Pete's Walks - Chiltern Heritage Trail
About my walk
I walked the Chiltern Heritage Trail in September 2006. As with most of the walks I have done, I did it ‘both ways’, each day walking 6-8 miles along the route, then turning round and following the same route back to my car. I thus walked a total of 104 miles, and enjoyed the scenery in both directions. It took me seven days to do the walk, spread over about two and a half weeks. I followed the example of the guide book by starting and finishing in Chesham, and each day started walking in a clockwise direction so that I could follow the directions in the guide book. I found the directions to be generally very clear, and the route was generally well waymarked (although I seem to remember there was a strange absence of waymarks near Seer Green), so I very seldom had to look at the maps.
River Chess, near Chenies (Day 1)
All the mileages I give have been taken from the guide book [UPDATE 25/09/17 - here I am referring to the old guidebook published by Chiltern District Council, which is no longer published and has been replaced by a new guidebook from the Chiltern Society with slight modifications to the route]. This splits the Chiltern Heritage Trail into 16 walks and gives the distance for each walk to the nearest half mile, so my mileages are no more accurate than that. Most of my walks simply followed two or three consecutive walks in the guide book, where these could be combined into 6-8 mile sections that I could walk each way. The last two walks in the guide book are 4.5 and 6 miles long, so on my penultimate day I finished just over half way through Walk 15, and finished this along with Walk 16 on my final day.
Click here to see a very rough map of the Chiltern Heritage Trail (but only if you have already read my disclaimer and notes regarding maps).
Note: I have numbered each photograph (in red) and inserted the same number in the text to show where in the walk the photo was taken.