22nd April
Back to Tring. We seem to have walked around here a lot…1, 2, 3…but this walk joins up sections of these walks with stretches we’ve not walked. Parking in Wigginton, we drop down from the Ridgeway into Tring Park and stumble into the Saturday morning park run…all very well organized with marshals in fluorescent jackets and routes pegged out with plastic flags. Our walk will be an altogether less well-planned affair!
The short climb up to Hastoe takes us close by the highest point in Hertfordshire (Pavis Wood). Apparently we’d scaled these dizzy highest during our Wendover Woods walk last year and hadn’t realised it! The air’s more refined up here.
In Drayton Wood we are greeted by the Cholesbury dinosaurs and then some genuine English history as we cross the ditch into Cholesbury Camp. It’s hard to imagine how this Iron Age fort used to look. Today, the ditch is marked by a line of trees and the centre contains fields and the village church.
We loop back to Wigginton along one of those ‘Chesham valleys’, long and low and not much by way of a view. As we approach the end, the sun comes out. Had we started our walk a couple of hours later the weather would have been perfect. In future we need to pay more attention to the forecast before setting out.
Hastoe picture gallery (more pictures on Flickr):
Distance: 7.2 miles ; Difficulty: Easy
Coordinates for Satnav: N51° 46.703′ W0° 38.463′
Where Angells Tread! 