Ivinghoe Beacon to Cley Hill: Walking Home

Back in 2018, I persuaded my daughters Kate and Emma to walk the Cotswold Way with me and wrote of our encounters in this blog… describing the National Trust archaeology we travelled through from Chipping Campden to Bath.

It’s been a long time and I wonder whether I can still hack it. Put on the rucksack and walk across a bit more landscape.

Kate and Josh accompanied me on a trial run along the South Downs a couple of weeks ago… from Eastbourne to Hassocks. Things held together and we made it. They’ve flown off to Italy now.

The view from Beachy Head to Birling Gap

It was touch and go… but Emma cleared her commitments and agreed to be my companion once more.

This time we’re walking home. Take the train to London, to Tring and then up onto the Chilterns.

To begin at Ivinghoe Beacon and treck130 miles along the Ridgeway to Cley Hill..

We’ll be trespassing on National Trust London and South West Region territory for a while.

Before we cross over the border into Wiltshire again.

If we hold out… I will see the Uffington White Horse.

An amazing prehistoric chalk artform. It will feel good to earn my first glimpse of it by walking (as with Hadrian’s Wall on the Pennine Way).. and then on to Avebury.

I have closed and locked the office in Tisbury, left the gathering driftwood of emails to accumulate..

The years are too few. England must always be appreciated in the Spring.

This walk through bright new woodland, multi-hued greenery, fields of orchids and buttercups ..to the heart of the west country ..will be an absolute pleasure.

whatever the weather throws at us…. but I do hope the Ridgeway will be kind..

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
64 will not come again,
And take from seventy springs 3 score,
It only leaves me twenty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Twenty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Houseman