Has anyone set off to do a walk that turned out to be as bad as my one yesterday?
From an old leaflet I had, it was a 5.5 miles circuit in the Colne Valley in the green belt on the Middlesex/Buckinghamshire border, which is on the west side of the London conurbation. It looked promising as the area is a mix of small rivers, mature gravel pits and a canal, while the start was from Uxbridge which is very few miles from my home.
There was absolutely nowhere to park at all in the edge of the built up area, I drove around for half an hour seeing nothing but yellow lines and residents parking. The car park for a recreation ground had pay & display machines, £6.30 for a maximum time of 4 hours.
Plan 'B' was to drive to the southern end of my route, where I found a pull-in with room for 5 cars, full but someone was just leaving. This was by an attractive lake with rivers either side of it, but even though the air was filled with the distant roar of the M25 it turned out to be the only decent part of the walk, as twenty or so minutes later the path ended at a dismal road that I walked along to reach a canal. For a mile this was far from idyllic, with light industry along one side and office blocks along the other, while it was lined with really tatty-looking old houseboats and barges.
Leaving the canal I followed a minor road filled with traffic queuing for lights, and then there was half a mile along an A road. A public footpath passed through a young wood full of empty beer cans and other litter, before following the side of the motorway for nearly a mile. Mercifully this was out of sight behind an 8 ft wooden fence, but it was all too audible. Meanwhile, a fence the other side of the path hid a river from view. I also saw a very strange 'footpath' that I'll be writing about in a separate thread when I get the photos sorted out.
Next a half-mile track bordered by large properties led to the centre of the village of Iver, where crawling HGVs queued for a mini roundabout. I followed a suburban road and then cut through a council estate, where there was a serious fire behind one of the houses, a shed or something maybe, but I couldn't get close enough to see. It was no good me calling the fire brigade because I didn't know the names of the roads, so I told a woman who was by her car, but when I glanced back she was just standing there looking.
On the far side of the estate I climbed to a footbridge spanning the gridlocked 8-lane motorway. My instructions read, "walk along the track down to the canal" (an arm of the one I followed earlier), not mentioning that it passes a sewage works, by the entrance of which I had to literally climb over a makeshift barrier presumably intended to deter further flytipping beyond it. Little more than two miles to the south of me, planes were climbing steeply one after the other from Heathrow airport.
A real shock came after I had threaded a way through mounds of rubble and heaps of old tyres, for the expected bridge over the canal turned out to be nothing more than a pair of large pipes crossing the water. The alternative my map showed was to return past the sewage works and walk a path beside the motorway for a quarter of a mile, to reach a lane that headed to my starting point. The large lake whose boundary I followed was surrounded by a high steel fence.
Never before have I been so relieved to get back to my car! It is certain that I won't walk in this area again.