Day: 047
Date: Sunday, 17 July 2022
Start: Church Stretton
Finish: Knighton
Daily Kilometres: 35
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1318
Weather: Warm to very warm and mostly sunny.
Accommodation: AirBnB
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Ham & egg sandwiches
Lunch: Chicken & stuffing sandwich/chicken & bacon pasta.
Dinner: Savoury mince, rice and vegetables, apple turnovers and custard.
Aches: Dave - still a few niggles. Julie - nothing she is owning up to.
Highlight: Amongst many moments on a good day, making our way on a narrow path through a chest-high field of wheat waving synchronously in the breeze, like waves on the ocean, was memorable for two town-dwellers.
Lowlight: We had a few stretches of path which were very overgrown with nettles and brambles that left us scratched and stung. But, often, these are paths that link excellent trails, so we’re not complaining too much.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We made an early start (6:00am) on a day forecast to be quite warm, in the hope that we could reach our destination, Knighton, by mid-afternoon. As it turned out, we were a bit later than that, but no complaints.
Our plan was to use our navigation app to plot a way back from Church Stretton to the guidebook route and this worked out well. The first hour was walking along a main road, but there was a footpath for some of it, and there was little traffic at that hour on a Sunday anyway.
We left the main road at the hamlet of Marshbrook and then followed a series of field paths of varying quality, but mostly good, across pleasant undulating rural countryside that is part of the Shropshire Hills “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” and then down to the lovely little historic village of Wistanstow.
After some more paths, one of them more of a dump site for a few hundred metres, and some backroads, we rejoined the guidebook route near the hamlet of Rowton around 9:30am and half an hour later we finally found a comfortable spot to stop and have breakfast. We like benches or picnic tables best, but rarely find them when we want them. Otherwise, something to lean our packs up against as backrests and some soft grass or other vegetation to sit on. In this case, we found a farm gate with grass in front, but it was on a crossroads and there seemed to be a steady stream of locals passing through and giving us the eye.
The terrain became hillier after breakfast and the views more spectacular. After the next long climb through a welcome shady forest and then a horror stretch of brambles and nettles, we found a lovely place for lunch in a little wood and could have stayed there all afternoon.
But, Knighton beckoned and we descended to the next valley where we got in trouble from one farmer for walking down her “private drive” even though we were pretty sure we were following a marked public footpath. Then, in contrast, a few minutes later an elderly woman went out of her way to open a big gate as we passed through her farm and asked whether we needed any water. The next climb took us high onto moorland on Stow Hill and then we had a long descent into Knighton, made longer by a few navigational mishaps and some slow trail.
We reached our AirBnB, which is metres from the Welsh border in Knighton, around 4:00pm, glad that a warm day was over, but having enjoyed the walk very much. Julie later crossed the border into Wales and the village to buy food and drink for dinner and we settled in for a warm evening.
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