Letcombe to Liddington

It was another hot day, though slightly less so than yesterday and there was some cloud cover in the afternoon. Unfortunately the blisters I'd developed yesterday got worse during the day and I was really hobbling by the end. I don't normally suffer with blisters, so can only assume that the problem was caused by the fact that my feet quickly got hot and wet. The fact that the path was on hard chalk for almost the entire way didn't help, and it was deeply rutted in places.

We slept very well and Louise Boden cooked us a lovely breakfast - the rest of the family were still asleep. We left Quince Cottage shortly after 9am, armed with packed lunches, and it was already warm as we walked back up the hill to Letcombe Castle. We stopped at the Castle to cool down.

We rejoined the The Ridgeway and walked along above Letcombe Bassett and the (one of many) Devil's Punchbowl, with a model airplane club flying their planes over the valley of the punchbowl. There were a few Race to the Stones participants about - definitely walking not running and we had a chat with one young woman who had injured her knee and so was pulling out at the next pit stop. We reached this pit stop at Sparsholt Firs (61 km from the start of the race, 39 km from the end) and stopped just beforehand to give my feet their first TLC of the day. Quite a lot of people seemed to be pulling out of the race here and a number of the others looked unlikely to make it to the end.

The route to the west of Sparsholt Firs was undulating and after a couple of miles we climbed first to Rams Hill and then to Whitehorse Hill. There weren't many trees about so we retraced our steps slightly to find a hawthorn tree with sufficient shelter to eat our lunch. It proved a most comfortable resting place.

We climbed back to the summit of Whitehorse Hill and took a diversion around the ramparts of Uffington Castle (an Iron Age Fort). Uffington White Horse was beneath us, out of sight, but we watched two paragliders and various other people pottering about (there is a car park halfway down the hill). After walking 3/4 of the way around the ramparts in an anti-clockwise direction I decided there was a path we could follow back down to The Ridgeway - the problem was that the path I had thought to be the Ridgeway was actually the track running to the west of the fort and we had to follow this back to rejoin The Ridgeway at exactly the place we'd left it.

Around a mile or so after Uffington Castle we reached Wayland's Smithy, rightly described in the walk book as 'an extraordinary place'. It's actually a huge Neolithic long barrow, with large sarcens at the entrance. The 'Wayland' in the name is a corruption of 'Volund', who in legend made the shoes for the Uffington White Horse. Legend also has it that any rider passing this way whose horse is unlucky enough to shed a shoe, has only to place a coin on one of the stones and leave the horse tethered overnight, to find it re-shod in the morning. Our attention was more on human feet than horses' - we were grateful for the shade of the surrounding trees and for the lower stones to sit on as Richard delivered more TLC for my blisters.

At the car park at Ashbury Folly they were just dismantling a 'Race to the stones' pit stop and at Ridgeway Farm we sat on some agricultural machinery for a rest. Then we walked on past Charlbury Hill and Fox Hill to a road which took us what is marked on the map as a pub but which is actually an Indian restaurant, PGL Liddington and then over the M4.

Half a mile or so later, with tomorrow's first challenge (Liddington Hill) clearly visible in front of us, we left The Ridgeway and turned onto the B4192 towards Swindon. We crossed the motorway again and descended to Liddington. Meadowbank House is just past the village, on Medbourne Road. I was in a pretty poor state by the time we arrived, but Jane and Matthew Howes were kindness itself, providing first water and then tea to drink. They are walkers so they understand...It turns out that they only moved here in March, from elsewhere in the village, and opened as a B&B at the beginning of June. Jane used to be a primary school teacher and Matthew still works in Newbury. It is a large modern house with three rooms in a separate area at the back, and a guest lounge just behind the patio. Ideal for B&B and they are lovely people - they deserve to do well.

Jane had booked us a table for 7pm at The Village Inn and we got there before they opened! - no problem, we sat at a table outside. They were busy so it was worth having the booked table and we had (in order of importance) J2O, cider and a lovely Butternut Squash and Stilton risotto, before returning to Meadowbank House for an hour of sitting in the pleasant airy guest sitting room, being provided with more tea by Jane.

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