Travel – Page 13 – Fergy's Rambles.

Lock-down Diaries #1

What’s all this about?

Hello there and welcome to a post which is probably going to make me hate myself, I just hope it doesn’t have the same effect on you. By way of keeping the site tidy, I am going to put a read more link here so please do as I am going to try something completely new.

Continue reading “Lock-down Diaries #1”

Building works, Beckton and a bloody bad back – Jubilee Greenway 7.

Hello once again and welcome to a somewhat ridiculous seventh day of walking the Jubilee Greenway which, considering it is only 35 miles long is pretty poor going but it was only ever intended as a means of getting a bit of exercise whilst I was fairly well grounded due to a succession of hospital appointments. If you haven’t read my previous posts about this jaunt then you may wish to start here. If you have read them, I thank you and let’s go for another walk.
Continue reading “Building works, Beckton and a bloody bad back – Jubilee Greenway 7.”

Suffragettes and spooks, Shakespeare and ships – Jubilee Greenway 4.

Hello again and welcome to the fourth instalment of my walk along the Jubilee Greenway , a 60km. footpath in London which was constructed from existing rights of way to celebrate Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 even if it was hijacked by being linked to the London Olympics of that year. If you haven’t read my previous entries, you can start here.
Continue reading “Suffragettes and spooks, Shakespeare and ships – Jubilee Greenway 4.”

London’s green lung – Jubilee Greenway 3.

Good day to you and welcome to the third day of my walk along the Jubilee Greenway in reasonably central London which I had come upon more or less by accident on Day 1, managed to wander off on an interesting diversion on Day 2 and had determined myself to regain and continue on Day 3.
Continue reading “London’s green lung – Jubilee Greenway 3.”

Greenway or Grand Union ? – Jubilee Greenway 2.

Hello again and welcome to the second day of a walk I undertook in early January 2020 which began in the previous entry and, if you have not read it yet, I respectfully suggest that you click back one page (use the button at the bottom of the page) as it will give you an idea of what I was at plus which I could use the traffic for the site! Continue reading “Greenway or Grand Union ? – Jubilee Greenway 2.”

A Saturday stroll goes large – Jubilee Greenway 1.

It all started with a bit of a Saturday stroll and by the time the light was fading on an early January afternoon it had metamorphosed into a new project. As with so many of my little excursions it was unplanned but that is the way I like to do things. Let me tell you about it. Continue reading “A Saturday stroll goes large – Jubilee Greenway 1.”

The only Way is Essex – the slightly easier way.

I do hope you have come to this page by way of the previous entry where I walked the first section of the Essex Way from Epping to Ongar, or rather I didn’t exactly walk it. I had set out to do so, become completely lost before I had walked 50 yards, trespassed on private land and a railway line and nearly got killed on an unlit busy A road. There you are, you don’t need to read it now but I do hope you do if you haven’t already as it is an object lesson in how not to undertake a hike. This entry is not exactly textbook rambling but it is a whole lot better than the previous effort. Continue reading “The only Way is Essex – the slightly easier way.”

The only Way is Essex – the hard way.

Hello again and welcome back or a fresh welcome to you if you have not read any of my pages before.

In the last couple of entries I walked the Wandle Trail which follows the course of the river of that name in South London from Wandsworth, where it empties into the Thames, to one of it’s two sources at the rather picturesque Carshalton Ponds. It is a distance of about nine or ten miles (depending on which website you read) and had taken me two days which doesn’t sound like much and indeed it isn’t compared to the distances I did in my youth. Without wishing to bore my regular readers, the brief story is that I had been hospitalised in the latter part of 2019 and the medicos had told me to take plenty of exercise.

Due to a bad back and various other factors, the most telling of which is advancing old age, a lot of forms of strenuous physical activity are out and so I decided to do a lot of walking which I love and had done regularly anyway. I was on the hunt for other delineated paths to tackle and found the Essex Way, an 81 mile way-marked long-distance footpath which runs from Epping on the outskirts of London to Harwich on the coast. Continue reading “The only Way is Essex – the hard way.”

Wandering the Wandle 2.

If you are reading this having read my previous post then I thank you and promise this one is a bit better. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t exactly a riveting read but I was working with some pretty average source material. If you are reading this without having read the previous entry and wonder what exactly I am on about I shall explain.

My previous post was about my first day on the Wandle Trail in South London which is supposedly a signed path following the River Wandle. What that walk had actually entailed was a day of trudging through industrial and residential areas with very little of interest to see. If the path was way-marked at all, which it frequently wasn’t, the signs had no sense of cohesion and many of them featured a URL address which leads to a potentially dangerous Chinese (?) website. The weather had been pretty abysmal and it really had not been a great day out. Continue reading “Wandering the Wandle 2.”

Bye bye Berwick.

I woke in my room in the Castle Hotel on the morning of Wednesday 6th October 2019 in the knowledge that the next bed I slept in would probably be my own in London some 350 miles more or less due South.

After the events of the previous morning I had decided to skip breakfast, tasty as it was, as I would have had to have awoken at about 0600 to allow my slightly battered gastro-intestinal system time to get going and do it justice. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of decent options for a bite to eat round the town. Continue reading “Bye bye Berwick.”