Honington to Navenby
Walked by Sally and Richard, Saturday 13th September 2014.
About 14 miles (5.75 hours including stops), 13.5 miles on route of Viking Way.
Click here for all our photos from this walk.
We'd been enjoying an 'Indian summer' for the past week, and to my delight the dry weather lasted to the weekend - and I was able to take a day off work (though tomorrow will be a busy day..,). Having reached the route of the wonderful Number 1 bus, which runs between Grantham and Lincoln, we were able to use just one car. We drove by way of Sleaford, then on the A153 to Honington; unlike last week, we had no problems with closed roads today and, since Richard was driving, no problems with me going the wrong way! We parked in the same place as we'd left one car last week (SK942434) and we were walking by around 9.30am. It was initially misty, then dry but dull with sunny intervals, and eventually the sun came out properly. We'd expected this to be rather a boring section of the Viking Way, but we were pleasantly surprised.
We walked up the lane back past Honington Grange and turned right on the road towards Hough on the Hill, back on the route of the Viking Way. Yes, it was a road, and occasional cars passed us, but it was a picturesque road and as we climbed, views opened up behind us.
After climbing, we turned right onto a pleasant track, and followed this to the delightfully named Carlton Scroop, all the time getting closer to the large communications mast that had been in sight since we left the car. In Carlton Scroop we turned left past the Church and walked along the main road for a while, then we took a track that climbed up to the communications mast, past a barky guard dog then a man walking his dog.
At the top of the hill, past the mast, we turned left and followed around field edges until we reached a path that went straight across Normanton Heath. We passed a sign that we at first assumed to be notification of a diversion, but it only seemed to mention the width of the path, so we kept straight ahead. A woman out with a Labrador, complete with a retrieving dummy, was reading the sign at the other end and she decided to follow a different route. We kept straight ahead across the “heath”, though it was more farmland than heath. The walking became rougher, but there was a convenient log at the point at which we reached Ermine Street, so we stopped for an early “first lunch”.
Ermine Street was a Roman road which ran from London to York via Lincoln, and we followed the route of it, also known as “High Dike” in this section, for the next 5 miles or so. We were initially walking parallel with the B6403, but we were a decent distance from the road, initially in a scrubby ditch to the west of the road, then through a wood, then along a wide grassy verge. We reached Byard’s Leap and stopped for a drink at the Country Kitchen. The legend of Byard’s Leap involves a troublesome witch and a horse called Byard, which took a giant leap and both horse and witch disappeared, but the detail seems to vary depending on which account you read.
We crossed the A17 and continued along Ermine Street, now a wide track. The RAF College at Cranwell was to our right, and we watched several gliders coming in the land. I was delighted by the quality of the photos from my new camera.
The route took us through a couple of small areas of woodland, with some autumnal colours especially berries, and we stopped for our second lunch! There was a wind sock in a field to our right and eventually we realised that there were a couple of very small planes in the field too, close to what is marked on the map as Griffin’s Farm Cottages. We joined the minor road which had come from the east, past the farm and farm cottages, and then continued straight ahead on the route of Ermine Street.
Just as we reached the road we spotted a pretty Ermine Street mosaic amongst the undergrowth on the verge. In researching this later I was delighted to discover that Robert, “The solitary walker”, has also walked the Viking Way in short legs, reaching the Humber Bridge just earlier this year. Slightly further on, we passed the site of the former RAF Wellingore.
We turned left off Ermine Street onto an attractive tree-lined road which took us to Wellingore, which we now know to refer to as one of the “Cliff villages”. We had reached the Lincoln Cliff, a limestone escarpment. In fact we’d climbed up the escarpment back near the communications mast this morning, and we’d then been walking on the top of the limestone plateau. We’d intended to finish today’s walk in Wellingore, but we decided to continue on to Navenby, only a very short distance further north on the road, just slightly further by way of the cliff-edge footpath.
We meandered our way through Wellingore, past Wellingore Hall and Church (just by the hill back down Lincoln Cliff), briefly along the A607 and then left through a residential area to the Village Hall and the cliff edge. What a wonderful end to the walk; we followed the cliff with superb views across the plain (first “Wellingore Low Fields” then “Navenby Low Fields”) then we meandered our way back to Navenby Village.
We left the route of the Viking Way on the edge of Navenby Village and walked to the main road. The Viking Way doesn’t go to the centre of the village, which is a great shame; it’s a delightful place. We discovered that we had missed the 3.05pm bus, so we had time to buy an ice-cream and a newspaper before the next bus at 3.45pm.
We enjoyed the bus route back along Lincoln Cliff then down into the plain and through the delightful villages of Welbourn , Leadenham, Fulbeck, Caythorpe, Normanton-on-Cliffe and Carlton Scroop. The bus dropped us back at the layby near Honington and we had a good journey home.
