Day: 045
Date: Friday, 15 July 2022
Start: Ironbridge
Finish: Church Stretton
Daily Kilometres: 32
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1283
Weather: Cool early, then mild, breezy and partly sunny.
Accommodation: AirBnB
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Ham & egg sandwiches
Lunch: Cheese & ham sandwich/Cheese, ham & coleslaw sandwich
Dinner: Burger & chips, icecream
Aches: Dave - still a few niggles. Julie - nada.
Highlight: We were following the route suggested by our navigation app after breakfast and expected it to take us via the usual field paths and country lanes to Church Stretton, our destination for the day. And this was the case until the last six kilometres of the day when, from the very attractive old village of Cardington, it guided us between the beautiful Hope Bowdler and Willstone Hills on the left and the impressive Caer Caradoc on the right. It was like being back in the Yorkshire Dales for a short while.
Lowlight: None really.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We made another early start, sneaking out of our hotel at 6:00am and walking back and across the Iron Bridge (no tourists, or anybody else, around) to the south side of the River Severn. Our guidebook route then climbed steadily through dense and peaceful woodland, apart from the occasional cooing of doves and twitter of smaller birds, eventually emerging into some farmland. The farm paths were generally easy to follow and the walking pleasant to the historic village of Much Wenlock where we arrived around 8:00am and bought supplies for the day at the village store, kicking ourselves when we passed a bakery a short distance later (though we picked up a couple of “pains au chocolat” to eat while walking as compensation).
From there we climbed steadily up onto Wenlock Edge, a forested limestone escarpment, and followed that westwards. It was more pleasant woodland walking, though it only provided occasional vistas out over rural Shropshire to the north.
We stopped for a late breakfast by the trail at 9:30am and decided to leave the guidebook route and use our navigation app to plot the most direct route to Church Stretton where we had an AirBnB booked for two nights. It proved to be a good choice, following rural lanes with negligible traffic and passing through very old hamlets with Tudor-period houses.
After lunch on a bench in the churchyard of the historic village of Cardington, the last stretch for the day climbed through some attractive hill country (see above) on an old cart track, before descending to the pretty village of Church Stretton. We arrived at our AirBnB, which is excellent, at 3:00pm and are looking forward to a day off tomorrow (for Dave) and a trail half-marathon race for Julie in the Shropshire Hills which starts just a kilometre from where we are staying.
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