Walk around Stevington

I had misread the JordanWalks description of our walk on 8th January and thought that the total length was 5.5 miles, which would be a suitable walk for me to follow with two friends who I am expecting to visit soon. In fact the total circuit of Stevington, Pavenham and Oakley is 7.5 miles which is too far for that purpose and the path was perhaps a little muddy for people without walking boots, which is a pity as it is a delightful walk. Having realised the true length of the full walk, we truncated it today because rain was threatening and we wouldn't manage the whole think before it got dark; today's version included a fair amount of road walking, but they were minor roads and it was still a pleasant walk, forming an elongated figure of eight overall - and we made it back to the car before the rain began in earnest.

It was mid afternoon before we'd visited Richard's Mum (his Dad was in hospital so we were trying hard to visit his Mum every day), driven across to the Bedford South Premier Inn and left one car there, and taken the other car on to the Stevington Country Park carpark at TL007525. The walk through the Stevington Country Park follows a disused railway line and we walked along it, passing Skylark Cottage, a former signalman's cottage that appears to be totally derelict but is for sale. The house is also some distance from the nearest road which could be interesting!

We continued on tracks around Stevington Windmill, now on the route of both the John Bunyan Trail and the Ouse Valley Way. We turned right onto Park Road through Stevington, turning right at Stevington Cross onto Church Road. It was here that we encountered the Pied Piper of Hamlin, actually a scarecrow. Richard, as usual more observant than me, had noticed signs for a scarecrow festival which had been judged yesterday and whilst we were photographing the Pied Piper, his maker came out of her house to take him in for the night at the same time as a neighbour appeared to ask the results of the competition. It appears that the Pied Piper had come second in the competition whilst the winner was Mary Poppins down the road, but she had not been put out today because of the rain!

We passed the bench where we stopped for lunch when on the Ouse Valley Way, and stopped to talk to the cows, then we passed and photographed the Church. We had been planning to turn round here but we decided to continue a little further, on a rather muddy path which brought us gradually closer to the river.

We reached the woodland that's marked as Wood Craft on the map, and decided to try to walk up to the road and thus to do something of a circuit, rather than returning on the same route. We turned left away from the river by the wood (still on the route of the Ouse Valley Way and the John Bunyan Trail) then, after passing around the top of the wood, we turned left (now away from the named trails) on a footpath which climbed across a field to the road. There was another scarecrow, "Where's Wally", outside a cottage.