A January day, and my starting point for today’s 12 miler is the New Inn in Send, beside the River Wey. Our family Sunday pub-lunch is, in reality, a mere carbo-loading exercise, and this pub certainly recommended for the largest, soggiest bowl of sausage and mash in the world.
An hour later, brilliant sunshine is fading into dank drizzle as I explore a new route into town through Riverside Park. Picturesquely named, it proves to offer little more than a patch of green, sandwiched uncomfortably under electricity pylons between the tranquility of the river and the deafening A3 road traffic.
I slither around a few laps of boardwalk laid across the riverside wetlands, my lunch settling better than the weather. The skies evolve steadily through hail and finally pelting rain as twilight approaches over the aptly-named Guildford suburb of Burpham.
And then, deep in the darkness of the woods beside the river, I stumble across a line of old tank traps lurking on the steep bank behind the Spectrum Leisure Centre. This must be another part of the last line of defence south of London, dating from the Second World War, and linking up with pill boxes south of the town near Shalford and high on St Martha’s Hill.
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There are stars
roads of stone 