Tuesday January 02, 2007

A walk before New Year

Before preparing the house for our New Year visitors we did a walk on Saturday. The weather was good but a strong wind meant later in the afternoon rain was predicted. We went to the edge of the Chilterns to a place called Wooburn and parked by the Old Bell pub. Our initial path had us go through the village alongside its River Wye and as this was an old walk printed years ago the path did not follow the one described in the book. Once we met the busy A4094 we crossed it and entered a road that soon ended up being a gravel track Princes Road. The path then followed the edge of several fields until at a gate we took what is called a Half Left and headed towards Holland Farm. Annoyingly the gate we had to go through was locked. It is really annoying when this happens and this gate was very wobbly making it hard to get over. We crossed a road and then met the A4094 again and went past a small brick building - a sewage pumping station. We were now heading to the pretty buildings of Hedsor Warf with the River Thames close by. Another road was crossed and we were then heading along Church Path. Upon the hill to our right was the pretty church of St Nicolas up there it is claimed there are great views all around. The trees around the church also had an amazing amount of Mistletoe in them.

To our left was a sham castle a Folly built by Lord Boston who was a equerry to George III - it was built to honor the King in 1778. It now looks like it has been converted into a rather large house.

The path then started to go gently uphill through Woolmans wood and after meeting a road we ended up having a rather good lunch at the Chequers Inn . After lunch we crossed a field by the pub and entered a small belt of trees called The Swilley and dropped down into the village of Wooburn passing its pretty church St Paul's on the right.

A rather nice three and a half mile walk.