Walks in 2017
This hasn't been the easiest of years for walking. Aside of the usual pressures of work, for the first half of the year we felt we couldn't venture too far from Richard's parents. There are several long-distance paths relatively close to their house in East Sussex; and we walked the best known of these, the South Downs Way, from Winchester to Eastbourne, over eight days in April and May. Then we moved Richard's parents to a residential home close to us in Norfolk; things remained difficult, but we were able to catch up a bit and to get away. Richard's father, Derek Ernest Jordan, died on Christmas Eve 2017, six days short of his 90th birthday.
My 60th birthday fell at the end of August and we spent it on the Heart of England Way, a delightful walk through the English Midlands which we completed in early September. On both the South Downs Way and the Heart of England Way, we also walked sections of the Monarch's Way, largely to get from the route to the places we were staying.
In March we rented a holiday cottage near to the village of Great Tew in Oxfordshire. Each morning I got on with some research and each afternoon we went for a walk; there was a copy of the AA's "50 walks in Oxfordshire" in the cottage and we walked a different path each day, with lengths varying between 3.75 and 8 miles. With the exception of Walk 2: From Cottisford to Juniper Hill, which we walked en route to a meeting back in Milton Keynes (don't ask), we didn't need to drive for more than 20 minutes to get to any of these and we discovered some beautiful (if muddy!) countryside and some delightful villages. On two of the routes we also visited stately homes and/or gardens - Chastleton House (free to us as National Trust members) and the garden at Rousham House (entry cost the princely sum of £5 each) - and one walk took us past the prehistoric Rollright Stones. Our routes touched on several long distance paths which might be worthy of further investigation at some stage in the future: Shakespeare's Way, the d'Arcy Dalton Way, the Macmillan Way, the Oxfordshire Way, the Oxford Canal Walk, the Seven Shires Way and the Palladian Way. To see more photographs from this holiday click here.
On our regular stays in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, we have completed the North Bucks Way and the John Bunyan Trail and we have also walked a small part of the Cross Bucks Way and linked up previous short legs along the Grand Union Canal to the extent that we have now walked along it from the point at which the Two Ridges Walk joins the canal south of Leighton Buzzard to the point at which the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk leaves the canal near Grafton Regis.
Aside of walking, other highlights of the year included a work trip to the World Science Forum in Jordan and two family weddings: my niece Joanna married James in October and my sister Chris married Derek in December.
Page last checked 17th February 2020.
