# 🥾 Walk 446 - Goring, Aldworth and Ashampstead

The walk on Saturday 10th April was the second walk that Ian had led for us. Ten of us met up in Goring on a rather cold and grey day for a walk that promised to include hills and churches. After leaving Goring and crossing the Thames into Streatley, we encountered our first steep hill - Lardon Chase. Once we'd got our breath back, we descended through the golf course on the other side of the hill to Thurle Grange.

Turning south, we made our way through fields to Aldworth. Not stopping at the Bell Inn, as it isn't allowed to open just yet, we continued to St Mary's church. As we approached, we could hear it's bell tolling in honour of HRH Duke of Edinburgh, who's death had been announced the previous day. The bell ringers were leaving as we arrived, and they invited us to take a look at the  "Aldworth Giants" in the church.

Originally standing at 7 ft tall, these 14th century statues of the knights of the De La Beche family were damaged by Parliamentarians during the English Civil war. We ate our packed lunches in the church yard before heading off towards Ashampstead.

![The Aldworth Giants at St Mary's Church, Aldworth.](https://www.berksww.org.uk/scrapbooks/volume36/images/aldworth_giants.jpg)

A mostly woodland walk led us to Ashampstead Green and then we took a small diversion to a farm shop at Cassy Fields Farm, where we we able to make use of their toilet facilities, buy refreshments and consume them at some handy picnic tables.

After our tea/coffee stop at the farm shop, we crossed a field to St Clement's Church to see the medieval frescoes. The paintings are thought to date from C.1230-40 and were plastered over during the reformation and remained undiscovered until 1895.

A mixture of woodland, fields and hills took as back to Streatley and then Goring. On route, we crossed a part of Grim's Ditch at Bowler's Copse. We'd already crossed another part of it earlier, at Portobello Wood, where our leader announced that no-one knew what Grim's Ditch was. A brief bit of Internet searching suggests that it's a Bronze Age territorial earthwork running between the Pang and Thames valleys. There are other such earthworks with the same name elsewhere in the UK.

![Frescoes at St Clement's Church, Ashampstead.](https://www.berksww.org.uk/scrapbooks/volume36/images/frescoes_st_clements_church.jpg)

Our final hill (slightly steeper and longer than Lardon Chase) brought us out behind the YHA at Streatley, leaving us with about half a mile of road walking back to the car park at Goring. This included a slight detour past St Thomas's church, just to add another one to the list of churches on this walk. See our on Google Maps.

![Heading up to Hartridge Lye Wood, Ashampstead.](https://www.berksww.org.uk/scrapbooks/volume36/images/hartridge_lye.jpg)

*Thank you to Ian for leading this walk.*

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