Tag: hiking

Capital Ring Highgate to Stratford (Travel Writing)

35, 877 steps in total today (approximately 15.65 miles or 25.19 kilometers)

18.01.2026

Today, I walked the Capital Ring with a friend. The weather was not inclement. The company was not unpleasant. I was not tired.

We started outside Highgate underground station. I had been warned that the high street was a bit rough but the area we were in seemed nice enough. I have a game that I play with my friend. To collect as many conversations from people as we can. I started it off. As we got into the space between the trees on either end, there was a lady with a very big dog. I started telling her about the walk that we were doing and she had never heard of it. The dog was doing something of a wrestle with her and my friend wanted to make tracks, so we said goodbye and watched her run off with the dog.

The path was absolutely littered with runners. I had never seen so many congregate in one place before. It wasn’t cold and they were wearing their usual skimpy outfits. I felt envious of them running along. After all, it is a very pleasurable exercise. I used to run in the woods like them when I was a kid because I used to live in the woods too.

We took the Parkland Walk to Finsbury Park and stopped off in the cafe. We almost didn’t stay as the queue looked a bit chaotic. However, I was determined to sit down and we changed our mind about finding another place. My friend treated me to a cherry bakewell cake. It was delicious. The cafe had a mini art exhibition featuring artists that did brightly coloured flowers and also pretty landscapes. Some of the artworks were for sale at what I thought was a fairly reasonable price of £200. What was particularly nice about cafe were the cheery flower arrangements on each table. They had a daffodil with an orange rose that was blushing with red. Very cosy and very beautiful and warming.

I bagged another conversation for our competition. There was an Asian man from Liverpool that I struck up a conversation with on the way out from the cafe. He was a runner in a half marathon they had on today at Finsbury park. He said they did about seven laps and the gradient in the park was a bit of a killer.

We walked down through the park and ended up sitting at a bench leading up to a path with a pretty church in the background for lunch. As we were eating, a little grey greyhound in a jacket came scampering up to investigate my friend’s lunch which happened to be honey sandwiches. The owner, a middle-aged brunette with an Australian accent, came bounding down and, noticing that I hadn’t opened my packet of Scotch eggs, informed me that the dog had once stolen a scotch egg from a man’s lunch. He’d been okay with it. You always have to factor a hungry dog in your lunchtime in a park I guess.

I was counting up the birds I saw as we walked towards Woodberry Wetlands and Clissold Park. Today, I saw swans, blacked headed gulls, seagulls, a black cormorant, sparrows, crows, pigeons, Egyptian geese, ducks and coots. One of the joys of a long walk in the greenery is the animals of course. At Woodberry Wetlands, we watched the sparrows resting amongst the bullrushes as my friend was telling me that it was unusual of them to hang about there. The water looked absolutely divine in the sunshine.

There was a climbing wall at some point near a building with the water reservoirs near it. We did it after me and my friend took some shots of a big shiny mirror ball with the building distorted within it. It was dead there before we came and after we went probably. But when we went to take the photographs, a group of children came with their mums and usurped the territory so we had to wait for them to disappear to get the shot. As to the climbing wall? I had to have a go. The grips for the feet were tiny so I only did a wall and a half before I gave up. I couldn’t get the footing for it in my hiking boots and was using up a lot of upper body strength exclusively.

Next, we passed through Abney Park Cemetery. We read up on the founder of the Salvation Army who was buried there along with many other folk from them too. We compared the cemetary to Montmarte Cemetary to which we had both been too and I spent the time reading the inscriptions on the graves. They looked very picturesque with the green moss growing on them.

The next stop was Walthamstow Marshes. We followed the Lee Navigation canal to our finish point. I saw a book floating in the water and we took some shots with our cameras in our usual photography competition that we have on these walks. I also did something I’ve never done before in my life. I saw the opportunity, asked permission and I got a long handled axe and split open a log of wood. It was the third time of asking. My friend shot a video of me while I was doing it so that I could share with our other friends and so on. It was very satisfying and made me feel immensely powerful.

I managed to bag another entry for our competition to collect conversations with people on the trip. It was a brunette mother that was tethering her boat house to a post. I asked her to resolve our dispute on how cold the boats get. But it turned out that the cold wasn’t the problem. Rather it was the mud.

At some point in Stoke Newington, we went into a second hand bookshop. I managed to get a second hand book on Art Deco and also picked up some free booklets by the Guardian on the Second World War, a set of seven of them.

The final stop on the walk was just before Stratford Olympic Park where we parted company. We went to a cafe and sat outside while my friend sipped at a tea and I demolished some chocolate.

Chigwell to Harold’s Wood – London Loop (Travel Diary)

05.10.2025

Absolutely superb. That’s what the weather was like for the long walk. I met up with my friend at Newbury station and we bundled ourselves onto the Tube at nine o’clock for an early start on the day.

In the morning, it took about the same time to get into Chigwell as it would take me to get into Central London for work due to a change at Hainault and a long wait for the next service. On arriving at Chigwell, I was struck by the beauty of the place and the grandeur of the big houses out there. Really a dream destination to live in. Chigwell is called Chigwell because the name derives from an Anglo-Saxon personal name, ‘Cicca,’ and the word ‘well,’ meaning “Cicca’s well”. 

We came across some beautiful horses but I couldn’t get a good shot or composition. I have a personal ambition to ride a horse but haven’t got round to it yet. It is a very modest and achievable ambition but I am always too busy for it.

