Day: 042
Date: Tuesday, 12 July 2022
Start: Uttoxeter
Finish: Penkridge
Daily Kilometres: 34
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1215
Weather: Warm and overcast all day
Accommodation: Hotel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pastries
Lunch: Ham & egg sandwich/Bacon, egg & mayonnaise sandwich.
Dinner: Kebab & chips, icecream
Aches: Dave - a few niggles. Julie - nothing to report
Highlight: In the early afternoon we followed the Staffordshire Way across Cannock Chase, a huge park-like nature reserve. There were fern-covered hills, woodlands, streams and paths everywhere and not that many people. It felt distant from civilisation but sits amidst one of the most populated parts of England.
Lowlight: To get out of Uttoxeter, we had to walk a few kilometres along a narrow winding road with virtually no verge, busy with commuter traffic, and bordered by high hedgerows reducing visibility. It wasn’t much fun.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We left our Uttoxeter hotel soon after 7:00am, stopping in at a supermarket just after it opened on our way out of town to get breakfast supplies. It was overcast, but already warm, as we followed a main road out of town. For a while we had a footpath, but when that ended we had to negotiate a busy narrow road, frequently pressing ourselves into the bordering hedgerow to avoid vehicles (see above).
We were much happier when we turned off onto a minor road and, when peak hour had passed, we saw very little traffic for the rest of the morning. We did have some excitement when two large farm dogs came flying and snarling out of a farm entrance to greet us, but after much shouting from us, and the farmer and his wife, they eventually let us pass.
We left the minor roads behind in mid-morning and spent an hour or two, punctuated by a breakfast break under a tree, following a bridleway through the pretty rolling rural countryside and across mown fields.
In late morning, we passed through the village of Great Haywood where we bought lunch supplies from the village store before joining a scenic canal to walk the towpath for a few kilometres until we joined our guidebook route and the Staffordshire Way which we were to follow for the rest of the day.
From the canal we gently climbed into the beautiful Cannock Chase (see above) where, around 1:30pm, we found an isolated picnic table and stopped for a pleasant lunch. After more Cannock Chase trails, we emerged on the western side of the park and after some more backroads, fields and canal towpath, we reached Penkridge and our hotel around 4:30pm.
The day was perhaps easier, and certainly more scenically interesting, than we had anticipated, which was a good thing. We have a day off tomorrow, which totally coincidentally (really) happens to be Julie’s birthday.
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