2 min read

Saturday Morning Stroll

Mapledurham And Back

Shelli, Asri and Eleni went into town to do some shopping so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to head out into the wonderful South Oxfordshire countryside with the pooch.

Knowing the night before that this was the plan for the day I plotted a route out to Mapledurham and back, following paths and trails I’ve used before, making it a lot easier to just enjoy the walk instead of constantly trying to figure out where I was and where I needed to go.

We headed out the door shortly after 10am in the lovely sunshine, making our way out to Whitchurch Hill, where it promptly started to rain! It was getting pretty heavy so I gave in, dropped my pack to put on a long sleeve top, and carried on walking. Only – yes, you guessed it – for the rain to stop about 2 minutes later! Why does that always happen?!

We had a lovely walk down to Mapledurham where we sat on a bench at St. Margaret Church and had lunch; Snow sharing a cheese roll with me and having some of the water from my flask as well. Bless her.

While there we had a quick look at Mapledurham Watermill, made famous for being on the album cover of Black Sabbath’s self-title album from 1970. I couldn’t get to the exact position where the original photo was taken due to it being all fenced off, but it was good to see it at last.

Short lunch finished we hit the road again, making our way back up to Woodcote, taking a slightly less than direct route so that we’d managed to get 10 miles in.

It was the longest walk I’d been on for a while, and definitely the longest walk Snow had been on for a while, and I’m pleased to say we both did really well. That was until we got home and I carried on with things (making the video below for example) but Snow crashed out pretty much as soon as she was through the front door!

Photos

Videos

Route

If you’re interested you can download the GPX file of the plotted route. Please be aware though that the route was hand-plotted and so may not be 100% accurate.

Walk Statistics

Miles Start (HH:MM) Finish (HH:MM) Breaks (HH:MM) Walking (HH:MM) Pace (MPH)
10.11 10:09 13:22 00:15 03:08 3.23

Route Map

Elevation Details

Start Elavation (m) End Elavation (m) Max Elevation (m) Min Elevation (m) Total Climb (m) Total Descent (m)
170 172 185 42 489 -487