St. Peter's Way（Stage1; Chipping Ongar - Stock）
We started to walk St. Peter's Way in Essex. It's a total of 41 miles from Chipping Ongar to the ancient chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell on Sea. The route is partly the same as the Essex Way that we walked last year. I didn't expect to go back to Chipping Ongar again. Most of people seems dividing into 3 stages. We decided to walk to Stock because of bus service. It's about 13 miles.
The start was no problem. It was mostly crossing the fields. Well..., walking is always something like that, but we crossed the middle of the fields, not the edge of the fields. We prepared OS map and printed guidebook of the St Peter's Way from the website (PDF; www.essexhighways.org/uploads/files/st_peters_way.pdf).
After we passed High Ongar, we found the sign and the guidebook route were different from the route on the OS map. We followed the sign and the guidebook and I think it was correct. If you get lost, I recommend you to follow the sign.
It has been nice weather, so the ground was completely dry. But this image and condition reminded me of muddy path after the rain...
We went a long way around, I was losing energy before lunch... but we continued to walk towards the church in Blackmore.
The church was fascinating. It's a joy to visit a church and look around inside every time we walk, but unfortunately this church door was locked...
After the break, we started to walk again. Blackmore is a lovely village. As the road sign 'Slow', the ducks were walking around.
We walked and crossed the fields.
We walked towards the A12, there should be the tunnel under the busy road. But we were stuck. There was no tunnel. We got a wrong route without notice, so we corrected the route walking through another public footpath. We found the tunnel and walked through it under the A12 but the next tunnel under the railway was extremely dark and long... We ran through without looking back, because we felt scared... Grrrr.
Our walk is always like a incident-filled journey. It's full of adventures. Went and back, we made mistakes around the village Stock.
If you see this mountain of gravel, that means you went wrong like us. :p You had to turn aside to the left...
At the farm, cows for were waiting us.
There were no proper sign of 'St. Peter's Way' around here, and we were confused. It was early for sunset, but getting dark because of clouds. We felt a bit lonely because we hadn't walked through a golf course and Swan Wood yet. We said we would need to sleep in the open to be funny. But everything was OK. We arrived at the bus stop in Stock safely.
