Day: 056
Date: Tuesday, 26 July 2022
Start: Cheddar
Finish: Bridgwater
Daily Kilometres: 30
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1560
Weather: Mild to warm and mostly sunny.
Accommodation: Hotel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Egg mayonnaise sandwiches
Lunch: Tuna & sweetcorn sandwich/Beef & pickle sandwich.
Dinner: Pizza, trifle.
Aches: Dave - a few niggles and a heel blister. Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: None really
Lowlight: We had a few kilometres of walking along busy roads with little or no verge, today, and it’s not much fun, especially with trucks and other traffic coming from both directions at once.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We left the hostel at 7:00am and stopped by a small grocery (opened at 7) on our way out of Cheddar to buy supplies for the day. At first we followed the Cheddar Yeo, a small river bordered by levee banks on a beautiful mild sunny morning. It was a pleasure to be walking through the countryside on such a morning.
The guidebook hadn’t been particularly complimentary about today’s walk, so we followed a route that blended the guidebook route and suggestions from our navigation app. We were keen to avoid the little-used rough and overgrown field paths if there was a quiet road alternative, especially if it saved some distance.
For most of the day, we were crossing what had once been marshes/swamp, and we saw a lot of drainage channels. The guidebook said that they first began draining the marshes 1,500 years ago, and while the land is now dry and productive, channels and levees were everywhere.
Of course, this meant much of the land was flat and the scenery unremarkable with a couple of exceptions. While we were having our mid-morning breakfast, resting up against a farm gate along a minor road, a farmer came along in an ATV and suggested we move behind the gate because some cattle were coming and they would not go past us. Having encountered quite a few cattle during our hike, and having just settled down for our break, we were reluctant to move, so stayed put. The cattle did arrive, about twenty of them, herded by another ATV rider and lured forward by a guy driving a pickup and shaking a feedbag out the window. Sure enough, the cows stopped when they got to us and about ten of them just lined up along the edge of the road, a metre or two from us, and stared at us eating. For a moment there was a stalemate, but then the honking of the ATV, literally pushing a bull, broke the impasse and the herd moved on.
There were also some very pretty villages, and some higher ground, to break the flatlands, but the walking was monotonous at times. We even got our headphones and listened to something to help the time pass, which we have rarely done.
Bridgwater is a big town, and we had a few kilometres of suburbs to walk through before we reached the centre and our hotel at 3:30pm.
Not a very exciting day, but you have those.
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