In this post, I’m collecting together a few walks from our campervan travels.
29 Sep 2023 – Leiston-Thorpeness
6.5 miles. Walk 18 in the Ordnance Survey book Suffolk – Outstanding Circular walks. From Leiston leisure centre to the coast beside Sizewell power station, south along the coastal path to Thorpeness, returning inland alongside The Meare, then cross country back to Leiston.
An unexpectedly interesting walk on a fine Autumn day. The fact that this starts by heading towards Sizewell Nuclear Power Station made me a bit hesitant. But, although you do skirt the site, it doesn’t dominate the early part of the walk, and you turn your back to it for uninterrupted sea views as you take the coastal path, which runs first along clifftops and then, as you approach Thorpeness, its shingle beach. Thorpeness itself was a surprise – developed in the early 20th century as an exclusive holiday village around its artificial boating lake, full of tidy Edwardian cottages and some genuine architectural oddities, like the (rentable) House in the Clouds. The Kitchen @ Thorpeness proved an excellent spot for a light lunch before the yomp back to Leiston.
16 Jul 2024 – Brockenhurst loop
5 mile circuit around and about Brockenhurst village, following the route provided here by the New Forest National Park.
A good way to get a flavour of the New Forest, taking in as it does the pretty village of Brockenhurst and some of its surrounding heathland (complete with the famous ponies) and woodland. We downloaded the New Forest National Park app (here for iPhone) which proved to be excellent – both in providing a range of options and in its in-walk guidance.
12 Sep 2024 – Bala to Llangower, Gwynedd
7.9 miles, from Pen-y-Bont campsite, loop into Bala village and back then, crossing the Bala Lake railway at the station, take hillside paths above the lake, descending just short of Llangower village and returning along the road.
Intermittent showers and bright sunny spells – a day for peeling the waterproofs on and off. We started from our excellent campsite at Pen-y-Bont and looped into Bala village to pick up some supplies, returning along the lakefront. Back at the site, we crossed the Bala railway (no sighting of the steam engine today) by the footbridge, and climbed across fields to the a bridleway that ran along the hillside to the Bala Lake Hotel. We took advantage of their picnic tables to eat lunch before climbing further through the woods, on occasionally quite wet and muddy tracks, and onto the open mountainside above. Here, in the finest weather of the day, we enjoyed beautiful views of the lake, back towards Bala (pictured below) and away towards the peaks of Snowdonia, before joining the path that drops slowly towards Llangower (with one dispiriting sharp upward turn), emerging onto a lane that connects to the lakeside road. From here, it was 2.5 miles along the (fortunately not too busy) road back to the campsite – easy walking, but always with one eye on the traffic and largely screened from views of the lake. We did take a bridleway and path at one point to get off the road, but this turned out to be in poor condition and resulted in wet feet for one of us! Back at the campsite, we felt we’d earned a good night out – and we found one, in the quirky, independent little Portuguese-themed restaurant Old Wives’ Tales in Bala – well worth a visit.
This is a great area for walking. We didn’t do much research in advance, and didn’t find a great source for walks while we were there, although I am sure there are many (there is a website here, but it didn’t offer walks of quite the length we were looking for and, at time of viewing, was not that well organised). So we constructed our own walk as we went along using the Footpath.com website, which we also used as a live route map (we found surprisingly good mobile data signal!). It worked pretty well, although next time we might plan better and find a route without the longish section on the road at the end.
