Fourteen of us (including several visitors) met up on Saturday 18th December outside St Peter & St Paul Church in Medmenham for our last walk before Christmas. After taking the register (for track & trace purposes) the leader gave a short introduction to the walk, then one of our visitors mentioned that nearby Danesfield House had been used by the RAF during the Second World War as a base for their photographic interpretation unit. It turned out that the father of one of our members had flown photo-reconnaissance missions for them during the war. What a co-incidence!
We started the walk by heading uphill to Medmenham Camp, an Iron-Age Hillfort, which was hidden in woodland, and then made our way through Hog Wood to Pullinghill Wood, where there had been practice trenches during the First World War.
The military aspects of the walk gave way to the literary, as we joined Shakespeare's Way, a long-distance path from Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire to the modern Shakespeare's Globe on London's South Bank. We didn't follow it for long, taking a parallel path into Hambleden, where we stopped to explore this picturesque village and to have our picnic lunch. Some also had tea and cake from the local shop.
We took a more direct route back, through farmland and woodland, emerging from Killdown Bank onto the main road into Medmenham. Then we followed a permissive path that took us away from the noisy road through countryside where we saw a small shooting party, hunting pheasants. The permissive path joined a public footpath leading us back to where we'd started, having covered 12.9 km (8 miles) with 520m (1700 ft) of ascent in total. Quite a hilly walk. See our route on Google Maps.
Thank you to Ruth for leading this walk.
Return to volume index