If you go down to the woods today ... - 11 November 2007

We must have been focusing on the colours, rather than the track and instructions, as we got ourselves hopelessly lost about a mile into today’s 7-mile walk. Further on the instructions talked about the summit of Gibbet Hill so we figured we if we kept taking tracks that went uphill we would arrive at the summit. We did, but could find nothing that indicated we were there or anything that suggested this spot may have once had a gallows. Some passing cyclists told us we were not quite in the right spot, the summit of Gibbet Hill is slightly lower than the part of the ridge we had climbed to. A little further on we found Gibbet Hill and the concrete pad that marks the spot where the gallows were.

From there we worked backwards and found the trail we should have been on. Once we had aligned ourselves with the instructions we set off downhill and in less than 10 minutes were hopelessly lost again. - Must be time to hang up our boots!

Perhaps we had not actually found the track again, who knows? Fortunately the GPS was happily bread-crumbing our trail allowing us to see the direction we were meant to be heading to return to the start point so we abandoned the instructions and headed for the car. By this stage the trail on the GPS looked as if it had been made by a drunken three-legged ant.

Out in the middle of the woods, we came across a house and the lady there confirmed that we were headed in the correct direction to return to the village where the car was parked. By the time we were back at the car we had walked 4 miles and seen very little of our planned route. Next time, maybe?

There was little chance of getting lost at our next stop, Winkworth Arboretum, as the paths were well marked with numbered posts that corresponded to numbers on the leaflet we were handed as we entered.