South Downs Day 4: East Meon to Petersfield

Another beautiful day.  I explored the gardens around our pig shed before being treated to the full-english fried experience.  I try to be polite about it, but really.  No one can possibly eat that much.  

I tried my best to knock off some of the mud off my boots.  It is the heavy, thick clay mud that picks up gravel.  Pretty soon, you are hauling around cement bricks on your feet.

Back on the trail, with so much pretty green everything.

And sheep, of course.  These might be Shetlands?  Or maybe Jacobs.

They were smaller, and more woolly looking (literally!) than the other sheep we've seen.

There was quite a bit of road-side walking on this day, which is never a favorite thing.  The road did take us past a cafe and nature center called the Sustainability Center, so we stopped to check it out.

They had beautiful gardens and a leech field and some interesting symbiotic plantings, but nothing really prepared us for what we saw next.

They have a natural burial ground!

Instead of being pumped filled with formaldehyde and put in an airtight casket, advocates of Natural Burials get buried in wicker caskets where they can easily become part of the life cycle of the forest.  They had lovely little forest paths with grave sites marked simply with sticks and stones, and the forest is allowed to retake anything it needs, and there were benches where relatives could visit.  It was somber, but the forest was far more beautiful than any manicured cemetery I've ever seen.  It's an interesting idea.  I'd be curious to see if this catches on in more places.  It was a little morbid, but I found it touching and beautiful.

There was also a tap for hikers here.  These are always welcome, especially on such bright, hot days.

The great thing about hiking is that you can hike all morning, and then come to a road intersection and realize that if you had taken the road, you'd only be out two miles.  Trails don't always take the fasted route.

You can see the cute little church tucked into the downs at East Meon:

This wasn't a very long day of hiking anyway (well, in theory...) and we soon crested the hill overlooking the A3 motorway in Queen Elizabeth Country Park.  We were supposed to branch off the trail here and walk from Bruiton the three miles north to Petersfield, but we left the trail a bit earlier than we were supposed to and ended up being stuck on the wrong side of the A3 with no way to cross it.

We ended up walking back up the hill, and picking up some public footpaths down the north side of the hill, which seemed to solve the problem of cutting down our road-walking miles.

Which would have been fine, except we hit a point where the footpath didn't seem very often used.  It appeared on the map, we would see an occasional signpost.  We could see where we would end up, but the trail was almost completely overgrown.

The buzzards started circling.

Also, deep in the woods, there was a very tall fenced enclosure electrified with a car battery.  It could only mean one thing: someone was keeping velociraptors as pets.  

After crashing through some farmland and some forest and losing the footpath several times, we found a farmer who put us back on the right track again.  See what I mean?:

That's the trail!  It was chin-high and choked with weeds and filled with thorns and stinging nettles, with the superhighway running right next to you- no one had walked here in a while.  Once again hiking in capri cargos is a bad idea.  My legs were scratched and on fire.  Those last three miles ended up taking us much longer than they should have.  Taken the beaten path through town would have been a much more pleasant option.

Finally, we hit the road and a place where we could cross under the busy highway, and then we booked it into Petersfield.  We approached the train station just as the road gates began to close and the train pulled in right as our feet touched the platform, which was quite serendipitous as it didn't look like there was a pub nearby to kill an hour if we had to wait for the next.

It was a good day of hiking, aside from that nasty bit at the end.  We did the "worst" part of the Southdowns: passing industrial farms, a tank and quad-bike track, a military firing range and doing a fair bit of road-side walking.

The next leg promised to be more lovely hills and sweeping views.   I love this trail so much.

South Downs Trail Day 3: Winchester to East Meon

It might take a while, but I'm slowly chipping away at the South Downs trail on the weekends, depending if I can find accommodation on Saturday nights within a few miles of the trail.  The way the trail is set up, you can take a train in, walk for two days and come to another rail line to take you back to London.  The North Downs trail is a bit more connected: you can walk that one, with some planning, as day-hikes, but the South Downs is a bit more out of the way, and I like that.  

I started this hike early in the morning in Winchester, where the trail officially starts.  Despite warnings of doom and gloom and hail storms, it was a little soggy to start, but not bad. 

Winchester itself is slightly adorable, with beautiful old buildings and a Saturday morning market.

It also had a very famous Cathedral.  It's very low, with no huge bell tower.  In fact, I almost walked right past it as you can't really see it from afar like most Cathedrals.

You have to walk through Winchester to get to the trail head, so I stopped to look at some of the sights: ruined castles, ancient walls, beautiful cottages.

 Oh!  And the house where Jane Austen died.

She's buried in the Cathedral, of course.  I would have gone in but we were in for a loooong day of walking.

 Finally!  The trailhead.  Apparently, it considers the walk you had through Winchester your first mile, since the signpost starts at 99.

You have to cross a roaring superhighway via bridge, and then you are off into relative quiet.

Past a military training zone, which wasn't active on this day.

Looking back at Winchester...you can barely make out the Cathedral!  It's that low.

 The first part of this trail isn't known for being the best section.  It's mostly rolling farmland, with a few villages here and there and some country roads to dart across.  You walk across this for miles until you start hitting the real hills.

I kept hearing the loud buzz of quad bikes in the nearby woods, but something more ominous as well:

Seriously!  Tanks.  There was a whole course set up.  You can apparently learn to drive a tank at this place.

Once the tank and quad bike center was behind, the trail got better.

It was great birdwatching: I saw hawks, buzzards and kestrels all over the hillsides, and the woods were filled with song birds: wrens, chaffinches, goldfinches, robins, linnets, dunnocks and black caps.

Around mid-day, we hit Beacon Hill, and the trail started getting more South-Downsy, with big, sweeping hills and views.

 Far off, you can see the Isle of Wright on the horizon, along with the New Forest park in the south.  You could also see Portsmouth and Southhampton further away on the coast.

The day ended up being beautiful, and although the trail was quite muddy in places, it was perfect hiking.  

We hit the town of Exton about 12 miles in.  It was supposedly a great place to spend your first night, but I couldn't find accommodation there, so we had to keep walking to the next junction a few more miles down the trail.

Through more mud, and then a climb over the next big hump of Winchester Hill.  The fields were full of wildflowers and the hillsides dotted with sheep.

There is a large bronze-age fort and dwellings on the top of this hill, and for good reason.  You could see to the sea, and the surrounding hillsides.  There's no way to sneak up this hill.  All that remains of it is a big earth wall and ditch and some scattered rocks.

The views in the late-afternoon sun were spectacular.

Finally, after about 80 runners passed us who were full-out running and doing the entire 100 miles trail as a relay race, we started going down into another valley to the tiny hamlet of East Meon to our accommodation.  There, past a lazy river and a cow farm, we found our little renovated pig shed quite cozy.

We covered all of 18 miles, which took us most of 9 hours to complete (with an hour break for lunch).  The shed owners were kind enough to drive us the mile into town for dinner at the only pub in town, which was ancient and friendly, and next to the 12th century church with the downs rearing up behind it.  The town seemed lovely, and we walked back to the shed in the dark in our flip-flops afterwards, and slept like rocks.