Dungee Wood to A428 near Warrington

We hadn't done a proper walk since December, with our excuse being the fact that we moved into our new flat in the village of Simpson, Milton Keynes, at the beginning of January, and until today free Sundays have been spent driving back to Simpson and then putting up pictures etc. There was still work to be done, but we felt it was now time to resume our usual habit of getting out for a walk on our way back to the Milton Keynes area on Sundays. The plan for today was to leave Norfolk quite early and have just a short walk in the late morning, leaving the afternoon and evening free for the DIY in Simpson. It was a glorious cold, sunny morning and a very enjoyable walk.

We parked one car by the A428 at SP905544 (note that if, for whatever reason, you can't park by the track here, there is a proper car park a couple of hundred metres further to the west, towards the roundabout where the A428 crosses the A509) and drove together around the village of Bozeat and back to Dungee Wood (SP932596) where we got Richard's car stuck in the mud last time we were here. We were extremely cautious today, though actually the size of the hole in which we'd been stuck was very clear in today's cold dry weather and there was plenty of room so it was easy to park well clear of the hole. We rang our daughter before setting off on the walk, and also discovered that the computer monitors which we'd expected to be delivered tomorrow to our house in Norfolk were going to be delivered today. And delivery companies have an irritating habit of leaving deliveries by the front door...and heavy rain was forecast overnight...we quickly realised that Richard was going to have to go home this evening, not tomorrow.

We set off walking at on a path by the wood, following a family out walking with a couple of dogs and indeed we saw a surprisingly large number of people on this short walk, mostly with dogs, some apparently on various circuits around Bozeat. The first couple of hundred yards of today's walk was the only part of the entire Three Shires Way that's entirely in Northamptonshire, but the path soon dog-legged its way back to the Northamptonshire-Bedfordshire border, though the signs continued to be attributed to Northamptonshire.

There were initially distant views to the church in Bozeat and beyond that to the church in the village of Grendon. For most of the walk we were following a field boundary, sometimes with open countryside to either side and sometimes woodland and eventually we reached Threeshires Wood, named because we had now also reached the boundary with the historical county of Buckinghamshire, now Milton Keynes. We were now on the route of the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk, walking in the opposite direction to when we were last here in December 2015. Then it was extremely muddy in the Threeshires Wood area; today there was one muddy section but the overnight frost had not yet fully thawed, so in the main the ground was still hard.