Walks in 2024
Plans
We've developed a tradition of a week's holiday sometime in the spring in a cottage somewhere within about an hour's drive of our daughter's house in Wiltshire. We are currently planning to head to Dorset in 2024, hopefully to progress on the Jubilee Trail, but there are many other options to consider in the Wiltshire/Hampshire/Dorset area including more Cranborne Circles, completing the Avon Valley Path and walking an unofficial section of the England Coast Path (mapped as the E9 European Coast Path or the Bournemouth Coast Path) to link up from the end of the South West Coast Path. Or we could start the Stour Valley Way. That lot will take a lot longer than a year!
We have loved our holidays in Shropshire in the past two years, and definitely want to return for another holiday there in 2024, enabling us to walk another section of the Shropshire Way.
Closer to our flat in Milton Keynes, we want to complete the Grand Union Canal Walk, which requires just a few legs to get us into to central London near Paddington and/or the junction with the Thames at Brentwood, and also to get us into central Birmingham.
I have been researching our family history, and there are places I want to visit in Cumbria, so I'm tempted by a holiday somewhere in Ravenglass area so as to combine some family history research with more walking on the Cumbria section of the England Coast Path (and perhaps some walking in the Lake District!). There is also family history research to be done in Tewkesbury, Nottingham, and around Chardstock on the Devon/Dorset border, plus Lincoln (which we've already walked through on the Viking Way) and around Adderbury and Bloxham (close to where Richard was born and which is on the Oxford Canal Walk and at one end of the Jurassic Way). Meanwhile, completely coincidentally, many of Richard's mother's ancestors lived close to us in Norfolk.
It would be nice to have at least one holiday this year (or perhaps a short break) on which we walk from B&B to B&B.
Other ideas (this year, next year, sometime, never...)
Progress north from the Midshires Way on the Pennine Bridleway
Walks in Northamptonshire (Knightley Way, back to Milton Keynes on Grafton Way, Northamptonshire Boundary Walk)
Berkshire Loop of the Chiltern Way
Walked (as of early March 2024)
Walking in the first couple of months of 2024 was stymied by very wet weather (the wettest February on record) and the fact that we both went down with a lurgy very early in the New Year and were just recovering from that when we caught a more ordinary cold. However, we have walked from the Thames at Kew Bridge along the Grand Union Canal to Bulls Bridge, thus completing the route at the London end. In addition, rather more unexpectedly, we have walked a 16 mile stretch of the England Coast Path from Skegness to Mablethorpe.