Buxted to Oaklands Hall and return on Vanguard Way

We slept extremely well at the Buxted Inn and when we went down to breakfast at around 8am we were surprised to see (a) that we were just about last of the guests to appear and (b) that rather than a room full of business people, which is what I had expected here, everyone else also gave the appearance of being on holiday. Because we were last, but only just, we had rather a long wait for our breakfast, but we ordered "wild mushrooms, sautéed with thyme and parsley, topped with poached egg, and served on ciabatta" and when it came it was absolutely delicious. We had booked on a room-only basis but, because we were staying, this breakfast, with the addition of a very good cold buffet selection, cost us the grand total of £2 each. The Buxted Inn had done us proud.

We set off walking at 9am to complete the short distance remaining on the Wealdway and then to do a circuit making use of part of the Vanguard Way to bring us back to Buxted Station. It was a dry, sunny day, though not warm. We retraced our steps past the station and then climbed up through Buxted Park to the Church where we had left the Wealdway yesterday. We turned right onto the main entrance to Buxted Park and emerged through a grand gateway onto the A272 (which we could have followed all the way from the Buxted Inn, but it wouldn't have been such a nice walk and we'd have omitted a small section of the Wealdway).

We turned left and walked alongside the road for a few hundred metres then turned right down the entrance to Oast Farm, a pick your own fruit farm, also with a cafe and farm shop, selling their own apple juice (which had been available at breakfast time). We really didn't need a second breakfast, but the menu here also looks most attractive. We took a path alongside the farm, with views to fishing lakes, and eventually this brought us to the busy A26 in Five Ash Down.

One of the very few detractors of the this part of the Wealdway had been the number of busy roads to get across. There just ARE a lot of busy roads in this area, but getting across them on foot can be rather difficult. However, once across this one, the path took us into a narrow strip of woodland by the road, of which we had not had high expectations. Actually it was delightful, with a good selection of wild spring flowers. After a brief walk across fields we found ourselves in Hendall Wood, again delightful, with masses of wood anenomes under the trees.

North of Hendall Wood was a longer stretch of walk across attractive open wealdland countryside. In this stretch we were also entertained by some very young lambs, some attractive (and large) farm buildings at Hendall Manor Farm and a treehouse to match!

We climbed up to, then descended through Furnace Wood, with the name reminding us of the Wealdon iron industry (whilst the guidebook told us that Hendall was the site of furnace in the heyday of the industry, and Hendall Manor was the home of the ironmaster - gosh, there must have been money in the iron industry). The landscape was reminiscent of some locations to the north of Ashdown Forest (around Hartfield where Richard lived as a boy); this reminded us that we were now on the southern edge of Ashdown Forest and very much in the "High Weald".

We emerged onto a track then a minor road at Fairwarp. A female rider was just getting onto her horse by a horsebox and as we reached the entrance to Oaklands Hall we were passed both by the horserider and by the postman in his red van. We'd encountered cyclists when we were last here in October, so we were led to conclude that this apparently minor road is rather busy whenever we are passing! More significantly, we had now completed the whole route of the Wealdway, though not today's walk.

After taking photographs of the entrance to Oaklands Hall, we turned right down the road by which we had approached back in October. This took us down to a ford, then we climbed quite steeply through woodland to the A26 (again..). Across the road, we continued past Perryman's Farm and past the point at which we had emerged on the diverted route of the Vanguard Way when we were here back in October. The Vanguard Way doesn't appear to be diverted any longer but we continued on the route of where the diversion went, a hundred metres or so further along the road, then descended across open parkland to High Hurstwood, where we joined the Vanguard Way proper.

From High Hurstwood we turned up past a church and then across a field containing a couple of donkeys. From here we crossed undulating countryside, eventually descending to cross the River Uck and to pass underneath the railway line, then to climb up to Buxted.

The train from Uckfield and Buxted to London runs once an hour and we'd realised that we would either have to hurry, or accept that we would miss a train by just a few minutes and so have to wait for nearly an hour. We selected the latter option, and when we reached a spot with a good view back to the railway, we decided to wait to photograph the preceding train on its way out of Buxted. We then had plenty of time to go in search of lunch (we bought sausage rolls in a corner shop) before taking our food to the station and eating it there. I can now tell you that Buxted Station rivals Ely Station as the coldest place on the Planet!