Wealdway

In the direction in which we walked it, the Wealdway goes from the south coast of England at Eastbourne (where it links with the South Downs Way) to the Thames Estuary at Gravesend. According to the Long Distance Walkers' Association, the walk is 83 miles long, though there seems to be some uncertainty over this.

The name comes from the fact that route crosses The Weald, the area of land between the North Downs and the South Downs. In the ancient past, the chalk of the North and South Downs formed a dome over the area, but the chalk above the Weald has long been eroded, leaving exposed sandstone (in the High Weald) and clay (in the Low Weald). Meanwhile, the River Medway (flowing north) and the Cuckmere River (flowing south) cut right through the chalk escarpments.

The Weald takes its name from the Anglo-Saxon "Andreasweald", the name given to the great forest that covered the region at that time. There are still delightful wooded patches. Iron was mined in the High Weald from prehistoric times, but especially duing the Roman Era. Nowadays, the High Weald, and in particular Ashdown Forest, are better known as the home of Winnie the Pooh and if you are familiar with E.H. Shepard's beautiful illustrations in A.A. Milne's books, you'd immediately recognise the landscape with wooded areas ("Eeyore's gloomy place") interspersed with open healthland and isolated clumps of pine trees ("The enchanted place"). 500 Acre Wood becomes "100 Acer Wood" whilst Poohsticks Bridge is nowadays known as, well, Poohsticks Bridge.

We first started investigating the Wealdway because it passes close to the East Sussex village of Hartfield, where A.A. Milne lived from 1925 and where Richard and his family moved in the 1960s. His Mum and Dad remained there until 2017 by which time they were 91 and 89 respectively and we were spending a lot of time visiting to help them out. We'd completed the South Downs Way in the Spring (with that route deliberately chosen for its relative closeness to Hartfield) and we'd intended to walk the Wealdway, perhaps around my 60th birthday at the end of August, so as to be able to combine time spent looking after Richard's parents with some time for us. However, circumstances changed: Richard's Dad became quite poorly and we ended up moving the two of them to a residential home close to us in Norfolk. We therefore started walking the Wealdway (on a short walk on Ashdown Forest which also touched on the Vanguard Way) on a day trip to Hartfield to check that the house was OK in August 2017. Then circumstances altered again: Richard's father died on Christmas Eve 2017 and we put the house on the market around Easter 2018 and visited regularly until the house sale completed very early in the New Year of 2019. We decided to continue from our starting point and to walk north. After a series of mostly rather short legs walked en route to Hartfield (initially to check the house, then to clear it), we reached Gravesend in October 2018. We completed the rest of the route in a single short holiday in which we walked from Eastbourne to Ashdown Forest in April 2019. Thus, we did not complete this one rapidly!

The route passes through just two counties, East Sussex and Kent. Apart from Eastbourne and Gravesend, the only town it goes through is Tonbridge, though it also skirts Hailsham and Uckfield. In places you have to cross busy roads, but in general, we were surprised to discovered such beautiful, quiet countryside in such a generally crowded part of the country.

The path crosses the "Garden of England" and we saw all sorts of crops growing, from apples, strawberries and raspberries to cobb nuts, hops and sweet chestnut (used to form the poles on which the hops grow). The many oast houses that we also saw were originally used for drying the hops, though as hop production has declined, many oast houses have been converted into private houses. Thus when we heard that there was a working hop "garden" and oast house at the National Trust's Scotney Castle, we decided to visit during the hop harvest in September 2018, and to go on the hop tour. For the princely sum of £3 each we spent two and a half hours on the tour of the oast house, hop garden and hop pickers' sheds, with a knowledgeable and friendly guide and an interesting group of other visitors, including a couple who met when her father was the "stilt man" (the man who walked on stilts to string and de-string the hops, a job now done from a platform on a vehicle) and he was a hop picker, and two women whose family, the Crawfords, originated in the village in which we live in Norfolk. It was a Saturday, so the hop pickers had the day off, but that turned out to be better because we were able to look inside a "kiln" (the round bit of the oast house with the characteristic top) which wouldn't have been allowed had drying been in operation. After the tour we had a quick dash down to the picturesque old castle; there's lots to see and do at Scotney - highly recommended!

Returning to the Wealdway; the signposting, whilst excellent in places, is a bit erratic, so it was useful to have Ordnance Survey maps with us. The route crosses Explorer sheets OL25, 135, 147, 136, 148 and 163. We now have a subscription to https://osmaps.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ and so when a route only requires a small part of a map (as for 136 on this occasion) or is one we are unlikely to ever need again (as for 163 on this occasion) we instead use the OS maps App or print out A4 sections of the map we need. Whilst clearing Richard's parents' house we stumbled across a guidebook "Along and around the Wealdway" which we used in subsequent walks.

There are lots of long distance footpaths in South East England and both the Wealdway and the Vanguard Way go close to Hartfield. We thus had to start by deciding which of these to walk: we picked the Wealdway because it is a coast to coast rather than starting/ending in London, and also because it links the South Downs Way (which we have walked) to the North Downs Way (which we have not yet done). Our circular walks also included sections along the North Downs Way and, especially, the Vanguard Way. We also made use of the Forest Way to link back to Hartfield and walked on sections shared with the Medway Valley Walk and the Greensand Way. The Greensand Way is not to be confused with the Greensand Ridge Walk, which we have completed, but it looks like an interesting route. And there are plenty more...

Click here for more photographs of the Wealdway (in the order taken) and click here for more photographs of Scotney Castle and the hop tour.

Click here for all our walks on the Wealdway, described south to north.