We had our Spring bank holiday today and what a day it was. Spring came out in all her glory.
I decided to enjoy the weather with a walk to work. By road, work is about 5 miles away (that’s about 8km for those of us who speak metric). But no one really wants to walk via the road as there are no footpaths. This last week, I’ve been told by a few people about how you can match up several public footpaths to walk to work. It’s a longer trip but is supposed to be a nice walk. I picked up a couple of OS maps this morning (yep, Saffron Walden is at the top of one so I needed two) and headed off.
I’ll be heading out across these fields.
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At the moment all the rape is blooming. It’s gorgeous, but is causing havoc with everyone’s hayfever. For me, I usually only get really bad hayfever my first spring in a new place and then I usually get used to the new types of pollen. I’m really hoping that continues to be the case as my reaction is a little different from the norm: lots of heavy bleeding noses. Yes, yuck. Unfortunately I have a golden staph infection in my sinuses, a gift from a hospital when I was very little, and when this flares up, the blood flows. Luckily, today it was behaving, even when I was walking next to these fields.
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Isn’t that house great. I’ll live there please. It was lovely walking through these fields of yellow, feeling a little like the only person in the world even though I was just 10 minutes out of town.
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At one point, the ground I was walking on was much lower than the other side of me. I got a fantastic view of the ground. Wow, there really isn’t a lot of soil there is there.
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In some parts of the walk, the direction to take was nice and clear.
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And in others, not so much (I had to turn left here).
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While much of the way was yellow to begin with, as this view back to town shows nicely
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Not all of the farmers had planted rape when they harvested the wheat fields last autumn.
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Then later, the crops change to something else, that obviously bunnies like. I’ll have to wait and see what the crop turns into so I know what is so tasty and worthy of protection.
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Eventually, you get to a point in the walk where the start/end of the path is not a farm, but a village. This cute little church was in Little Chesterford, just as I was exiting a paddock.
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And this one was in Ickleton, just before I went into the nature reserve at the back end of work.
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2.5 hours after I set off from town, I was sitting at a picnic table at work having lunch. Not that it took that long to walk there. I just found a cool little place with pocky little crafty shops (art, framing, jewellery, craft supply shop) next to a tiny little lake. It was like finding a secret place – I had no idea it was there. So I stopped for an ice cream and had a look around. While I made it to work, I wasn’t actually going to go to work, so this was the closest I got – looking across the fields at the buildings.
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A nice stop for lunch then the return trip back. It took 2 hours to get back to Saffron Walden town, by which time I was getting really tired and my legs and lower back was starting to really ache. Going for a long walk in joggers is not a good idea, so I really need to get my new hiking boots before I try a day of walking again.
And of course, this walk was out the north side of town and I live on the southern edge, so there was the extra walk home. Which took twice as longer as usual as I was walking slower and slower as I got closer and closer to home. But it was a great walk, and luckily my sinuses didn’t realise how much pollen I was breathing in and so behaved. Well, until the start of this paragraph, that is. They’ve just caught up..
Those of you in the UK, hope you had a great long weekend. Those of you not, hope your week started well.