Greensand Ridge Walk
The Greensand Ridge Walk is a 40-mile route which, for much but not all of its route, follows a Greensand escarpment through Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, mostly Bedfordshire (it is described as that county's "premier long-distance path"!). We started the walk in Leighton Buzzard and finished at Gamlingay Cinques. We were amazed by the variety of the route; we walked alongside the Grand Union Canal, across country parks (Rushmere Country Park and Ampthill Park) and the Woburn Estate and through some beautiful woods. There are some excellent views from the Ridge, but the climbs and descents on the path didn't create any problems; it's undulating rather than mountainous! I didn't take my walking poles for any of our walks along the Greensand Ridge Walk and in terms of ascents and descents that was the right decision - however walking poles might have been useful in negotiating occasional muddy sections which seemed reluctant to dry out, even through the hot and largely dry August and September.
Greensand is a sandstone with a greenish colour, and the greensand ridge on which this trail sits is not the only one! The Greensand Ridge Walk should not be confused with the Greensand Way in Surrey and Kent, which looks like another excellent walk. When used as a building stone, greensand appears rather similar to the carrstone that we see so much of in West Norfolk. There are some pretty villages on or close to the path.
We stumbled across the Greensand Ridge Walk when visiting the Woburn Estate on Richard's birthday in December 2015, and then walked a small section of it which is coincident with the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk in March 2016. It had also been highly recommended by friends and, in turn, we would recommend it to you. The Bedford South Premier Inn, where we spend many Sunday nights (in preparation for work commitments in Milton Keynes on Monday) is very conveniently located for the path, and we walked the path on a series of short Sunday afternoon walks between May and September 2016, after driving over from home in Norfolk around lunchtime.
Regular readers of JordanWalks will know how much I like to join one long distance path to another, and on another Sunday in summer 2016 we followed the Two Ridges Link from Ivinghoe Beacon (where the Icknield Way Path meets the Ridgeway) to the Leighton Buzzard end of the Greensand Ridge Walk. Amazingly, since I think of the Greensand Ridge Walk as "local" whilst The Ridgeway is, in my mind, somewhere in the deep south of the country, this link path is only just over 8 miles long. From Gamlingay Cinques we continued on the Clopton Way for the 11 miles to Wimpole Hall (leaving us the option of following the Wimpole Way for 13 miles to Cambridge). Sections of the path are coincident with the Grand Union Canal Walk, the John Bunyan Trail and the Marston Vale Timberland Trail - all of which we walked within the next few years -and we also discovered a promising circular walk around Old Warden.
The Greensand Ridge Walk has an impressive looking website of its own here, but unfortunately it is only skin deep! - most of the content is not there. I found the description on Pete's walks rather more useful. There are also detailed descriptions of the walk in five sections on the Central Bedfordshire website here, but unfortunately we didn't find this site until we were getting towards the end. The signposts are as attractive as any I have encountered on long distance paths, showing a muntjac deer (and we have encountered real deer on the path) though the quality of the signposting is a bit variable. We also used Ordnance Survey Explorer maps (sheets 192, 193 and 208) though note that the route is not as shown on our 2011 copyright OS map around Ridgmont.
Click here to see more of our photographs from the Greensand Ridge Walk.
JordanWalks Greensand Ridge Walk pages last checked 24th December 2019.