Salcey Forest to Yardley Road north of Olney

This weekend saw record-breaking rainfall and extensive flooding in the north of England. Further south, we got away quite lightly; it had been wet and windy on Saturday, but Sunday was dry all day, if a bit breezy. We left home in Norfolk around 8.15 am and it was a delight to drive across to the Milton Keynes area with very little traffic to trouble us; well, until Olney that is! The Olney "Dickens of a Christmas" would probably be better described as "Dickens of a traffic jam"; Richard managed to avoid it but I didn't! However by 11 am we had parked one car on the verge by Yardley Road at the point (SP878539) at which the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk heads off towards Olney Hyde, and driven back in the other car by way of Yardley Hastings to Salcey Forest (SP811508).

There were several horse boxes parked at Salcey Forest and a female horse-rider accompanied by a disabled male cyclist were just preparing to leave for a ride. We passed several dog-walkers as we walked along the muddy path back to the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk and then out of the Forest to the east. Immediately after leaving the Forest we encountered Salcey Solar Farm. We climbed up above the solar farm and meandered our way through undulating countryside to the pretty Rocks Farm. We joined the long drive and climbed towards the road, passing a stream and an attractive wooded area. However, as we reached the gate onto the road, we realised that we had a problem: it's an electric gate and we had no way of opening it. Richard had noticed that the route of the MK Boundary Walk was shown on the map as heading to the south before the end of the drive, so back down the hill we went; we found the correct path, even if Richard did have to hold up the sign to enable us to see it.

It felt as if we were walking through someone's garden, but I think we took the correct route to the road, and walked back along it, then down a track around Eakley Grange Farm. We climbed steeply past paddocks and then continued past Parkfield Farm and cut across by the corner of Parkfield Spiney. We descended to the village of Ravenstone, with a pretty church and a mass of thatch. We ate our lunch sitting on benches on the playing field, then walked through the village on the road (the official route cuts across fields but we wanted to see the village), noting that there were more benches near the church, so this is a good lunch spot.

We turned up a track past housing on the edge of Ravenstone and walked across fields to the next village of Weston Underwood. More people had been this way, making the path a bit muddy, but we were grateful for this because it meant that when the route suddenly dived across a field, we spotted it. We descended to the village of Weston Underwood. A couple of colleagues from work live here, but we didn't see anyone we knew. It's another pretty village, which once had a big house, the gateway to which (known as "The Knobs") we walked through on our way on our way out of the village.

We turned up a track by Weston Park and continued along here for a kilometre or so, descending and ascending again and meeting a few walkers. We crossed an old railway line then the track turned right towards Hungary Hall whilst we took a path to the left around a spinney, across a footbridge and along a field boundary, towards Yardley Chase. We entered a part of the wood turned right along the edge of it, then we took a track across fields near Biggin Lodge to more woodland and turned right again. On the ground, this was fairly unspectacular mixed woodland with occasional signs of forestry activity, but the map showed some peculiar semi-moated areas in the middle of the wood. Apparently there are concrete huts in the middle of each of these areas, used to store bombs during the Second World War.

We left the wood and followed a track to Olney Park Farm, being somewhat disturbed by a large field of turkeys (note the date). We walked down the farm track to the road and back to the car.

Following leg