Day 34: The South Cheshire Way

Distance: 18.2 miles
Bear Arms: Dawn, yes; Al, no

First a bit of blog housekeeping. We've heard from a couple of people who have had trouble with the word matching captcha thing that Blogger requires of anonymous commenters. So I turned it off, because we love comments! If you've had issues with that, or have been intimidated by the commenting procedure, try it again; should be easier now. Also, it seems that Google must have changed their spam classifier because yesterday about half the comments were mistakenly classified as spam. I reinstated all the comments, and we'll keep an eye out in the future.


Today was grey. In the morning, there was the faintest trace of drizzle, like it was trying to rain. Later, the grey turned white in patches, like it was trying to get sunny. The weather didn't succeed in either; it just stayed grey. It wasn't cold. It wasn't warm. It wasn't quite windstill, but despite little breezes trying to build up, it never got windy either. Just a middle of the road grey all day long. Which is fine walking weather, so no complaints.


Today we left Shropshire and started in on our seventh county: Cheshire. We spent nearly the whole walk on a waymarked path, the South Cheshire Way, which makes its way across pastures, crops, lanes, and, where unavoidable, the occasional A-road. The waymarks on the ground started out pretty far apart, putting the path in the middle of my three level path classification system, and leading to lots of scenes like the one in the photo above. As the hours rolled past we moved more into the heart of the county, and the signs got better and better, and by the end of the day, the SCW was clearly top tier. This is great, since we will be on the same path most of tomorrow.


We weren't sure that we'd encounter any open pubs on the way, so we started the day in a Whitchurch Tesco on our way out of town. We bought some apples, a block of cheese, a few buns, and a big bag of salt and vinegar crisps - the perfect lunch.


Dawn's rapport with the farm animals was at an all time high today. Twice today, we walked through a field of cows busy turning grass into cow pies, and they'd look up, see Dawn, and follow her. Look how sad they are after Dawn cruelly left the field through the human only gate, and left the cow gate closed.


She had power over the sheep as well, though today seemed a bit lighter on sheep than most days we've had.


We passed by a small lake today, ironically named Marbury Big Mere, where a guy was fishing for perch. I think that this was our first real lake of the trip. Here's a picture of the mere with the church from day one photoshopped into the background.


At five to twelve we walked by a pub, the Bhurtpore in Aston, due to open at noon. We waited five minutes, had our lunch there, and carried our Tesco provisions the rest of the day. This worked out well. Our B&B is a farmhouse, miles from anything - so we used the Tesco food as our dinner instead.


Tomorrow the weather is supposed to clear, giving sunshine again and 13 degrees. Perfect!

Location:Wrinehill Rd,,United Kingdom