"Friday Dec 6th we will meet in the small village of Chevington. Pls park considerately down Church Road IP29 5QH and gather at The Church for a 11am start. We will venture into Ickworth Park to walk the Red Route. A stop at The Porters Lodge for coffee (I'll check its open as it looked closed today as we passed by) and your home made lunch before we return to our cars. I estimate the walk to be about 9 miles with a finish time of 3.30pm. Pls check weather forecast and expect mud! Pls bring National Trust cards if you wish but we should be ok on the paths we are walking. Dogs on FIXED leads."
This was our route...
Here are a few of my photos..
Our intended route was the Red one, but we threw in a bit of the blue too so as to go past Ickworth church and get the nice views.
We started by Chevington Church.
There were 8 of us today, with only Joyce and I survivors from our Ten do Devil's Dyke walk on Tuesday. We also had two new walkers joining the group. Welcome Kate and Alison!
"Expect mud", said Joyce. Well our path towards the Ickworth Estate certainly met expectations.
Some trees still have their autumn colours. We admired this one and the topiary in the garden.
On the Red route now, descending to the River Linnet.
This lovely cottage is a familiar sight. As a family, we've been walking the trails at Ickworh House for 20 years, first featuring in a blog post in 2006. And then some, and more.
The pace today was quite quick and I struggled to keep up at times, but I was briefly in front here as we walked along beside the river.
Walking towards the house now, there are some lovely old trees, although we didn't digress to visit the Tea-Party Oak
We stopped for drinks at the old Porter's Lodge. Nice coffee!
We set off up the drive, still on the Red walk, but then turned off to go back to the house via the driveway to the hotel. Here we saw a good example of the amount of mistletoe there is on trees around the estate.
The house is shrouded at the moment, which looks rather odd. But what is that we can see in front of it?
It's Santa's sleigh, led by Rudolph, of course. Any one for a ride?
A bit of crouching down was needed for this photo. We're all still kids at heart but sometimes a little tall to play the part.
We all admired Rudolph's red nose.
But this wasn't getting the walk done. We continued past the shrouded house...
...and down towards St. Mary's Church.
We turned left when we got to the point we reached previously having descending to the river, continuing along the blue path under lowering skies...
But the clouds broke as we reached my favourite view across the lake.
In February we saw it frozen over... see here. We continued past the lake.
We still had a view of the house.
We ascended towards the obelisk (although we didn't visit it), and saw our starting and end point of Chevington Cursch.
It was nice when we eventually got some wintery sunshine.
We took a slightly different route back...
..but still went along the same muddy lane back to the start. We'll go along the field edge next time, I think. Soon we were back to the old school house.
...and were saying our farewells.
Doing 9 1/2 miles in less than 3 hours we were kept warm and we luckily only had a slight sprinkle of rain. Thanks Joyce for the walk and to the rest for the company.
You can see details of our walk here on MapMyWalk
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