26/11/16 - The Red Lion, Cropredy - Millennium Way Stage 42

Distance - 8 Miles
Geocaches - 3
Walk Inspiration


The countdown to the end of the Millennium Way begins in earnest.  Just three stages left.

A return to Cropredy - a small, two pub town on the Oxfordshire / Northamptonshire border.  I've walked here once before, breaking up a journey back on the M40.

Straight down onto the canal, where a full on regatta is taking place.  A few paces before heading East alongside the River Cherwell, passing Prescote Manor.

Canal Action

Prescote Manor

The walk takes me across fields and along lanes, passing through Wardington and Edgcote, finding the only caches of the day, before deliverance in Chipping Warden.

Nice looking place, Chipping Warden - proud of its history.  There are information boards to the civil war battle sites and a town standard featuring a medieval yokel bothering the farm stock as a WWII Lancaster Bomber flies overhead.   Two pubs, but the Rose and Crown looks long dead.

Chipping Warden Church

Yokel. Pigs.  Bomber.

The Millennium Way shares paths with the McMillan Way over farmland.  Route finding is easy, in a first - someone has spray painted the footpaths.  These lead back to the Oxford Canal at Claydon Locks.

Easy Path Marking

Picking up the Oxford Canal

No one else using the towpath today - I have two quiet miles passing moored barges, a couple of boatyards and a marina.

Just the post walk refreshments to knock off.  Cropredy has two pubs - The Brasenose Arms is shunned for the Red Lion.  It must have been the advertising.

Good Advertising

But Someone's not been paying their dues

The pub is picture post card perfect.  Thatched roof building in a terrace of similar buildings along a hidden, very narrow lane and directly opposite the Church.

The Red Lion

I deboot, enter and get looked up and down by the two old boys at the bar who are getting tips on the use of Tinder from the young bar man.  The Scot sees potential but the cockney is horrified at the type of woman who would advertise.  I am forced to invade their space to eye up the wares.

A top quality Purity Ubu was chosen in preference to the ubiquitous Doom Bar.

Purity - Not Hook Norton