For this section we parked our car in the same spot as for the previous leg, and just walked in the opposite direction! When you’ve found a good parking spot, you want to maximise your use of it!!
This time at Witley Station we turned east down the back of some houses, across a road and onto Hambledon Common. This again was super sandy, so although it was hard to find the exact right track amongst the many paths, we were reassured we were definitely still on the Greensands ridge!
We found our way by walking the perimeter of St Dominic’s school. The original house, was known as Mervil Hill and dates from the late 19th century. In 1904 it was purchased by astronomer John Franklin-Adams, who wanted to make a photographic chart of the heavens over the northern hemisphere. This was challenging as the mist that rises over the Weald would ruin his plates. The house changed hands and during the First World War the building became a convalescent home, as the fresh air was considered essential to aid a return to health. In 1929 the property was passed to the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, who established St Dominic’s a residential school for delicate boys. There’s a bench with a good view, but we didn’t feel it was coffee time quite yet, so we pressed on.
We came down into Hambledon and cut across fields towards the church. At the top of the fields we set up our jetboil in a sunny spot for our morning coffee. Then refuelled we went to the churchyard to find the very wide yew tree we’d read about. The church building itself dates from the 13th century, but apparently within this shell there is an almost complete late Saxon church dating from 11th century. We didn’t go in to see for ourselves as it was a Sunday and there were people worshiping, but from the outside we could see the new chapel build to celebrate the beginning of the third millenium of the Christian faith.
From Hambledon, the Greensands Way took us to Vann Hill. Vann is likely to have derived from the same word as fen and referred to the small hamlet by the wetland beneath the hill, now marked as Vannmoor on the map. As we walked through Burgate Hanger, we managed to spot the twisted chestnut tree that we’d seen referenced in Simon’s blog of a similar walk he’d done ten years earlier.
When we go to the road we turned left and then left again at Little Burgate Farm to make our way back towards Hambledon. We were now on a timescale as we had a booking in the pub for lunch! Of course it’s always when you have a time pressure that you take a wrong turn and we missed the left turn out of fourteen acre copse and only realised we’d gone wrong when we got to a fence!
We managed to still get to the Merry Harriers for in time to enjoy a lovely Sunday roast. It was a good choice as although they ran it as a very efficient restaurant, we didn’t feel out of place in our muddy walking gear. It dates from the 16th century and had the names of the various landlords over time painted round the walls. We hadn’t realised they own a herd of friendly llamas, so we hadn’t secheduled llama trekking into our itinery – maybe another time!
After lunch, feeling rather full, we took the path to the north of the pub towards Sweetwater Pond, where we saw some giant fish! We then headed through the woods to the railway and back to the main road at King Edward’s School – which apparently used to have its own station platform.
This route was about 7.5 miles.
Read about the other sections of the Greensands Way.
Embrace your inner goat 