🥾 Walk 591 - Eastbury and Lambourn Downs

The weather forecast for Saturday 15th July was for a bit of everything. Light and heavy rain, very high winds, thunder and lightning, with sunny intervals. Just a bit off-putting! Despite that, four people turned up for a repeat of the first ever walk led by the Berkshire Weekend Walkers, when it started up on Sunday 15th July 2012.

Although there were several rain showers, some heavy, while travelling to Lambourn, the sun was out as we assembled in the free car park on Lambourn High Street, ready for the walk. After the usual introductions and a welcome to a visitor from the Oxford Weekend Walkers, we set off up the High Street and turned right onto Newbury Street. A footpath through the grounds of the Lambourn Sports Club took us onto Bockhampton Road, where we stopped to admire the chalk-stream River Lambourn.

Now heading up a lane called Long Hedge, we were gaining height and heading up onto Eastbury Down. The byway connecting Beachdown Farm to Eastbury Grange seemed to be heavily populated by butterflies. Andrew, our visitor from the OWW, was very knowledgeable about these creatures and identified Marbled White, Tortoiseshell, Painted Lady, Comma, Red Admiral, Gatekeeper, Brimstone and Skipper varieties. They all seemed to be going about their business despite the strong wind.

The original route would leave this byway and go through a now nettle-infested footpath. When we did the pre-walk some weeks back, we'd tried and failed to use this path, so a detour was taken, adding slightly to the total length of the walk. We turned south at Grange Farm, and re-joined our original route further down.

The footpath to Eastbury was rather variable. Some of it had been recently cut back but one section was totally overgrown with tall grass, which was though going.

On arriving in Eastbury village, we walked up the road, admiring the many thatched cottages before reaching an interesting memorial sculpture of a Concorde aircraft and vapour trail carved from a Redwood tree. I'd done my research as was able to tell the others about how and why this had been created. See https://lambourn.org/flight-captain-ken-potter-1930-1977/ if you're interested in its story.

We stopped by a War Memorial near the church to eat our packed lunches. As we sat, two on a bench and two on the stepped base of the memorial, we commented on how different the weather had been to the forecast. No thunder and virtually no rain so far, but the wind was beginning to pick up, quite noticeably.

After lunch, Andrew declared that it was his birthday and bought us all a drink at The Eastbury Plough, which was much appreciated. On leaving the pub, we followed a byway, heading south-west on to the Lambourn Downs. These were quite different to the Eastbury downs, with much more evidence of the recent heavy rain. Paths were muddy and often covered with loose stones, washed up by torrents of rainwater that must have flowed along these paths.

Much of the byway was enclosed by trees, whose leaves rustled loudly during the strong gusts of wind that the forecast had correctly predicted for the afternoon. We also had to skirt around some large puddles in the dips of the path. These got worse as we headed further south, toward Burgess's Farm.

During the pre-walk, which was in the middle of the June heatwave, this part of the route was the only section that was muddy, so I expecting this to be much worse after the recent rain. Today, we cut off the corner of the byway by crossing a wheat field and re-joining it after it turned northward.

Heading downhill now, again the path looked like it had been a river the previous day, with grass bent over and loose stones in evidence. At a crossing of tracks outside Cleeve Cottage, we took a track called Stony Lane. This was more muddy than stony today and there were the occasional flooded sections to skirt carefully around. Stony Lane ended as White Shute, another track, began. The ground beneath us was distinctly chalky, which may explain the name of this track.

Passing gates to a nature reserve we went uphill again. We could now see the TV mast at Membury - a landmark we'd seen many times on this walk. Downhill again, we stopped at Hungerford Gap were we could look down on Lambourn and across to Eastbury Down, where we'd been that morning.

As we approached Lambourn, the rain began. A few light drops at first and then heavier ones. We were only ten minutes away from the end of the walk, so we pressed on and got to the car park before the rain was heavy enough to need waterproof jackets. In fact, our jackets had not needed to come out of our rucksacks all day, despite the depressing weather forecast. We'd done 9 miles with 488m (1,600ft) of ascent in total. See our route on Google Maps and OS Maps.

Thank you to Emma for co-leading the walk with me and providing a picture for my write-up.

📸 Back to Volume 45

Return to volume index