Priors Wood 24th October 2009

Another real old favourite, often in the quest for bluebells, but this time to take advantage of some unexpected afternoon sunshine. Fungi abounded, and some fun horses towards the end.

Some handsome cattle who thought it was going to rain...

Upton Cheyney 18th October 2009

A walk with Ellie from an old book which we are not quite sure whence... It's called 'Pub Walks in the Cotswolds' and we remembered, about halfway round the walk, why we don't like using old books.  There was a corner of the walk that was impossible to navigate - subsequent investigations on the map and google earth seemed to indicate that a significant portion of the walk was no longer footpathed.  We had a little trouble finding the path from the village, but Ellie found some friendly Morris Men...

Some good views of The Park golfcourse from the top of Landsdown...

This was taken from a rather scenic picnic spot

This sojourn was followed by a rather lost walk around Landsdown Golf Course - this is where we failed to find the path to the corner of Bath Racecourse, (and Prospect Stile).  Ellie tried to feed the smalller of these two horses, but the bigger one had other ideas.

We found our way to the village of North Stoke, where we regained our path and passed this rather impressive porch..

On the final leg of the journey, there was a photo-opportunity involving my new boots:

Some rather lovely but funny alpaca on the road up to Upton Cheyney...

We took an action video of some serious chewing...

Mostly a lovely walk, it would be good to find a way to navigate the missing corner.

11th October - Waverly Down

A new Geoff, from WW3.  Weather forecast was OK first thing, rainy later, so we got up at bastard on a Sunday morning to beat the rain.  Hah bloody hah, and a beautiful afternoon once we were home and had started the long process of drying out everything.

The village of Cross is interesting, here's a rather lovely housefront, some topiary, and a rather unusual garden ornament..

One pleasant surprise, especially for Margie, was how many blackberries were still available, and they seem to have reached a peak of sweetness.  I was often waiting for her to finish grazing...

On one of the road stretches of this walk, (very quiet lanes really) we passed a kennels which housed a large pack of foxhounds:

We seemed to arouse their interest ...

It's the foxes I feel sorry for

The walk did become more of an ordeal than a pleasure, as the walk up to the summit of Crook Peak was in complete cloud, and we got wetter and wetter.  We bottled out of the push to the summit, and then on our walk over Waverly Down my boot sole came away from the boot, suddenly and almost completely, so that I had to tie the bootlace under it to be able to continue walking at all.  This picture of Margie by the Waverly Down trig point summarises the walk quite nicely...

In all, a walk that we would love to repeat in dry weather, especially as some of the downhill sections were rather treacherous.  A fair bit of motorway noise during much of the walk is another consideration for the future.

27th September - Sugar Loaf

A quick trip up an old favourite...