It recently dawned on me that London is the ideal base from which to explore the countryside. The Green Belt architects and campaigners halted the spread of the suburbs in the 1930s and 40s, so true countryside can be found close to London, even within the M25.
Furthermore, England’s train lines shoot out from the capital and make a large circle around London easily accessible for walking day trips. This ring stretches from the border of Suffolk in the north to Beachy Head in the south and from the North Wessex Downs in the west to Broadstairs and Margate in the east.
Captured within this circle are six areas of outstanding natural beauty, one national park and five national walking trails: Dedham Vale, the Chilternsm, Kent Downs and Surrey Hills, the High Weald, North Wessex Downs, the South Downs National Park, the North Downs Way, the South Downs Way, the Thames Path, the Ridgeway and the England Coast path.
Many people dream of moving out of London or to the country. But I wonder, do Londoners who develop a walking habit experience more countryside and a greater variety than those who have fled? Is their appreciation heightened because of the contrast with the city?
After walking more than a thousand miles in the countryside surrounding London, I have written a book called Walks for each season: 26 great days out in the countryside near London. All of the walks start and end at a train station, so you bypass the traffic hell and avoid adding to London’s pollution. Here are my favourite walks near London:
Our best five walks roundup
- The Tring Circular - 10.5 miles
- Chartham to Cantebury - 8 miles
- Deal to Dover - 11 miles
- Cuxton - a short walk so take a picnic!
- Frinton-on Sea to Walton-on-the Naze - 2 miles
Tring Circular
Spring wouldn’t be complete without a walk in a bluebell wood and this fabulous walk in the Chilterns takes in the famous Dockey Wood on the National Trust’s Ashridge Estate. It’s overwhelmed with bluebell tourists at weekends, but it’s spectacular and a good place to catch the flower’s shifting scent.
Earlier you stride along the exposed ridge of Pitstone Hill with wide views over to Ivinghoe Beacon. There’s a tremendous sense of openness and space. After human-sized London I always feel pleasantly small and insignificant. Cowslips with their small sprays of egg yolk flowers dot the downland and increase in number until they form a long drift through a field of dandelions.
Skylarks rise singing from the rough grass and then suddenly drop, like animatronic birds moving up and down invisible wires. The walk ends in the picturesque village of Aldbury with its pubs, duck pond, stocks and whipping post.
Details: 10.5 miles. Best time to visit, is the last week in April.
Train: 40 minutes from Euston.
Eat at: The Trooper Adlbury
Chartham to Canterbury
The Garden of England is being dug up – 85 percent of Kent’s orchards have been lost in the past 50 years – so venture out this spring to savour the remains of this precarious, precious spectacle.
This walk purposely leads you into the heart of Newmafruit’s orchards: acres of pear and apple orchards. These are industrial orchards with line upon line of short, high-yield trees. But they still have a wow factor.
There are thousands of them. As you move through you catch their elusive perfume. But the highlight is stumbling upon No Man’s Orchard along the North Downs Way full of mature fruit trees topped with broad canopies of blossom.
You’re free to wander among the twisted old trees, passing pastel drifts of cuckoo flowers thriving in the long grass. This walk begins with a riverside walk along the Great Stour, a fast-flowing chalk river, which you rejoin as you walk into Canterbury.
More than 85 percent of the world’s rare chalk streams are found in England, their implausibly clear water the result of slow filtering through calcareous rock. Finally, you can explore the UNESCO World Heritage site of Canterbury.
Details 8 miles
Best time to visit: last week in April
Train: from 1 hour.
Eat: in Canterbury
Deal to Dover
A superb late spring seaside walk, which is also very straightforward – just follow the coastal path from Deal to Dover. It begins with classic English seaside without the brash and ends with an exhilarating walk along the clifftops.
Five minutes after leaving Deal Station you suddenly come to the sea, a simple pier before you and neat rows of higgledy-piggledy Georgian houses behind. This is seaside on a small scale.
