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OxfordshireWalk Details: Top details: |
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The Walk:Following the previous week's bagging of eight Midlands tops in one day in a series of short walks, we fancied doing some "proper" walking today. We headed off to the Lambourne/Marlborough Downs area with the aim of doing no more than two or three tops, but getting a good walk out of each one. I'd always had a love of the area; probably heavily influenced by having grown up nearby in Chippenham. It was partly because of this that I wanted to treat these tops with respect and make decent walks out of them. For instance, we could have parked at the official car park near the top of Whitehorse Hill, but instead we parked at the pub in Woolstone at the bottom of the hill. In fact, I'd quite have liked to walk the whole section of the Ridgeway from Whitehorse Hill down to Liddington Hill, the Swindon top. Unfortunately this would have been a bit impractical as we'd agreed to meet our Dad for a circular walk at Liddington Hill, plus didn't want to have to use two cars. From Woolstone we headed east around the bottom of the hill on a muddy and deeply horse-rutted path. Talking of horses, I was looking forward to seeing the Uffington White Horse - despite having lived nearby for so much of my life, I'd never actually seen it. There was no view yet, despite looking uphill for it so often that I was in danger of tripping up! After what seemed like an eternity on this poor path, we finally turned right and headed gently uphill, crossing the B4507 at Britchcombe Farm. After this, the path got much steeper and I got very out of breath - I always seem to struggle with walking in the morning, and steep hills certainly don't help matters! I started stopping to "admire the view" (which was rather good!), and a handy excuse for stopping for a view. by the top we were both looking a little red-faced and gasping for water - it hadn't just been me that found it tough. I don't know how we'll cope with the bigger hills though!
The highest point is on the mounds of an impressive double concentric-ringed hillfort to the north of the Ridgeway. Upon the outer ring a startlingly white and geometric trig point stands sentinel, outlined against the sky. The highest point was actually close by on the inner ring. Despite being a cloudy day the views were stunning in all directions, but most especially to the north where we could see a patchwork of fields spread out for miles across the Valley of the White Horse. We also fancied that we could make out our next destination, Liddington Hill, away to the south east. There was still no view of the white horse itself though. After calling our Dad to arrange a rendezvous at the next top, Liddington Castle, we returned to the Ridgeway and then turned down Woolstone Hill to return to our car. Here we passed the official car park for the hill. It was enormous - this clearly would be a true "honeypot" in summer. Here we finally got a view of the famous Uffington White Horse and were distinctly underwhelmed. Uffington is of course the original white horse, carved into the chalk hillside thousands of years ago, and the only "stylised" one. The others spread across this region (such as the one on Cherhill) are only a few hundred years old, and are much more horse-shaped. I had been looking forward to seeing this original one, but unfortunately it was carved more into the flat top rather than the steep side of the hill, and was consequently difficult to get a good view of.
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We now turned right and made the final approach
to the hill up the far more gentle slope of the Ridgeway. We passed a
couple of horse riders and a few walkers, and started to mutter "honeypot",
but the top was surprisingly free of people.