North Downs & the M25: We had our elder son staying with us over the Christmas break and by the 29th the trains in our area were almost working normally and we decided to have a walk on the North Downs.
I didn’t write a lot about it on-line, though some of the pictures have captions, but here is the complete text from My London Diary other than those.
A couple of days later we took a walk on the North Downs at Woldingham. It was pretty enough, but for much of the walk we could hear and see the M25.
Though we were walking along rather less busy roads – the sign here says ‘Public Bridleway. No Four Wheel Vehicular Access.’
Wikipedia begins its entry on the village with “Woldingham is a village and civil parish high on the North Downs between Oxted and Warlingham in Surrey, England, within the M25, 17.5 miles (28.2 km) southeast of London.”
Which isn’t a great deal of help to those of us who have only the vaguest idea of where Oxted and Warlingham are, but this is a part of what I think of as “deepest Surrey“, a few miles out past Croydon. We live in a very different part of the county with few large houses and virtually free of horses and on the other side of the Thames which doesn’t really belong in the county – and until the 1960s was Middlesex, the county which once included London and our town is still a part of it.
This year today engineering work on the railway means there would be no way to get to Woldingham by train, but back in 2007 – and at normal times of the year now – it’s a relatively short journey, with a change at Clapham Junction we could be there in around an hour and a quarter. So even with the short December days there would still be plenty of time to walk around ten or twelve miles before it gets dark and be home in time for dinner.
I can’t remember the route we took, but this was a circular walk from Woldingham station Both the first and last pictures I made that day were at Church Farm, just a quarter of a mile south from the station. It’s probably not a walk I would recommend unless for some reason this section of the M25 was closed, as almost everywhere you can hear the noise of the traffic along it.
It’s probably not a walk I would recommend unless for some reason this section of the M25 was closed, as almost everywhere you can hear the noise of the traffic along it. There seemed to be some long traffic jams, with cars moving hardly any faster than us.
The final picture I made on the walk. More on My London Diary at North Downs & M25.
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