Compact fishing boats rear up from the shingle beach, each surrounded by a jumble of lobster pots, nets, flagged buoys and rope, mixed up with the primary colours of plastic crates. You catch that seaside whiff.
As you walk on, flowers begin to colonise the beach. Miles of clumped white, pink and red valerian are later joined by swathes of ox-eye daisies.
Up on the cliffs downland, flowers colour your way. Pink sainfoin runs through the grass, accompanied by the yellow gorse-like flowers of bird’s-foot-trefoil. Clumps of yellow kidney vetch remind me of tiny cowslips.
At times the air is full of birdsong. Invisible skylarks spill out their tuneful distortion of trills, conspicuous yellowhammers broadcast their classic ‘little bread and no cheese’ lament and posses of linnets warble, their breasts flushed with pink.
The sun coaxes out fritillaries and the rare Adonis Blue, one of several species of blue butterfly that thrive here.
St Margaret’s Bay, the closest you’ll get to France in the UK, provides a welcome interlude. A kiosk sells quality ice-cream and there’s a pub. A gorgeous walk along the White Cliffs of Dover follows.
Now and again a huge white buttress rises up in front– usually with some brave soul standing close to the edge; the decision to put nothing between the path and cliff edge has to be admired.
Towards the end of the walk is a bird’s-eye view of shabby Dover Port, the busiest ferry port in Europe, with its noise and trails of lorries. The walk ends with a stroll along Dover’s seafront, before you head into town to catch the train.
Details: 11 miles.
Best time to visit: last week of May.
Train: from 1 hour 25 mins.
Eat: Bring a picnic, but stop off at the Zetland Arms
Read: The best wild swimming near London
Cuxton
Once poppies were so abundant in cornfields they were considered a weed; today they only appear as an occasional clump at a field margin. The field of poppies on this walk was the first I’d seen.
I have to admit my heart raced a little as I reached the middle. This shortish walk around Ranscombe Farm, nestled in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, allows us to experience a lost world of wildflower meadows and arable fields alive with blossoms.
The flowers of greater knapweed sprout from small artichoke-like buds in woodland clearings and marble white butterflies are drawn to the purple of their catherine wheel flowers. In June, the giant, dandelion-like seed heads of goat’s-beard sit among the grass in Brockle’s Field alongside oxeye daisies, yellow hawks-beard, purple pyramidal orchids, pea-like vetch, ugly common broomrape, wild marjoram and plenty of other wildflowers.
July in Longhoes Field is sensational. Poppies mix with swathes of vivid blue viper’s bugloss, yellow St John’s wort and the seed heads of opium poppies.
Only 2 percent of the meadows present in the 1930s survive today. But there’s hope, as increasing numbers of farmers and landowners are showing an interest in reinstating wildflower, so hopefully our children and grandchildren will see less green concrete and many more wildflower meadows in their lifetime.
Best time to visit: mid June to mid July
Train: from 45 minutes
Eat: Take a picnic
- Frinton-on Sea to Walton-on-the Naze
This walk offers an interesting combination of Essex seaside resorts, followed by untouched wild coast. The trip takes in two seaside towns, miles of superb beaches, crumbling cliffs dribbling out fossils and salt marsh cut through by wide creeks.
It’s a walk for those who want to explore a bit more of our coastline, enjoy being by the sea all day and like to people watch.
The longer walk starts from posher Frinton-on-Sea. Bylaws, put in place a hundred years ago, were designed to create a more refined resort and dissuade ‘the wrong sort’. As a result there’s no pier, no pubs, no amusement arcades and no commerce on the seafront.
Instead, a wide green swathe runs along a high bank and below, a utilitarian concrete promenade supports an endless line of multicoloured beach huts that disappear into the distance.
In front, miles of flat, pristine sand is divided into rectangles by black breakwaters. There’s so much beach that families can have one of these sections of sand to themselves.
