🥾 Walk 295 - Holyport Figure-of-Eight

This year the August bank holiday weekend was blessed with warm, dry weather. Yes, I know! Anyway, eighteen of us (including a few newcomers) congregated by the war memorial in Holyport for a 5½ or 10-mile figure-of-eight walk. This offers a choice of a short or long walk, which is useful to people trying out organised walking for the first time and may not know what sort of distance they can manage.

We walked along the quiet Holyport Street before crossing a field and joining Stroud Farm Road. Leaving this road, we followed a long straight path with open fields to the right of us and domestic gardens to the left, then heading across the fields to Fifield.

A little bit of road walking got us to the other side of Fifield and back onto footpaths through fields with wooden bridges crossing streams. The route looped round back into Fifield again and out the other, other side. (I'm trying not so say we headed west, etc., because my write-ups are getting a bit samey!)

The next bit of the route went through a field of horses. Some were in roped-off sections but two were in the main field and standing by the gate we needed to go through. A brief safety announcement was made, reminding people not to walk immediately behind horses, unless they want a kick. We hoped that the horses would move away as we approached the gate.

They didn't. In fact, they stood either side of the gate, inspecting us as we passed through, like a couple of bouncers outside a nightclub! Further on, we passed through a field of young bullocks. At first, they remained in the far corner as we walked through, but then things got a bit tricky. They moved at some speed toward the corner of the field where we were leaving. Most of us were over the style before they arrived, but a few weren't.

A careful detour around the herd followed by a wait for them to move away was required. Naturally, this was a stressful time for some of us, but we all made it through without incident - into the next field, where there were more young bullocks!

Back at Holyport, we said goodbye to those just doing the morning walk and said hello to Greg who was joining us for the afternoon walk. We had a picnic lunch stop by the village pond followed by a quick drink at the pub before the remaining twelve of us got on with the second part of the walk.

This took us through fields and woodland, emerging on to Sturt Green road slightly further down road than originally planned, which caused a brief moment of confusion. We soon found the correct route and carried on past Leslions Farm and Little Foxley, before returning along tree-lined paths back to Holyport. See our route on Google Maps.

The incident with the bullocks has made us think that we need to update our guidance to walk-leaders, so that we know what's best to do if and when this happens again.

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