"Friday June 7th. The weather forecast looks 45% chance of rain on Friday BUT I'm still walking.
We will meet at Clare Country Park at 10am (park in local roads) and walk to Cavendish. If it's raining we will continue the circular 7 mile loop back to Clare and have refreshments. If it's not raining we will venture a little further to Glemsford but NOT visit my friend's beautiful garden on this occasion. We will keep that for a drier day.", said the update from Joyce.
As we drove to Clare there were a few spots of rain about already, but it was dry enough to start with. We checked on the weather forecast again when we stopped for a drink and lunch in Cavendish and decided to leave the walk to Glemsford for another day as the rain was coming.
Our route was pretty similar to Walk No 3 from the Clare Circular Walk Series, but we did it in the reverse direction. This was our version...
Some photos from our walk...
We started in the Country Park. Here is a view of the Castle.
We bumped into a group of Nordic walkers being led by Derek, our guide from the Magna Carta Walk in the Suffolk Walking Festival.
He told us to look out for the otter and woodpecker. Which we did.
The Bug hotel among the wildflowers.
Some amazing tree fungus.
And here is the woodpecker.
We were soon out in the countryside and following some of the Stour Valley Path and one of the Suffolk Threads Heritage Trails.
We arrived at Cavendish along a path I'd walked with the Bury St. Edmunds Ramblers last July; read about that here.
Ready, steady...
We stopped for a drink at The George...
...although I didn't have tea or coffee.
The George have their own Mac St Kitchen.
We lunched by the Waiver (but not on Mac 'n Cheese).
Some lovely gardens were just across the road.
We went onwards down to the river, seeing lots of these damselflies. I think they are Banded Demoiselles.
We also saw some goats with some kids.
We crossed the river via this bridge into Essex.
We met some pigs.
The sky started to look threatening...
...and we had waterproofs on and umbrellas up for the last mile or so of our walk,
I liked this old signpost.
Now we were on the Magna Carta trail... the bit we missed on the walking festival version as we took a detour from the route to see the views and returned via the priory.
The waterlilies are about to come into flower.
And here we are back at the otter, with just the bridge to cross back to the start,
But we then took a little extra walk to see the Grade I listed Ancient House Museum. Amazing pargetting!
Thanks Joyce for a lovely walk,
Here is a slide show of my photo album...
You can also see my album here on Flickr and more details of our route here on MapMyWalk.
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