Beach huts are painted in blue, green, brown or grey, selected from the colour palate in Tendering Council's Beach Hut Strategy; a few have names: Heaven Sent, Sea Breeze, Playtime, Life is a Beach. Pastel bunting is strung inside, mugs decorated with brightly coloured seaside scenes balance on windowsills.
The smell of bacon wafts by. Silvered helium balloons in the shape of numbers sway in the large paneless windows. This is a place where families come to celebrate significant birthdays: one, 30, 50, 60. Outside, tables are laden with sausage rolls, plastic cartons of olives, crisps and cans of drink and three generations play frisbee and rounders on the sand below.
The sand is exquisite. When dry, it coats wet feet like flour; when wet it’s brilliant sandcastle material. A giant plastic ice cream cone welcomes you to Walton-on-the-Naze, quickly followed by the blast of noise from the fairground on the pier (the beginning of the shorter walk). Here brightly coloured beach huts are stacked in terraces.
Despite its popularity somehow Walton doesn’t make too much of itself and has a rather unassuming, almost sad seafront, although I do like the corner cafe, popular with old bikers and their muscular machines. Perhaps recent efforts to regenerate will bring a bit more of the glamour befitting a town that welcomed steam ships from London in its Victorian heyday.
After a bit of a trek along the seafront out of Walton, the route runs along the edge of the Naze, a peninsula nudging into the North Sea, comprised of grass, coastal heath, scrub woodland and saltmarsh.
The Naze Tower marks the beginning of the peninsula. Built in 1721, it served as a marker for ships, guiding them into Harwich. The tower is now a visitor attraction, incorporating an art gallery, viewing platform and cafe. The modern Naze visitor centre close by offers information on local history, wildlife, geology, and walks (and has a cafe attached).
Try to reach the Naze as the tide recedes or at low tide, so you can walk along the beach and maybe dabble in a bit of fossil hunting. Few will realise the white shells with a slight orange tinge are fossils, exuded from the sandy red crag at the top of the cliffs. You can’t miss these as you walk along the beach.
Families sifting through shingle are after shark teeth. The thin dark blades ending in a stubby root are so unblemished it’s hard to believe they are 54 million years old.
Heavy black fossils capture bark, twigs and even poo, in unnervingly intricate detail. Over the last 50 million years they’ve been transformed into fossils made of iron-rich pyrite and are gradually being released from London clay.
The clay accumulated at the bottom of a shallow sea that covered this area of Britain, when the whole of what we now call Britain sat hundreds of miles to the south, where Spain sits today.
Low tide is the best time to find fossils, when they are washed into the dips and channels that form in the slippery beach of London clay.
I have found fossils of fish vertebrae, squashed fruit, sharks’ teeth and handfuls of the more common wood and poo fossils. Flints fashioned by our prehistoric ancestors have also caught my eye, but the bird skeletons and the huge megalodon teeth have so far eluded me.
As you wander up the unspoilt coastline of the Naze, wide views across Pennyhole Bay to the distant port of Felixstowe and up the Essex coast are welcome vistas after boxed-in London.
At the top of the peninsula the landscape flattens and runs into salt marsh. This is a good place to sit, to listen to the sea and to hear the calls of the oystercatchers and little terns and to watch turnstones busy themselves along the water’s edge. You may even see a seal.
You can choose to walk along the sea wall to see the creeks and pools among the salt marsh of Hamford Water, before you walk back along the Naze through scrub woodland to the Naze Tower and retrace your steps to Walton.
This is a gentle, easy walk. A July or August visit allows full exposure to the seaside experience and the sea is a decent temperature for swimming.
When I get off the train back at Liverpool Street station, I feel as if I’ve been on holiday.
Best time to visit: July & August
Train: From 1 hour 35 minutes
Eat: in Frinton or the Naze
Walks extracted from Walks for each season: 26 great days out in the countryside near London by Julia Smith, out now (Corncockle publishing)
