Pete's Walks - Chenies and the Chess Valley (page 4 of 4)
If you are considering walking this route yourself, please see my disclaimer. You may also like to see these notes about the maps and GPX files.
I then continued along the valley, initially with some bushes on my right. The hillside on my left clearly had the remains of strip lynchets on it, ancient agricultural terraces (though rather oddly this isn't shown on the OS map - I think I saw it mentioned on an information board several years ago). The path led on to a cottage and continued along its drive to a lane, New Road. The path continued on the other side, along the edge of a field and then bearing half-right past some trees to another footbridge over the River Chess. Across the bridge I turned right, to head back along the other side of the river (I'd only walked this path a few times before). The path stayed close to the river and soon ran past a water works on my left. It ended at a lane (the continuation of New Road which I crossed a little earlier, but here called North Lane, according to the OS map).
The path continuing from Sarratt Bottom
The path continuing from Sarratt Bottom
The footpath after I crossed New Road
The footpath after it turns right, towards the river Chess
Approaching the footbridge where I recrossed the river Chess
Looking south from the footbridge where I recrossed the river Chess
The path after I turned right, heading back to Sarratt Bottom
The path heading back to Sarratt Bottom
The footpath continued across the lane, running along the left side of a long pasture (there were six young cows in it) beside the river (still over to my right). The path continued on past a marshy area of reeds on my right to return to Sarratt Bottom. At a path crossroads here I turned left - most often when I've taken this path I've then immediately taken a path forking right from it, but on today's route I just kept straight on, along part of the Chiltern Way. The path ran for almost half a mile through the middle of a long thin wood, then rose uphill through a field to reach another wood, Wyburn Wood. Beyond this wood it ran beside a hedge on my right to reach a road on the edge of Chenies, where I turned right to return to my parked car.
The path heading back to Sarratt Bottom after I crossed North Lane
View across Sarratt Bottom - there are strip lynchets (a medieval form of agricultural terracing) on that hillside
The path at Sarratt Bottom
The path to Chenies from Sarratt Bottom
The path to Chenies from Sarratt Bottom
The path to Chenies from Sarratt Bottom
Approaching Chenies
The reason I walked this particular route on this day was because on the previous day I'd seen a post on Facebook from the 'River Chess Association' which said the woods in the Chess valley around Chenies and Latimer were very good sites for seeing Coralroot. Coralroot is a rare wildflower in the UK, I think it can only be seen in the Chilterns and in the High Weald in Kent. I had only seen it once, when I found it in a wood near High Wycombe in 2007. The Facebook post said they wouldn't be flowering much longer, so I decided to do a walk in the Chess valley the next day. I managed to see Coralroot in three different woods during this walk, though I had to take a detour of three or four hundreds before I saw it the first time (I'd also planned a longer detour in another wood, but didn't take it as by the time I reached it I had already seen two lots of Coralroot). In all cases the flowers were just yards from a footpath (the Facebook page had said to stay on the footpaths). I don't want to give the exact locations away, so I'm just showing some of the photos below.
This was wonderful walk - in 2015 I gave it '**' on my very idiosyncratic rating system, meaning that I think it's much better than an average walk in the Chilterns, and I see no reason to change that. As I said in 2015, I think the Chess is the most attractive of the (very few) river valleys there are in the Chilterns and I always enjoy walking here. The only slight negative is that you do see more people walking the paths here than you usually meet in the Chilterns, but that's hardly surprising considering that it's so close to the commuter belt.