I had an idea a while back that it would be great to walk round Greater London.
The whole way round the boundary, all of it, over the course of a year.
It's only 160 miles so perfectly doable.
It'd be an epic challenge, and very bloggable, and very much on-brand.
I seriously considered it.
I even made a map.
This was when the scale of the task became more apparent.
You can't walk directly along the border, you have to follow neighbouring roads and paths instead, and these often go nowhere near. Drawing a possible route therefore involves numerous significant wiggles whichever way you choose to go. The periphery of Havering is particularly tortuous, the edge of Kingston is ridiculous and the M1 creates a formidable barrier. All of this could add considerably to the length of the walk. But the public footpath network is often impressively dense, the boundary often crosses suburbs rather than fields and even the Thames estuary isn't an insurmountable problem if you start and finish alongside it. So it could be done.
The key issue turned out to be how to define the rationale for the route. Do you walk as close to the boundary as possible, do you stay within the capital at all times or do you try to walk around the outside without ever entering it? The first of these turns out to be quite subjective, for example do you prioritise short-term proximity over longer distance savings? The other two options are much better defined but also much more restrictive, for example forcing the route round ridiculous backwater paths you'd never choose to follow otherwise.
An objective definition is important so I plumped for "staying within the capital at all times" and that's the red line I drew on my map. It got a bit silly in Woodford, Chingford and Chessington, and it meandered a lot in multiple locations, but it was 200 miles long and it was doable. I split it up into monthly chunks - that's the yellow pins - so March would have been Hainault to Ponders End and October would have been Coulsdon to Biggin Hill. And then I looked into actually walking it and decided against.
A lot of the walk would be a repeat, so for example the start of January rehashed London Loop section 1 and July revisited section 12. A lot of the walk just missed something interesting, and what's the point in investing a year encircling London only to see the dull stuff? Some of the walk followed paths I didn't particularly want to follow again having found them quite oppressive the first time round, for example along the eastern edge of Havering. Essentially it was a great rationale but a bad walk, and you'd have found three dozen posts about it bloody boring.
Also the more I looked at my route the more I realised I'd drawn it wrong. I'd followed alleyways that weren't there, I'd missed umpteen shortcuts that actually existed and on numerous occasions I'd selected a path that strayed out of London making the route invalid. If I set out in January I realised I'd never get to December having perfectly followed the correct route, for multiple reasons, so my attempt to walk round London's boundary was doomed to technically fail. This is why you have never read about me doing it (nor, as far as I'm aware, anybody else).
I was reminded of this on Sunday when I found myself in Joyden's Wood. This would have cropped up quite late in my anti-clockwise circuit, less than ten miles from the end, here following paths I'd never walked along before. I even knew precisely which paths because Bexley have a very good public rights of way map which entirely excludes Kent. While I'm here, I thought, I should walk from Joyden's Wood to Ruxley to see what the path's like and so I can say that I've been. A walk through a wood followed by a dogleg across a farm - or so it appeared on amap - should have been an easy enough mile-long connection. But no.
You enter Chalk Wood from a gate in the southeastern corner of Joyden's Wood, the corner that's busier with horses than with walkers. The bridleway which passes through is a broad swathe of mud, and that's in August, intermittently marked with horseshoe-shaped depressions. It also marks the London/Kent boundary, which would have put it on my round-London walk, and everything on the far side is fractionally inside the capital. Here I discovered that Chalk Wood is essentially a bridleway circuit, a completely separate loop, with several acres of thick un-horsed woodland in the middle. The yellow footpath arrow seemed quite keen that I get off the bridleway at the earliest possible opportunity, so I stepped through the wooden fence and then wondered where the path was.
It was faint but followable, heading off into the trees in a "well this is probably it" kind of way. Sometimes there was a clear break in the vegetation but often my way was crossed by prickly brambles and I was pleased I hadn't worn shorts or a smart pair of trousers. More than once I kept going because the map had said so, not because the undergrowth suggested it. I felt increasingly alone, so much so that I 'knew' I'd meet nobody coming the other way despite all the human activity in the other wood nextdoor. It was freeing. It went on a bit. It was more than a little eerie. Eventually I reached the top of a steep slope, the kind it's easy to miss unless your map is Ordnance Survey, and the state of the footpath ebbed even further. If I trip and fall here, I thought, it could be hours (or longer) before anyone finds me.
It was a relief to finally reach the farside of the wood, and also a thrill because I'd finally located a denehole. This is a medievalchalk pit, one of several in the area but the sole example on a public right of way. It would have been dug around the turn of the 14th century and was in use until the 16th, with the chalk often used by local farmers to enrich the acidic soil. This particular pit is 10m deep with a dome shaped cavern at the bottom, hence potentially quite dangerous. In 1881 a young man stepped backwards into it while nut-gathering and was only discovered three days later when two men and a dog walked by. Poor Mr Glossop died from his injuries a year later, which is one reason why the denehole is now entirely surrounded by a sturdy metal fence. The bats prefer it that way too.
Departing Chalk Wood the footpath then has to thread across Honeydale Farm, whose owners would clearly prefer it wasn't here. They've erected dozens of notices telling pesky ramblers not to interfere with the horses, or try to feed them, even to encourage them to walk over, also the fences are electric, also private property, also no trespassing. The owners hold regular car boot sales in the lower field so they're not exactly averse to visitors, but walking the long track between the paddocks I still felt like an unwelcome visitor. The undulating rural landscape was rather attractive, at least for London, but as I emerged by the farm shop I still wasn't sure it had been worth the jungle trek though Chalk Wood.
The edge of London is a fascinating place but I won't be deliberately circumnavigating it, and my hike to Ruxley had only helped to crystallise that feeling. The loop's too long, too mundane, too prescriptive and simultaneously too inexact, and would ultimately end up being nothing proper to boast about.
Also the year I'd considered undertaking the circuit but never did was 2020... so I'd never have finished it anyway. I take that as a sign to never even try.
