South Downs Way days 7 and 8 - East Meon to Winchester

[nigheandonn]

Friday - East Meon to Warnford

East Meon seemed to me probably the prettiest of the villages I'd passed through, simply because it was built with its back to a hill - I hadn't realised how much I'd been missing that! But it really was nice, even dug up for roadworks - church at the top, a nice selection of houses, severely attractive Georgian as well as chocolate box pretty, tamed stream in a kind of moat along the main street.

I'd had a luxurious breakfast, too - I always hope to meet one place along the way which does smoked salmon and scrambled eggs - and I'd been able to dry everything out with only the slight distraction of a blueberry eruption from my bag as I unpacked. But I was still tired, and my feet were suffering - earlier in the trip they'd been sore on the inside, swollen in the heat and battered by hard paths, but now wet weather and wet socks had made them sore on the outside, rubbed and generally tender - and I'd lost my tablet charger somewhere along the way and was reduced to reading a paper book not to waste the battery that was left!

Stream in a moat

Despite the forecast for constant rain, it was dry if not very bright as I walked back out of the village - not that that really surprised me, as it had rained quite a lot on days forecast to be completely dry.

Houses against the hill

I'd come quite a long way off the route and it felt like a long way back, up to a track running along the top of the hill.

Back on track

After the road junction I was passing buildings - mostly new houses, but some which had once been the Navy signalling training base HMS Mercury, and were now something called a Sustainability Centre (and the hostel where I hadn't been able to get a bed).

HMS Mercury

The road I was on led along to Old Winchester Hill, which I was also heading for, but given the ways of long distance paths it should have been no surprise to turn off to the north, along another farm track and the ridge of a little hill, where it began to rain very gently just at the time the forecast had said the rain would become heavy.

Downhill I crossed a tiny road by a little cluster of houses and went on to a sharp left hand turn where I was almost back in East Meon, then back down to the road past a huge barn - I'd been wrong to doubt the rain, because it was on as hard as ever now, bouncing off the road.

Wet road

A sign offering hot drinks and refreshments was very welcome - it turned out to be self service in the building of a fishery, whatever that may be, with maps and old pictures to look at inside and the river to look at from a sheltered porch.

Meon fisheries

The rain wasn't showing much sign of easing, but I had to head on - the cows in the farm seemed to feel exactly the same way about the rain as I did, only they didn't have anywhere to go.

Cows in the rain

I was heading for a parallel road up above, slanting up the steep slope in between as the rain finally began to ease - light rain can last forever, of course, but this always stayed really heavy for a bit longer than I expected heavy rain to hold out.

Slanting uphill

Up on the road I had views into the next valley for the first time - the route wandered off onto a (soggy) parallel path, but I tried that and decided I preferred the road, before being channeled off properly onto a track labelled for the hillfort.

It was a bit confusing up here because the map showed an alternative path along the top of the hill which didn't exist on the ground - no way shown out the far end. The hillfort was an impressive size, but it was a bit big to take in all at once.

OId Winchester Hill

I ended up back where I'd come in, to follow the path round three corners avoiding the fort, and pass some enthusiastic herding of sheep to an odd place where my path led down one side of a hedge and a completely different footpath led down the other side of it.

This path was muddy from the start but further down it was so deep in mud that it was impossible to walk on, and I made a strategic escape into the edge of the field, and out again further down as the path angled along the other side to an old railway line.

Muddy paths

The path split here - cyclists off along the line of the old track, walkers down steps onto a muddy but walkable path down to where the river seemed to be spreading well over its banks.

River Meon

I'd come as far as I was going, apart from a mile or so up the road to Warnford, but it was an awful mile, with the pavement fizzling out almost straight away to leave busy road and a soft verge which a tractor or something had turned into lumps.

All my short day had achieved in the end was an arrival in the depressing late afternoon, too late to walk up to West Meon and get a bus to Winchester or Petersfield to go shopping, and technically too early for check in, and just as it started to rain again. Fortunately there was someone on duty in the apparently empty pub, and I was allowed to go up to my room, where I remembered that I had forgotten to eat any lunch and discovered that I had a bath, where I spent part of the time before dinner because it seemed like my only chance of ever feeling warm again - although food may also have helped!

Saturday - Warnford to Winchester
There's always a day on a long walk when everything goes wrong, and this walk seemed to have saved it up for the end - along with being generally sore and tired and slow and fretting a bit about the charger, because there were things I wanted to look up, and things I just wanted to read and write and do.

I didn't want to walk back down the main road to get back on track, so took a minor road in the other direction to where it crossed the railway line path further up, only to find that it crossed well above it, with no apparent way down. So I had to go further along, round by a farm track and another road, and followed by a group of teenagers playing unpleasant music out loud, to follow the muddy path again to the road at Exton.

I wanted to wander round the three conjoined villages a bit, following the road through Exton past the church to where the SDW turned off, and back past a pub oddly named The Shoe to cross the main road onto the back road through Corhampton into Meonstoke, which had a church with an odd decorative wooden tower.

Meonstoke church

Corhampton church was very different, a tiny ancient thing with a Saxon sundial on the outer wall and a yew tree in the churchyard almost as big as itself.