Almost at once, we came to a beautiful view and the farmlands. I had already got out my camera and was trying a few shots. As I did so, we came across some fellow walkers and they told me and my friend that they had been doing the walks on the London Loop for about two years. They were finally going to finish off the walk today. It was an old father with two young blonde daughters, one of them wearing a red jacket and looking somewhat like Red Riding Hood.

As we trailed after them when we were ready and they were already in the far distance, we worked out the percentage of weekends they had committed to their mission as we were arguing about how committed they were as walkers. If they had taken two years for about twelve walks on the London Loop, that would work out as them having invested 6% of their weekends on the trips over two years. I maintained that that was quite committed but my contrary friend disagreed with me.

My friend is a birdwatcher and I was trying to one up him by spotting more birds than him. I got a robin that he hadn’t noticed and felt quite chuffed but then he showed his experience and expertise in this subject. He spotted a woodpecker, a brilliantly yellow coloured creature that I had never seen before. It was winging its way through the air. He also spotted some buzzards and regaled me about the story of the corpse of one he had encountered recently as roadkill. On the trip, we saw about nine different species of bird, so it wasn’t a bad day: peacocks, hens, Egyptian geese, robins, a white egret, the woodpecker, crows, some little ones I forget the names of and seagulls and magpies. So for birds, it was certainly a great day.

It was a delight to stop for elevenses at precisely eleven on a little bench in the woods as I had a Dairy Milk with me. I shared the chocolate with my friend. I was watching the birds fly into the trees. A Dairy Milk always reminds me of the war. Probably it is because Roald Dahl, my favourite author as a boy, mentions being a taster for Cadbury’s chocolates in his biography and he fought in the war.

Around Chigwell and its forest, we came across an Islamic chapel with Christian gravestones in the garden which was quite an example of religious amalgamation. We didn’t go inside but looked at it with intrigue from the outside wondering what it was.

The next phase of our walk was Hainault Forest Country Park which is not too far from our local area. Hainault Forest was an old royal hunting forest. I had gone there many a time with the family. We saw the two daughters with their father there and I shouted out to them that ‘it wasn’t a contest, but…’ and they all laughed which was pleasing. They were sitting on a bench looking out at the lake. We kept on walking and didn’t see them again and probably won’t in this lifetime.

Hainault gets its name because its original Old English name, recorded as “Henehout” in 1221, meant “wood belonging to a monastic community”. The Abbey of Barking owned Hainault Forest. The name’s spelling later changed because it was incorrectly associated with Philippa of Hainault, the queen of Edward III. 

We stopped for a hot drink in the cafe and it was absolutely chock-a-block with young families. So we sat outside. Lazily, I watched two brightly coloured aeroplanes flying about in the sky and the families with their dogs all making their usual Sunday walk around the park. I was telling my friend that I should buy a dog so that I could also talk to the dog people.

After that I persuaded my friend to go to the farm and look at the animals. The goats were all butting heads with each other and the peacocks were sunning themselves. I got a few okayish shots on my camera as the light was quite good but missed a dramatic fight that the goats with brown hides were having as people had stopped to watch them and I didn’t want any people in the shot.

We walked through the golf course next and then we were back in the forest and in the farmland and then the forest again. There was a rough swing rope that someone had put up in the trees. The only way to get to it was up some precariously placed logs, so it was a challenge of balance. I climbed up it childishly and recklessly. It was only a few feet off the ground but felt like I was walking in the atmosphere and slipping about. I managed to get to the swing rope with my hands but then there was no way to get any momentum to swing about! I had almost fallen off once, but only once. And I hadn’t. So man nature was appeased. My friend shot a video of me doing it.

When we had walked through an enchanted pine soaked place with a delicious scent, I decided that we should stop for lunch. I had brought chicken satays from the reduced aisle with me and the scent was too much. Because we were accosted by two dogs that wanted to partake of the feast. The first one was a giant and was very forward and slightly menacing. Two young boys had to run up and grab him by the leash to get him away. The other dog was a black miniature hound and his owner, an elderly lady, said that he was ‘incorrigible’ as she rushed off with him.

After the forest, with its beautiful light and soothing smells and ambience, and after watching the little trickle that was the river Rom, the next thing, we were sitting in a pub called The Deer’s Rest which was in Romford itself. The whole pub was tricked out in Halloween decor. I got us some drinks and downed an ice cold Pepsi. It was absolutely delicious in a way that Cola is not always. My friend told me that I had worked enough so my body was rewarding me for the work with that delicious sensation. He said that he was having it with his drink as well. The pub had this wallpaper of framed butterfly specimens and it was something that I quite wanted for myself as I thought it looked very sophisticated and cool. And much nicer than real specimens of butterflies which I have always found slightly creepy. Because they are dead beauty.

We walked on through the beauties of nature talking about life, the universe and everything. At some point, we found ourselves in a park. I was keen to watch the young people at the skate park but it was disappointing. They were not doing any tricks! The kids were quite young, but then that Olympics gold medallist had been about thirteen. As we progressed through the park, we came across a father at the top of the slope throwing around a brightly yellow coloured glider aeroplane towards his son. The son was babbling away at us as I remarked that the dad had made a good throw. It was a really touching scene of family and its happiness, the joy of children.

The last stretch of the walk took us to Harold Wood. The name Harold Wood refers to an area of land associated with King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. It was about four o’clock. We had initially decided to do a bit more but decided to pack it up before the light started going and we’d done about thirty thousand steps. It was about eleven miles well spent.