Stage eight - Wooton-under-Edge to Old Sodbury

Stage eight - Wotton under Edge to Old Sodbury

After a hiatus, we are back to the task in hand...

Stage eight saw us up at the crack of... 0540, in order to be out the door by 0630, in order to park the car in Stroud and walk to Merrywalks bus stop by 0710 for the bus to Dursley, which in turn would link to Wooton-under-Edge, our start point. A 'West Gold Group Dayrider' from the Stagecoach app for £15.50 seemed to cover the travel for the day for all three of us, and the free parking in Stratford Park in Stroud helped, with only a ten minute walk to the bus stand.

After a short ride to Dursley, we headed to Sainsbury's, being the only place likely to be open at about 0730, where we bought pastries and a much needed coffee, along with some snacks for the walk. From the get-go, we knew we'd have to keep up a reasonably quick pace in order to reach our destination before the bus arrived at the Dog Inn in Old Sodbury.

Soon off the bus and on our merry way and the day was already looking promising for weather, though we were expecting rain later. The route takes you out of the town to the east on Sywell lane and soon begins the first climb out of the valley.

As you do so, the views begin to open up in all directions.

Once up on higher ground the way begins to wind in a more southwesterly direction and the views are intermittent, but nonetheless impressive. 

Soon, Lara's thoughts inevitably turned toward food and we began to strategically consider where it would be best to pause for a brief lunchtime snack. We paused momentarily to enjoy a tyre swing just as we entered the beautiful village of Alderley.

We passed up the chance of a perfect perch to eat a sandwich in favour of pressing on into the village, but pretty soon had passed through it and were on our way back out into the open countryside. We passed two walkers traveling in the other direction, who pre-warned us of the presence of some Longhorns that were strolling on the narrow footpath ahead.

Luckily they were more interested in grazing than they were in us, so we made our way past without disturbing them too much. After Alderley the path zigs southeast on a short stretch of roads and lanes before zagging back southwest. Here the path appears to have been re-routed slightly, as Google maps had it running along to the north slightly, but parallel to the signed route. We took the latter, which simply entailed climbing a short rise sooner than we would have on the other route. This then had us skirting southwest until we rounded a corner to be greeted by the view of the Somerset monument.

Here we finally sat for our brief but much appreciated break from the first half of our walk. In fact, we were now slightly more than halfway and could therefore calculate that we were well enough placed to make our destination in time for the critical bus (should that bus actually materialise)! We now pressed on our way, which took us through Horton Roman camp and past Horton Court. Here the path begins its descent through the Court's beautiful grounds and you pass right by the 'Owl house' marked on Google as the Horton Court Folly. We then headed through the eastern edges of the lovely village of Horton (we didn't hear a 'Who').

It's probably worth noting that the Cotswold Way here crosses and overlaps a little with the 'Monarch's Way', which apparently runs for 625 miles; a tad too much for us I feel!

Again there is some deviation between Google and the signage, which would appear to show some re-routing over the years. In any case, we were happy with the route the signs took us as this entailed walking through the ancient hill fort of Little Sodbury, quite a broad area which once would have been quite a large settlement. I enjoy these places, trying to imagine what life would have been like. As we walked through the fields into Old Sodbury, we were rewarded with a sighting of a pair of Roe dear, who on spying us, quickly ran to the lower end of the hill. Difficult to see in my photo, but there are just a couple of dots fleeing from the lefthand third of the middle distance to disappear behind the tree-line.

The walk through the churchyard of St John's church is a pleasant end to the stage, but the descent from there through the fields added to the pain I was now experiencing. (While I would be happy to keep ascending at a steady pace all day long, I suffer on the descents). The reward of course was the welcome sight of the Dog Inn and our bus stop. The icing on that cake being that we had about half an hour to wait. What were we to do with that time? ;-)

Within a few minutes of starting our journey back on the number 620 bus, we were passing by places we recognised and which we had passed on foot an hour or two earlier, such as the Little Sodbury Hill Fort, just off the main A46 road back to Stroud. The ride took us through Minchinghampton and across Minchinghampton Common and filled in some blanks in my mental map of some of the local area, including how Rodborough Common continues on to join it's neighbour. Back in Stroud we made the 10 minute walk back to our car and swung by TESCO for some provisions on the way home, before a hot soak in the bath for me before bed. We are now comfortably poised to complete the route in the coming days. All we need now are two days of decent weather to do it. Let's see how that pans out for us!