🥾 Walk 361 - Dinton Pastures and Hurst

On Sunday 23rd December, the day after the pub crawl, seven of us including a regular visitor from Loddon Valley Ramblers, met up at the Museum of Berkshire Aviation for a repeat of a walk that Sue and Jane had led a couple of years ago, albeit in the reverse direction.

The previous week’s very wet weather had put part of the route under-water and impassable necessitating a hastily arranged detour for the last section of the walk.

We set out anti-clockwise round Black Swan Lake in Dinton Pastures Country Park. As with most of the route, it was muddy in parts but not too bad.

After reaching the Visitor Centre and a welcome toilet stop, we headed across the former golf course to reach Sandford Lane and then followed the public footpaths to reach Lodge Road, which we crossed into Hurst.

A few hundred yards of quiet road walking took us to the village pond, where we rested for a lunch break before we convinced ourselves that we needed to visit The Green Man, just around the corner.

Suitably refreshed, we set off again heading along Hogmoor Lane and on to Whistley Green, tackling some partially flooded sections of path on the way. It was here that the original route had to be abandoned in favour of more passable terrain that took us parallel to Lodge Road again and back to Sandford Lane.

Turning north, we followed the edge of Lavell’s Lake back to our starting point. See our route on Google Maps.

Thank you to Colin and Sue for leading this walk, writing it up and providing the photos.

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