Ridgeway: Day 6

• Start: The Fat Fox, Watlington
• Finish: The Red Lion, Longwich
• Walking Distance: 24km
• Total Time: 8 hours
• Drugs: Ibuprofen 12 tablets, Paracetamol 2 tablets

Breakfast at the Fat Fox was perfectly nice, if a little pedestrian compared to recent days. We both had eggs and bacon.

Our host Rob was a pleasant young man, though clearly stressed. He and his partner had taken over the pub during lockdown and were trying to make a success of it, despite the various setbacks of the current situation.

Today’s route is slightly shorter than recent days and also means that we leave Oxfordshire behind and cross into Buckinghamshire. We have now moved onto the last section of the map, and can now see, on the map, Ivinghoe Beacon and the finish line!

The path wends itself in a vaguely north easterly direction for most of the morning. It is wide, with verges thronged with pretty wild flowers, but the high hedges mean we don’t get much of a glimpse of the wider landscape, in particular the scarp of the Chilterns on our right. The odd farm gateway provides a glimpse.

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We take a tea and painkiller break after around 7km in a field just off the route, with lovely views. My blisters are quite bad.

Today has been all about nature reserves. In total we passed through three along the route, with abundant wildflowers and insects and the most amazing butterflies. Sadly, neither of us are good wildlife photographers, we don’t have the patience to wait for the right picture and are far too slow to whip our phones out when we do see one! So, we opted to take pictures of the signboards instead, as they stay still!

The only significant climb today, Lodge Hill, came within the last 10km (naturally), though the views from the top were definitely worth the climb.

When we reached the bottom of the descent, we met a group of young lads doing the DoE. They were doing the Chiltern way and had missed their turning. We helped them to figure out where they were (is that cheating?) and they were left with a decision of either re-tracing their steps or going up the hill we had just descended. We told them the hill wasn’t that bad (?!?) and they decided to go for it. As we moved on, we realised that retracing their steps was easy and totally flat, but they are young and experience is a wonderful thing.

😃😃😃

Entering Prince’s Risborough we discovered ‘the pudding stone’.

The guide book and t’Internet say that this is a ‘naturally occurring conglomerate sedimentary rock that were frequently used as way markers by pre-historic man’ . Craig says it is a bit of 1970’s concrete that someone has conned the locals into believing is important! Who is right?

When we got to Prince’s Risborough we stopped for coffee at Costa, which felt almost normal! From there, we only had a few km to walk to our accommodation and so assuming that it would all be on pavement, I decided that as my toes were in danger of going black and falling off, to ditch the walking boots. We set off to walk to the pub. The route started out fairly sane, along cobbled lanes past the church and across a housing estate, but then we entered fields had to negotiate several very rickety styles, walk across a log over a stagnant stream! and then finally a rather precarious wooden bridge!

However, we did eventually get to the Red Lion, which is a proper local pub. The room is clean, though a bit dated. Tea was tasty but not refined. I had the chicken pie and Craig the mongolian beef.

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We also had a bottle of Romanian red wine, which lent a certain excitement to the meal!. The pub was really busy and in the corner there were a bunch of old men playing dominos, exactly what a real local ought to be!

One of Craig’s colleagues, who has been reading this blog, introduced us to the concept of type II fun! Having googled this and found this amazing article which explains it brilliantly, I think we have to concur that this is what we are currently experiencing, at least in part 😀

Tomorrow we will be starting early, it is the longest and hilliest day and we also have an important dinner appointment at 6:45pm, so we need to get a shift on. It is Craig’s 48th birthday tomorrow and we will be celebrating this at Pendley Manor, in their award winning restaurant. 12 months ago, Craig had just started his chemo treatment and so on his 47th birthday he just felt incredibly awful. I am hoping that whatever tomorrow throws at us it cannot possibly be worse than that!