Author Topic: Avening Circular Walk  (Read 189 times)

Offline Griff Grof

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Avening Circular Walk
« on: June 23, 2014, 11:05:46 am »
5 miles, 12 caches. Park at N 51° 40.879 W 002° 10.478

Full directions, also found on the cache pages, but compiled here:

•Start by heading towards the church from the parking area and go up the narrow path to the right of the churchyard.

•At the top there is the first of many unusual stiles. Follow the footpath through the gates and bear round to the bottom corner of the field.

•Go through the kissing gate and follow the stream for a few yards before you bear left up to the stile in the top corner of the field.

•Go over the stile leading into the lane and bear right. Now follow the lane down the hill. You will pass a farm called Avening Park, on the left. Verges here are covered with butterbur, which flowers in early spring, with a cluster of pink heads.


•At the bottom of the hill fork left, signpost says “Restricted By Way” follow the unofficial footpath sign, marked footpath, which runs next to the stream.

•On entering the field follow the hedge on the left

•Carry on with the hedge still on your left and go through a young plantation, the stile is just the other side of a fallen tree and the footpath is overgrown, to continue up the valley.

•Come out of the plantation and carry on up the valley. The area around here has many buzzards, so listen out for their high pitched calls, you may be lucky.

•From this location carry on walking up the valley.

•Carry on from here following the footpath. In the fields on the left there are two round barrows and also a long barrow. The long barrow is perhaps 5,000 years old and was quite an elaborate affair, whereas the round barrows could be anything between 4,500 and 1,200 years old.

•Continue with the wall on your left until the path comes out onto a track. This is a public road, but not fit for normal traffic. Turn right along the track. Within the next 200 yards the hedge on your left is made up of at least 14 different plants.

•At the end of this hedge a path cuts across the track, carry straight on. You will notice that the woods on your right have private signs on the entrances to it. This section of track can be muddy.

•When the track goes off to the right and a bridle path comes in from the left, keep straight ahead following the bridle way to the wood in front of you. This is Hazel Wood and some hazel stumps, now overgrown, can be seen. Before the invention of cardboard boxes all fruit and vegetables were transported in wicker baskets.

•When you enter the wood bear right alongside the wall, do not follow the path which drops away in front of you.

•Follow this path until you come to a kissing gate on your right, go through this and follow the path around the inside of this wood. This way you will leave a very muddy section of the bridle way.

•Sadly there is no footpath to cache #10, and you have to follow the track, lane and then main road to get to it. We had to resite it after being placed originally as it was too near other caches in the area. This was the only place that met the relevant criteria.

•When you reach the main road, turn left. You will have to walk along the main road to this cache. We had to place this one out this way so not to imfringe on nearby caches. So please supervise any young children and please take care when crossing the road.

~

I really enjoyed this series, in one of my favourite corners of Gloucestershire. Read about my experience of it on my blog, here  :)

Will try to put some photos on here, but does anyone know how to make images smaller with the ParseBBCode forums use?  ???
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