Today’s Chilterns walk with my father Bill was a baptism of mud. My new boots got covered in the stuff. The early April day north-west of London was mostly sunny, but quite cold and windy. It was warm out of the wind, but when we came to an exposed section of the path, the howling wind made it feel very cold.
We started out from Great Missenden station, which is on the rail line from Marylebone Station in London, and followed a series of public paths through the rolling hills east to the neighbouring town of Amersham. To find the route, we used a guide of country walks around London.
Being early April, the ground was quite muddy in places, and had been churned up quite a lot by horses on many of the public paths. By 2.30 we arrived at Amersham. It’s a prosperous town where probably the entire population works in London, although it feels very much like the country. The guidebook pointed us to a teashop where could get a pot of tea, and a cake. The tea shop no longer existed (the book is about 6 or 7 years old), but across the street was a cafe, serving lattes and cappucinos. It struck me how much London had changed. Ten years ago it would have been a polite tea shop but now it was a trendy cafe with Australian cookies, Italian smoked ham, lattes and the like. You could see that everyone in this town was well off; there were no ordinary shops, just a travel agent selling overseas tours and a place selling up-scale kitchens, but not butchers or bakers.
GPS tracks of the walks:
Mapsource GDB file
GPX file