# 🥾 Walk 490 - Medmenham and Hambledon

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.

![Hog Wood, near Danesfield Gardens Nursery.](https://www.berksww.org.uk/scrapbooks/volume38/images/hog_wood.jpg)

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.

![Shakespeare's Way, between Rogue's Plantation and Homefield Wood.](https://www.berksww.org.uk/scrapbooks/volume38/images/rogues_plantation.jpg)

*Thank you to Ruth for leading this walk.*

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