To Toller Porcorum from Lower Kingcombe and return

We’d had a lovely day today with our daughter, son-in-law and grandson. We’d met up with them this morning at Minterne House. There are lots of azaleas and rhododendrons in the gardens. so we felt we were perhaps visiting at the  best time of the year, and the Easter Trail, which technically ran to last Friday, was still in place.  So Bertie was amused by looking for large numbered pictures of Easter eggs, and after finding 13 of these, we reached a wooden “golden egg”. By this time we were on our way back to the car park on our circuit, but Bertie wanted to retrace his steps, ticking off the numbers in reverse, so that’s what we did. We then returned to our cottage, where we had lunch, then Bertie led us around the Purple Trail on the Kingcombe Meadows Nature Reserve (which our walk around yesterday is described here) and we visited The Kitchen at Kingcombe for tea and cakes, as well as looking at the pond and bird hide at the Visitor Centre.

Our visitors had to drive home, leaving us with an hour or so before we needed to cook our evening meal. We knew that the road from Toller Porcorum, about a mile to the south-east was very quiet, so a walk to Toller Porcorum on the Jubilee Trail with a return leg on the road seemed a suitable late afternoon walk. We turned right from the car park for Pound Cottage, immediately on the route of the Jubilee Trail. After joining then parting company with the Wessex Ridgeway through Lower Kingcombe, we continued on a distinctly wet track. It was damp underfoot, but very attractive, lined with bluebells. We emerged onto an open hillside, with Toller Porcorum clearly visible some distance away, and essentially we just kept walking towards the Church.

Eventually we reached the road we’d driven on when heading to and from our cottage, but a track almost immediately opposite led to the Church. We were just emerging out the other side of the Churchyard, reading that (apparently) the Church’s notice board has been removed because of a dispute over the use of capital letters and something to do with the screws that had been used, when we got a phone call from our son to tell us that he and his wife are safely back from their holiday in Canada. It was really good to hear from them, and timely that he had rung while we were out, given the poor signal at the cottage and the lack of functioning wifi. In the confusion, I wasn’t immediately clear which road we needed to take for the return leg, but I did notice a sign pointing up a road to a car park and the village hall. That might be useful for a future walk [it was!].

The walk back towards Lower Kingcombe was fine, if not terribly interesting.  However, on the final approach, Richard spotted the point at which the footpath across the Reserve that leads across “Pawne Plot” (almost from Pound Cottage’s front door) to the road we were on. We took the footpath; the route was not entirely clear, leading us to need to retrace our steps at least once, and Richard going deep into the mud at one stage, but we successfully navigated our way back to the cottage, and it was certainly more interesting walking than the road had been.

Following leg