Day: 044
Date: Thursday, 14 July 2022
Start: Penkridge
Finish: Ironbridge
Daily Kilometres: 36
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1251
Weather: Cool to warm, breezy at times and partly sunny.
Accommodation: Hotel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Egg mayonnaise sandwiches
Lunch: Tuna mayonnaise sandwich/Chcken Tikka mayonnaise sandwich
Dinner: Fish & chips/Kebab, salad & chips, icecream.
Aches: Dave - a few niggles. Julie - nothing to report.
Highlight: We passed some beautiful fields of flowers today along with plenty of wildflowers.
Lowlight: Not a big deal, but at one point we found ourselves on the wrong side of a hedgerow while trying to follow a field path and had to crash through brambles and nettles to get to the right place. Ouch!
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
Knowing we had a fairly long day, we rose early and, after buying supplies at a convenience store, left Penkridge around 6:00am (having passed up another included hotel breakfast). It was cool and the backroads and lanes were quiet as we headed westward with the sun rising behind us. Our packs felt a little lighter since yesterday we mailed back items we will no longer need to a friend in London, from whom we will pick them up before flying back to Australia. Mostly it was warmer clothing, but we also sent our emergency bivvy sacks now that we have booked all of our accommodation through to Land’s End. Hope neither of us gets injured or sick!
Our morning route followed a series of roads and a few field paths through low rolling rural country, much of it devoted to grain crops, some of which our path directly crossed. We always feel like trespassers when wading through crops like this, but we are on official public footpaths and generally there is a narrow trail to follow. We also had a few encounters with electric fences today, both getting unexpected mild shocks, but no damage done.
We stopped around 9:00am and ate breakfast on a picnic table next to a village hall in the sun. Very pleasant. The rest of the morning’s travels also involved backroads and field paths, but also some shady old forests. A highlight (see above) was the fields of flowers we passed by.
Later we found another good spot, this time for lunch, on a bench by a path near a village, though a cool wind blew making both of us add some clothing layers. However, we soon warmed up once we started walking again and the sun reappeared.
The last part of the day took us through some more lovely old forest and then down to Ironbridge Gorge at the upper reaches of the Severn River and the old industrial villages of Coalport and Ironbridge. There were reminders of the Industrial Revolution in terms of the old factories, the Hay Inclined Plane (a set of steep railroad tracks used to raise/lower floating loads 63 metres between the Severn River and the Shropshire Canal), and the Iron Bridge, a cast iron bridge, the first of its kind, opened in 1781 and still in use. All very touristy now (more ice-cream shops than Terrigal!), but great to see so much history being preserved and/or carefully re-purposed.
We reached our hotel in Ironbridge at 3:30pm and checked in, having had yet another good day.
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