November. It was no surprise that this was a damp walk under grey skies, but the mood was anything but sombre. A circular walk meant meeting with a friend and it was lovely to have company again. The walk started and finished at Wrenbury-cum-Frith, in non-covid times a post walk pub dinner would have definitely been part of the plan.
The first half of the walk is along the South Cheshire Way: pub quiz fact – at 55km it is just under half the length of the North Cheshire Way. Muddy fields were the start of the day, gently rolling through lush grass and pastures. The waymarked path diverted a couple of times from the map, which caused a bit of navigational confusion but we soon popped back out onto the road to Marbury and the accurately named Little Mere and Big Mere. Time for our legs and lungs to get a good workout, the route pulls steeply and steadily up Buttermilk Bank to a spectacularly long view to Peckforton and Bickerton Hill and the sandstone ridge.
All down hill from here, the path picks up the Bishop Bennet Way, another Cheshire Challenge path that I’ll be ticking off soon. After another muddy trudge through a recently harvested maize field we joined the Llangollen Canal which at this point is also the Sandstone Trail. We stopped here for a late lunch, timely as the weather began to close in; mizzle turned to drizzle and then to rain. Head down, deep in conversation at times and comfortable silence at others, we stomped steadily along the canal with barely a drop in height of 10 meters over the whole 10 km.
Video of the walk HERE
The route is available on the Ordnance Survey website HERE
| Cheshire Challenge distance | 19km |
| Paths walked | South Cheshire Way, Llangollen Canal Walk |
| Total distance | 20km |
| Total ascent | 181m |
| OS map | OS Explorer 257 |
| Date walked | November 2020 |
| Time taken | 6 hours |
| Cake | None this time 😦 |
| Dance pose | Jazz hands |
| Total Cheshire Challenge distance completed | 172km (1500km total) |
Rando' Girls 