Date: Location: Walk Leader: Participants: Distance: Parking: Lunch: | 12th November 2014 New Forest Brokenhurst Not really Ray, Peter, Rob 8 miles Beside Balmer Lawn Hotel Queens Head Burley ★★ |
The weather forecast looked dire and we decided that it would be a good plan to walk around some of the New Forest cycle tracks. These are normally pretty good underfoot even when the forest itself is saturated.
This turned out to be a good decision. Parts of the forest were indeed very wet.
We were very lucky with the weather and managed to escape the rain until the last couple of miles.
The walk was somewhat unplanned and we made joint decisions at various turning points. We set off through Pignal Inclosure towards Parkhill inclosure on the cycle track but as it looked reasonable dry we took one of the forest paths for some variety and were pleasantly surprised to find it passable. We diverted from the cycle paths in a couple of other places and although it was "sploshy" in parts it was not too bad.
The walk ended up at a nice round 8 miles.
We thought to go to the Sir Walter Tyrrell for lunch. We did not fancy crossing the A 35 so took the back route from Woodlands. Unfortunately there was a very large volume of water running though the ford and it looked rather deep so we reversed and ended up at The Queens Head in Burley where we all enjoyed the gammon egg and chips for £6.99.