The Ridgeway

The Ridgeway National Trail runs from Overton Hill near Avebury in Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. Well that's the way most people walk it (and the way the guidebooks describe it) but we did it the 'wrong way round', so as to continue from where we finished the Icknield Way Path. For most of its journey, the Ridgeway trail follows prehistoric routes on or close to the chalk ridge that sweeps across the south of England from Dorset to Norfolk. It joins with the Wessex Ridgeway (which leads to Lyme Regis) at its western end and with the Icknield Way Path at its eastern end. The Icknield Way Path then joins with the Peddars Way, which we have also walked - to Holme next the Sea near Hunstanton.The path is relatively short - for a long distance footpath that is! - 'just' 87 miles, and it runs mostly through Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire, with short forays into Hertfordshire and Berkshire. We walked the 3.5 miles from Ivinghoe Beacon to Tring Station after completing the Icknield Way Path in November 2011 and returned 18 months later, walking from Tring Station through the Chilterns to the River Thames at Goring in June 2013. We completed the final 43 miles to Overton Hill in a heat wave in July 2013, so there was an interesting contrast between the weather at the start of the walk (a cold and misty November day) and at the end (with temperatures in southern England hovering around 30 degrees Celsius!).

Before we set off to walk the Ridgeway we knew its reputation as a hard, rutted chalk track, largely due to the fact that about a third of the route is a byway, shared with horses, cyclists and - in places - with motorbikes and cars. A few bits were rutted and more were hard underfoot, but the path has been much improved by the fact that they now ban motorised vehicles from most of the route during the winter. Where motorised vehicles are banned entirely, we were walking on grass turf - lovely! - and in other places the route is an ordinary narrow footpath.

The trail passes through glorious rolling English countryside. We didn't know this area beforehand so this was a relevation. The route generally avoids towns and villages but when we did pass houses they were frequently picture-postcard thatch with rose-filled gardens. Even in the heat wave, the landscape had not yet become parched and there were delightful green woods and hedgerows, and plenty of wildflowers by the path. The Chilterns is renouned for its red kites; indeed we saw red kites for most of the length of the path and in the Princes Risborough area they were everywhere.

The path also passes many archaeological sites including Stone Age long barrows (e.g. Wayland's Smithy) and the immense Iron Age hill forts of Letcombe Castle (Segsbury Camp), Uffington Castle and Barbury Castle. There are also white horses carved in the chalk, but these are generally not visible from the ridge because you are above them.

Whichever way you walk the path, its start and end are vaguelly in the middle of nowhere. If you started from Tring Station you'd need to walk to Ivinghoe Beacon and then retrace your steps, so completing the Icknield Way Path and then immediately starting The Ridgeway worked well. The Overton Hill end of the path is in a car park on the A4 to the south of Avebury and the west of Marlborough. Most people don't like this as an end point - we thought it was OK, but it's not great for public transport. Apparently they are contemplating moving this end to Avebury, for its added historical interest, but that wouldn't help public transport access greatly (though there is an hourly bus service to Marlborough, if you ring up to book a seat in advance).

We got around the lack of public transport problem by walking past the end of the Ridgeway, all of half a mile to East Kennett where we staying overnight at The Old Forge. Then, the following day we walked through the pretty Kennett Valley villages of West Overton, Lockeridge, Clatford and Manton to Marlborough, from whence we caught a bus to Swindon. We had a pleasant lunch at the STEAM railway museum then caught the train from Swindon to Paddington and then from Kings Cross home.

The Ridgeway is incredibly well signposted, even without the additional signing we acquired by virtue of walking part of the path on the day of the Clare Foundation's Red Kite Walk and part of it on the weekend of the 100 km Race to the Stones. Normally I find lots of walkers or runners on 'our' path rather trying, but the walkers and runners on both of these events were friendly and polite and sharing the path with them added to the interest. You could almost certainly walk the Ridgeway without either a map or a guidebook, but having both also made the walk more interesting. The guidebook (Anthony Burton's 'The Ridgeway' in the Aurum Press's Official National Trail Guide series) was slightly irritating simply because it described the walk from west to east, but as always it contained interesting background information and its maps were useful in that they highlighted which of the mutlitude of long distance paths in the area we were meant to be following. We used (in order) OS Explorer (1: 25000) maps 181, 171, 170 and 157 - and as always we enjoyed being able to work out our occasional forays from the path (usually to accommodation), our route to Marlborough for the train home, and to set the walk in the context of the surrounding towns and villages.