About | A Trip Out

We started building this website during the pandemic of 2020 as a way of trying to remember and piece together some of the many long country walks we’d undertaken over the previous seven years or so. Our memories were quite sketchy and it was often difficult to pinpoint things that had happened or sites we had visited. Some of the walks required replotting to work out exactly where we’d gone. We also realised the photos we’d both taken were now stored and buried across many different devices.

This is why we are calling it a blog. It was initially a way of recalling, retracing and reliving some great days out. But you can’t really write a blog retrospectively. So we decided to use the site to share our walks with a wider audience. Many of them have been revisited – and sometimes slightly revised (we would often combine the walks with going to gigs or other activities, so in a few instances the original exact destinations or routes would not make a lot of sense to other people).

If you do try any of our walks, we are sure you will enjoy them as much as we did. We have included alternative routes or diversions for a lot of them, so they are easily customisable. If nothing else, we hope some of the visitors to this site are inspired to create their own. We both live in London and, although we love our city, in our view there is nothing more revitalising than getting out into the country for the day and discovering and exploring new places. A tonic for the soul, indeed.

Happy wanderings,

Kev & Becky

Welcome to our walking blog

The Walks

The walks on this website are all ones we have completed in the last ten years. With a couple of exceptions (which we decided to include simply because they were so great!), they are all in the south of England and are 'commutable' from London. They are between five and 15 miles long (average distance 10.5) and can all be completed in a single day.

As all the walks were individually devised, they do not always follow obvious, well-trodden routes and include both long-distance and local footpaths, as well as sections of the national trails.

They feature some of the best scenery in southern England and encompass a diverse range of landscapes. When we were planning the walks, we would always try to cram in as many sites of interest as possible, whether they were ancient churches, old trackways, beautiful villages or just intriguing places to stop and explore. Many include prehistoric sites, so if you have an interest in Neolithic burial mounds, stone circles or chalk hill figures you have come to the right place. We hope you enjoy the panels we have created for each walk, which illustrate people or features of interest we discovered in connection with the routes.

All the walks are accessible by public transport (with the exception of some emergency cabs, no cars were used in the making of this website). Each one begins and ends at a train station or bus stop. This means you can take full advantage of the village pubs and local ale – in our view, key components of any good walk! (We have included a selection of the best pubs for each route).

However, if you want to drive, a lot of the walks are circular, or near-circular – and even for those that are not, it should usually be fairly straightforward to return to the starting point.

We will be adding more walks as and when we do them (please send us your suggestions).

How to use this site
Access the Map & Walks Index page to view the location of the walks and a full index, with terrain ratings and distances. The page for each walk includes a link to a map of the route on the Plotaroute website and details of how to get there by public transport. For more information and advice, please go to the Tips & Resources page.

What we love

Live music (a lot of these walks were devised to make a day out of going to a gig), the band Sea Power – formerly British Sea Power (the title of this site is also the name of one of their songs), Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian (a constant companion – see the panel on walk 51), craft beer, real ale and tap rooms, megaliths and monoliths, street art, folklore, Eric Ravilious, the walking guides of SPB Mais, Ordnance Survey maps...

Word!

This is a blog not a professional walking site – so we accept no responsibility for you getting lost, missing the last bus or otherwise coming a cropper. All the details are to the best of our knowledge correct, but we encourage everyone to do their own research before setting off.

Please do not copy the photos without asking permission first as they are (mostly) our handiwork.

Feedback

We would love to hear from you if you have attempted any of our walks or if you have any tips to share, such as any sites of interest we may have missed or corrections to the routes. Also, please let us know if any of the pubs we mention have closed (or reopened!). And, of course, if there are any great walks you think we should try. Please reach us via the Contact page.

You can also follow #TripOutWalks on Twitter and Instagram.

Full-day country walks in SE England and beyond

Welcome to our walking blog

Full-day country walks in
SE England and beyond