Ray and I had seen signs for this attached to some footpath signs in the Pinkneys Green area, and had thought a while back that we might walk it. In total it’s a 13-mile route, but we decided to do it in two halves: today we did the bit that passes to the north of the town and will hopefully do the southern bit at the end of January. It’s walked as an annual sponsored walk organized by the local Rotary.
Helpfully there’s a .gpx file of the route (below) which we used in the GPX Viewer app.
We used two cars; Ray parked in the car park at Boulters Lock and I picked him up from there and drove us to the Thicket car park near the A404 roundabout. From there we walked to the point where the route crosses the A4 near the Shire Horse pub, as Ray wanted to start from there. (In the picture above, the route can be seen crossing the A4 (Bath Road) on the left side of the image.)
We walked northwards through Maidenhead Thicket, past Stubbings Nursery and under the A404 to come out on Henley Road near Stubbings village.
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| Our starting point |
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| Setting off through Maidenhead Thicket |
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| Peeping through trees at the big house at Stubbings |
For road geeks: the now-unclassified Henley Road was formerly the A423 until the 1990s, and even more formerly (pre-1935) the A415.
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| Henley Road at Stubbings |
We crossed the road and continued north-east along the exclusive Darling’s Lane and across the top of the common at Pinkneys Green to cross the A308 opposite the Golden Ball pub.
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| Crossing the common |
We passed the Brick & Tile Works site, though didn’t detour into it. Ray told me that when the buildings were still standing, he and a friend once illicitly entered the site and the friend took a load of photographs. He apparently gave Ray copies of these photographs but Ray wasn’t sure whether he still had them. A shame if not as an internet search didn’t turn up any photographs of the buildings and I imagine there would be local interest in them.
We walked along Malders Lane until the junction with Cannon Court Road.
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| Looking back westwards along Malders Lane |
We stopped at the Costa at the row of shops on Shifford Crescent (the Cliveden View Shopping Centre, apparently) for tea and a toastie, and to use their facilities.
We continued on, turning left onto Gardner Road and crossing the railway (the Marlow branch line) just as a train was passing.
We walked through a housing development and onto a lane leading out onto fields. We crossed a footbridge over a waterway (Strand Water) and then followed a path leading north for a while.
We turned right onto a larger path that’s also a cycle path and headed eastwards to skirt the southern edge of Widbrook Common. There are gravel workings in this area but they’re fenced off.
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| Tree on Widbrook Common |
The route then crosses the A4094 and goes across Battlemead Common (thought to have been the site of two historic battles, apparently). There’s a footpath across this leading to the Thames Path, but a passing walker told us that this was currently closed – evidently it’s closed over the winter months to protect bird habitats. This meant we had to take a detour - thankfully easily followed - that added about half a mile to the overall walk length.
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| Thames view; Cliveden estate opposite |
We joined the (muddy) Thames Path and made our way south back to Boulters Lock.
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| A boundary marker by the Thames Path |
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