Peace Pagoda to Oakridge Park

Unusually, we walked this short leg along the Grand Union Canal on a Sunday morning (rather than our usual Sunday afternoon). Last night I was singing with Newport Pagnell Singers at the annual carol concert at St Laud's Church Sherington and we had decided to spend two nights at the Milton Keynes South Premier Inn, so that I was in the right place for work tomorrow morning, whilst also being with Richard on his birthday. So we had a whole free day together (well, free apart from Christmas card writing...). It was a dry frosty morning, with milder rainy weather forecast from lunchtime, so we headed out for a walk in the morning.

Google Maps let me down on the way to our agreed end-point in the car park at SP837417 near the canal by the new Oakridge Park (to the north of Stantonbury) so I went the scenic (wrong!) route and Richard beat me to it. We left one car there and drove back to the Peace Pagoda car park (SP873407); this car park was free last time we were here, but we had to pay today and in fact we paid too much (we weren't sure we'd be back within two hours, but we were). We retraced our steps over the V10 then past the Milton Keynes Camphill Village and the Chrysalis Theatre then back to the canal.

We'd had a lot of snow during the previous week and there were a few patches remaining; the surface of the canal was frozen, though passing narrowboats cut through it very easily. We were delighted to pass by "Wendy Witch", a narrow boat that has been moored on each of the stretches we have walked for the past few weeks!

We passed Pennyland and we were passed by Father and Mother Christmas, out walking their dog! We soon encountered an attractive painted bench, then a sculpture of a horse, then a fantastic mosaic. It turns out that these are all part of the Gyosei Art Trail, and the person who made the mosaic is the friend of a friend.

The land on the other side of the canal became more open: this is Great Linford Park, on which lots of people were out dog-walking. Then we passed the attractive Church and historical buildings of Great Linford. The canal had looped round and we were now heading to the west, before passing over a disused railway line (now the route of the Midshires Way) and heading out into more open countryside.

We looped around Stanton Low Park, with views to Linford Lakes and St Peter's Church to the north, both of which we'd walked past on the Ouse Valley Way. When we were walking the Ouse Valley Way in March 2015, we'd had some difficulty finding the route away from the Grand Union Canal, but it seemed much clearer today (though we stayed on the canal). Another half mile brought us to the road near Oakridge Park and we returned to the car.

We went on to Bletchley Park for lunch and a few hours of learning all about codebreaking and Bletchley Park's top-secret role in the second World War. The weather forecast proved to be correct - it was raining by midday, so we definitely did the right thing in going out for our walk in the morning.

following leg of Grand Union Canal Walk