Long walk Sunday...

 Well, long-ISH anyway - at just over 8 miles this one was far from our longest effort, but definitely racks up as one of the nicest, I think! 

Like so many people, we’re starting to find it a bit of a challenge to come up with anywhere different to walk now - having spent very nearly a year all bar the 4 weeks we’ve spent in the Hebrides having a LOT of time to walk locally, we had rather begun to feel that we’d explored just about everywhere we could around the area, and quite a lot of it many times, too!  With another month at least before we’re going to be going anywhere new, we turned to the trusty OS Maps app for inspiration again, and MrEH suggested that we headed out on a path that I’d found on one of my solo walks a few weeks ago. 

Out through Old Harlow and into Harlowbury - that’s the Harlowbury Chapel above, a scheduled ancient monument no less, and dating back to 1180 it is, by some way, Harlow’s oldest building. There’s no access to the chapel now sadly, other than on occasional open days, but it’s quite nice just to walk past. 

On then and initially through a new housing development which sadly has played havoc with the footpaths  - the developers having seemingly closed quite a lot of them with no signage and no diversions, we had to backtrack and eventually resort to following a road to a completely different to the one we had planned to use, but thankfully did find that one had been restored and were soon alongside the wonderful Gibberd Garden - the former home of our inspired Town Planner and home of rather a lot of his extensive sculpture collection some of which is in plain sight as you walk by - it’s most entertaining to be walking along a lovely lane and suddenly spot a huge pair of stone columns rising up to your right, or a 20th Century polished steel effort of wonderful sweeping curves... The garden is also the home of our local beer festival in normal times - an event which also gives you admission to the gardens themselves, a lovely treat! 

The path then continues down towards the railway line - and gets quite muddy in places - but amusingly continues straight under this fallen tree (there’s plenty of room to pass beneath!) before getting to the bridge - where for a moment we thought flooding was going to cause a problem, but nope, someone had a solution to that...

Yes, that is a sort of causeway of fallen branches and lengths of old tubing, and yes, back beyond it that is a line of blocks that have been placed as sort of stepping stones to enable you to pass through without getting your feet wet! 

By this stage the sun had largely retreated in exchange for these gorgeous clouds, and it was starting to feel quite chilly, but not enough so that when we realised a little diversion across a field using an obvious and well trodden path would bring us to the river and the option to use the towpath for part of our return towards home. 

And once there we were rewarded with first the reflection of those clouds on the water, and second a nice chat with a couple litterpicking alongside the path - they’d already got three bags pretty much full and sadly this is just one of many times they’ve been out and gathered a similar amount. 

Back through Old Harlow and this lovely yarn bombing had appeared since we passed by earlier! I’ll be keeping my eye out for any more of these appearing now - SO bright and cheerful! Maybe that’s something I could use my elementary crochet skills for? 

Robyn