Old yew at Corhampton church

I'd been up to the shop, and now made my way back to the junction and took what I thought was the road back to Exton, except that instead of leading back into houses it led away from them - I'd somehow got the junctions muddled, helped by the position of the shop being marked very ambiguously on the map, so that I thought it was up a side road. So another go, and this time I decided to take the footpath straight to the back roads in Exton, only to have great trouble finding the start.

So I'd used up a lot of time and frustation by the time I was on the oddly straight footpath uphill, passing dozens of walkers with labels on their backs coming the other way, but the frustration wore off as I got going, and I'd bought some lovely chocolate brownie to eat on the first hill.

I'd climbed and passed quite a few Beacon Hills along the way, but this was the first to actually have a beacon on it, a modern version from the queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Beacon on Beacon Hill

These were not particularly wild or empty hills, with roads running all over the tops of the them, although the SDW route stuck to farm tracks where it could.

Green lanes

A few odd bumps in a field were the only remains of the medieval village of Lomer, mentioned in the Domesday book but abandoned a few hundred years later.

Lomer village

Two farms, a big one with a slightly confusing track junction and one called Wind Farm, although it wasn't, and then onto a little path by the road, past a junction running off downhill and on to a crossroads with a middle-of-nowhere pub with desolate looking walkers sitting outside - I'd thought about stopping for lunch, but I was out of the habit of being hungry, and I wasn't paying £8 for a sandwich from a place that looked like it had closed down 20 years ago and had a Tory sign in its garden.

So downhill on something that looked like a track on the map and a road on the ground, passing a man with a dog that wasn't paying attention, and meeting a group of American walkers setting out for Eastbourne, to another big farm diversified into storage and camping.

The farm on the far side of the road had the first multilingual gate I'd ever met, although I'm used to the 'drive on the left' tourist road signs - the gate was shut, so it must have been working.

Multilingual gate

The path led down one side of a field and turned almost back on itself to head up the other, but a sensible shortcut cut off the corner. Beyind that a farm marked in the valley turned out only to be a barn, and a green hawthorn lined path led up to a track crossing another minor road - everything here was called Something Down, but it was all gently rolling farmland.

A place called Temple Valley had no obvious sign of a temple, but did have an odd patch of woodland which I suppose could be used for occult purposes - the route made a right angled turn around it and into woodland, very pretty for a change although the path was kept severely contained.

Temple valley

Cheesefoot Head was a bit of a muddle, because the trig point is shown on the map as a viewpoint, but on the ground it's all fenced off with barbed wire, and the OS have, well, less reason to lie about it. Apart from that it's a great natural amphitheatre where Eisenhower made speeches before D-day and some kind of festival happens now, with a good view from the road but nowhere in particular to stop.

Cheesefoot Head

Winchester suddenly came into view from halfway down the next hill, sprawling out of the far side of its valley with the near side hidden.

First sight of Winchester

A sharp turn where a red flag might have been flying but wasn't brought me into the last village, Chilcomb, still more rural rather than suburban, although there was some kind of science park by the main road to the north. According to the guide book there was on odd granary raised on stones in one of the gardens, but as I was looking over a slightly overgrown hedge to try to see it a lady popped up from right behind the hedge where she'd been gardening - I'm not sure if she'd known I was there either, but she was very nice about it and obviously used to walkers wandering past!

Chilcomb

A long straight path led unexcitingly towards Winchester, and I really was getting to the stage of just hoping for the end - not glad to meet the M3, but glad to find a sign on the footbridge which told me it was only a mile to the end, even if it did seem possibly optimistic.

Nearly the end

Crossing the M3

A path along the backs of houses led to a long dull downhill road which brought me almost to the centre of town, but at that point the path seemed to decide that it was making things too easy - instead of heading straight into town I had to take a road leading down towards the river, and then instead of crossing by a footbridge I had to turn left away from the town - passing some very pretty coloured houses, to be fair - to cross the river further along and turn back, past a very fancy house belonging to a bishop to follow the river again to the City Mill and the END - not that there's very much to mark it.

City Mill

Winchester is one of those places where I seem to have just spent my time going round and round - I'd arrived really too late for shopping, just before 6 as the shops were closing, but wandered about hopelessly for a while anyway, feeling used up and getting mildly lost. But it was quite a nice place - I liked the statue and the Guildhall and the river as I came in, and there were some nice houses and an odd monument which seemed to be about a celebration held by aliens, and after a while I sorted myself out and decided that the things I really wanted to look at, sore feet or not, were the Peninsular barracks and the cathedral, so I did.

Winchester cathedral

All that was left for me to do was check the times of the buses to Alton - I was staying at the Travelodge at Four Marks - and find some dinner, which I did in a slightly too posh pub by the river.

Four Marks was a strange long place, but the hotel was far more comfortable then I expected and the boy on the desk lent me a charger from the lost property, and I walked down to the other end of the village to buy real milk for tea and some pudding, and had a small feast.

[Mal Grey]

Well done on completing the SDW.

I'm still not entirely convinced that extending it to Winchester a few decades back was actually a good idea (It used to finish/start at Buriton), it seems to me that the last day or so isn't very Downy!