Time in the country: Heart of England Way - Part 1

With a day's holiday booked and unseasonally warm weather for the time of year, it was time to decide what to do. Let's have a look at the Heart of England Way (HoEW) I thought. It's a 102 mile route from Cannock Chase in Staffordshire to the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire.

I've spent quite a few days on Cannock Chase over the past couple of years shadowing kids doing their Duke of Edinburgh Award walks but have never had a long walk there so quite fancied the idea.

An easy trip up the M6 brought me to Milford Common car park, the start of the walk. A warning sign said that the car park closes at dusk. That sounds a bit worrying and seems dependent on the interpretation of dusk by the people with the key. I'd better get a move on.

Start of the Heart of England Way on Milford Common

The paths on the Chase are full of pebbles. I used to think the paths had been made using beach pebbles but now realise that the whole area was formed in the ice age when the pebbles and sand were dumped up here and this is what leads to the unusual landscape and nature.

Youv'e been warned. I didn't test the theory

This 16 mile route from Milford to Lichfield was easy to follow, especially as I had loaded a GPX file of the path into my GPS before leaving home. So armed with map and GPS I had no excuses. I took an extra couple of diversions off the main path to climb a few hills making it probably an 18 mile day in total.

The Polish War Memorial

There is a good bus service form Lichfield back to Milford that runs every 30 minutes on weekdays, but be warned that the 4.05 bus is full of noisy schoolchildren!

Now how do I get past these!

Apologies for the fairly random order in which the pictures appear in this post! Try as I might I just cant seem to get them reordered in any sensible manner!