London Loopy

It all started with ….

Walking the St Peter’s Way in Essex in the autumn of 2004, accompanied by my faithful dog Noddy and finishing in the spring of 2005 accompanied by faithful friends, Frances and Trevor. St Peter’s Way is a long distance walk of 45 miles starting at Chipping Ongar and finishing by the North Sea at the ancient chapel of St Peter on the Wall at Bradwell on sea.

It was a feeling of some achievement when I finally completed the walk after splitting up the route into 15 different circular walks, so in fact I had walked about 90 miles and Noddy probably quite a bit more.

We had passed several other beautiful Essex churches on the way, notably St Lawrence at Blackmore, half timbered with broach spire and All Saints at Stock, before arriving at St Peter’s chapel, made almost entirely from Roman brick in the seventh century and one of the oldest places of worship in Britain.

The Essex marshes are fairly bleak but the last leg was completed in lovely warm sunshine along the sea wall (far too warm for Noddy) with nothing but the North Sea between us and Holland.

The walk had had its highs and lows, Noddy got attacked by a mad horse at Munden, which was also the site of a lonely abandoned church and the most amazing ancient oak trees that dated back the Armada. The marshy section from Mundon to Maylandsea was pretty bleak and if a convict had leapt out demanding vittles it wouldn’t have surprised me.

Highs are not normally associated with Essex but the view from Purleigh Church is quite stunning. The Blackwater Estuary is laid out before you and in the distance you can see the finishing post, the old nuclear power station at Bradwell.

Well, what’s all this got to do with the London Loop?

I was looking for another long distance walk that I could do that wasn’t going to involve lots of driving, (towards the end I was clocking 100 miles trips). This pretty much ruled out all National Trails, like the South Downs Way, Ridgeway and North Norfolk path and Thames Path, all of which have a lot of appeal.

Looking closer to home, I discovered the London Loop or London Outer Orbital Path to give it its full name. It comes with 24 beautiful guides freely available from Transport for London, easily accessible by public transport and offering the chance to discover parts of London, both familiar and unfamiliar. I decided to do two legs a year, one in spring and one in autumn exactly six months apart, 1st March and 1st of September to avoid the extremes of the British weather and to use public transport to get to and from the walk.