Essex Man Does Walking

 Surprisingly, I had a good sleep, usually the day before a trip or the like I find it hard to nod off. Maybe the whisky helped! Anyway, woke up early had a good breakfast, probably the last good one for a while, a shower and got my gear together. I said goodbye to the kids and my wife drove me down to Leigh on Sea station. Andy was already waiting, with a surprising number of bags plus his rucksack which concerned me. I said goodbye to my wife and headed down to the platform with my mate. 

His rucksack was stuffed and he had a sleeping bag and trainers in another shopping bag! I suggested he might well have too much stuff and that he was going to find it difficult to do a 17 mile walk with a shopping bag and rucksack. We played around with his rucksack and in the end managed to hook the other items on to it. It looked a little unwieldy but at least everything was to be carried on his back. The train arrived looking a little busy, we found a couple of seats and the train headed off. At every stop a veritable flood of people entered all heading to London for a festival, the FA Cup final or some other event. We got off at West Ham, along with most of the train and headed to the Jubilee Line, again with most of them. We managed to get into a carriage but I was stuffed by the opposite door and every stop just pushed me further back. I was a bit worried that we would never get off but we managed to at London Waterloo. 

London Waterloo was equally rammed and we waited for the train to turn up before getting on and finding a seat. Again, every one was taken by the time the train left. The journey was around an hour before we pulled into a sunny Winchester.

We headed down into the town passing by plenty of market stalls before grabbing a bit of lunch at Greggs and sitting outside the Cathedral on the grass with plenty of others. I studied the first part of the route and about 1 pm we headed to the starting point which is outside the Old Mill.

The sign was in the undergrowth a bit but I had to get the official start photo. 100 miles to go! No point worrying now. Time to get going.

We started off with a nice walk alongside the River Itchen, I had started off using my GPS unit but typically it stopped working and we ended up getting lost 10 minutes after we started. A little embarrassing! I got the maps out whilst Andy stopped some walkers who seemed to suggest where the route was. We followed their advice but I was not sure it was right and eventually I decided to turn us around and head back to the river.

It was there we found a sign which we couldn’t see the first time coming the opposite way. So we set off on the right route again up a steep hill. Very steep and very long. A sign of things to come! We came to another ambiguous sign pointing in the middle of two roads. We kept going  straight but as we reached the top of the road we realised we had gone wrong again. Thankfully we picked up a path heading to where we should have gone.  We headed over the M3, southbound was stationary with everyone looking to flock to the coast in the good weather. 

Once on the other side it was like a different world of fields, wildlife and peace. Across the fields we eventually came to the village of Chilcomb. Turning left at the manor and walking uphill, which soon became steeply up hill! At the top we had a rest and turned left heading slowly upwards towards Telegraph Hill. We headed across a field and over the A272 passed a car park for Cheesefoot Head before walking into a wooded area. The trail is very hard around here, chalk and flint so make sure you have some shoes that will cope with this.