15/05/21 - Chiltern Chain Walk - Stage 11 - Prestwood

Distance - 13 Miles

Geocaches - 5

Walk Inspiration

Previous Stages - Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4, Stage 5, Stage 6, Stage 7, Stage 8, Stage 9, Stage 10

Two things are guaranteed as a Rambler;

Guarantee 1 - If you don full hardshell waterproofs, top and bottom, it will not rain. This is regardless of how angry the sky looks or the forecast.

Guarantee 2 - If a walk shows a high number of big blue cups of joy (BBCOJ) on the OS Map, they will have no doubt have disappeared, been converted into houses or you are passing them too early.

Stage 11 of the Chiltern Chain Walk promised 4 watering holes. I came home dry, both within and without.

The walk is very typical of what I have found in the Chilterns. It is pretty. There are excellent paths.  There's little of real interest.

This is a mixture of interchangeable dense woodland and agricultural fields.  If you like bluebells, then mid May is the time to do it. 

Plenty of Bluebells - This in Peterley Woods

When you're not in woods, you're looking at these sort of views

So the pubs.  Far too early in the day, the Full Moon in Little Kingshill.  Garden Marquee that will be functional for at least two more days and an idyllic looking country pub.  10am is not the time to be walking past - so note to future self - do the route in reverse.

The Full Moon - Little Kingshill

The next one of note required a little investigation as to its fate.  My elderly OS Map has the BBCOJ at the end of a dead end lane in Little Hampden Common.  Its now about 1pm and the water supply is perilously low.  However, all I can see are a row of houses.

Its not necessarily a surprise that a pub in such a remote location has gone and I do find a couple to ask of it's fate.  The lady launched into a diatribe about how criminal it was that the Rising Sun had been converted into a private house around 10 years ago.  If she had been canvassing for votes last week, she would have had a convert.

The Rising Sun - as it was. 

Her information gives me something to work with when I get back on line.

One of the last reviews on Beer In The Evening in 2012;

drove all the way up to find this pub, only to find out im a couple of years late. sad.

Looking further on that site it talks about a miserable landlord who wouldn't let ramblers eat their own sandwiches in his garden and moaning about them coming in with muddy boots.  Who'd be in hospitality eh?  Although £3 for half an orange juice and lemonade sounds expensive now but this was 2008.

And it could have been a Good Beer Guide Tick, if I had a time machine.  This from 1983 - where it must have been the same angry, muddy boot hating landlord..

Splendidly placed for walks in the Chilterns, this pub has a big inglenook fireplace to stretch your legs in front of in its quarry-tiled public bar (get the mud off your boots first, though, or they won't let you in). There are comfortable seats around the tables in the Turkey-carpeted lounge bar, which does a brisk trade in big helping of ploughman's (£1.10), jacket potatoes filled with cottage cheese and fruit (£1.50), smoked mackerel (£1.80), moussaka, lasagne and herby sausagemeat pie (£2.30). A separate restaurant which opened in the spring of 1983 specialises in fish (closed Sunday evening and Monday). Well-kept Adnams, Brakspears Special, Greene King Abbot and Sam Smith on handpumps; darts, shove-ha'penny and dominoes in the public bar. A pretty back garden slopes up behind the plain brick house, and there are tables among some roses on the sloping grass in front. Though the lane peters out here, bridle paths lead on through the woods both to Coombe Hill (National Trust - with fine views) and to Dunsmore, about a mile away.

I'm sure there is a German word for missing something you never knew.  I am feeling it now.