that it is wise to be alert to railway strikes.

Map reading skills help. I felt momentarily lost a few times, but it was easy to correct course and find my way back to the trail. Familiarizing yourself with the terms and symbols on the inside cover of the guidebook will save you time and confusion along the way, such as a red footprint indicating a starting point, or a blue beer glass indicating a pub.

Know your footpath and your bridleway (the latter is likely to have horseshoe prints) and know that a ‘kissing gate’ is nothing romantic, but a way to prevent livestock from moving into other areas.

Take provisions with you and keep an eye out for pubs with fun names such as the tickled trout And the Black Horse Inn.