As mentioned before, this series of walks is all about getting into the great outdoors with my son Jake, along with getting in some good walking with my friend Matt. Matt is a keen photographer and always has a top of the range model with him. I've got his permission to share some of the pictures on here to show interesting parts of the route, but firstly, I want to give you a sense of what we look like walking along:
The route starts off in the car park of Golden Acre Park, goes around the pond and follows the Meanwood Valley Trail (a wonderful 7 mile walk from Golden Acre through Scotland Wood and Meanwood Park right down onto Woodhouse Moor) out of the park. The thing that always strikes me about living in North Leeds is just how easy it is to forget that you live in one of the biggest cities in the UK. Within a couple of minutes of leaving the park, all you can see is fields and trees for miles:
After leaving the park, the route takes you along a road for a short while before entering some of the best woodland that I've seen. It may be due to the fact that I find woods in the winter when you can see interesting shapes fascinating, but as you walk along the edge between the wood and the fields, you get a sense of the quietness of the place:
The woods sadly soon drop away and after joining a main road for a short while, you clamber over a stile and into the first of many fields. Fortunately, we did this walk before all the snow arrived so the going was fairly easy. The first field we came to respected the rights of the walker to such an extent that the farmer had avoided ploughing the public access path making for an easy walk. The path then goes through a series of hedgerows, where we weren't as lucky with the going underfoot:
Fortunately, we were both well equipped with a decent pair of hiking boots (yet another purchase to help me be outside with Jake as much as possible!) and after helping Jake fight off some low hanging branches, we reached one of the more confusing parts of the walk. This part revolves around following boundary lines between fields, but with little signage and plenty of walking tracks to be seen, we spent a while following the wrong route that eventually petered off into a field. It was around this time that Jake decided he was starving, so we decided to take stock, drink some coffee and feed him. This allowed us to re-read the instructions, pin point our wrong turn and head back into the fields:
It was this time that we discovered one of the vagaries of the instruction leaflets for the LCW. Whilst it's great at telling you when and where to turn and what you should be looking out for, it fails to omit fairly major landmarks or points of interest (for more on this, see the next post about the Bingley Arms). The leaflet tells you to walk past Stubb Farm on your left, but forgets to mention that you'll walk past this on your right:
You can't help but feel that more people would do the LCW if it mentioned interesting facts like the fact that you'll be able see right into the Emmerdale set! We spent a while trying to work out if the buildings were real (we decided in the end that they were), before heading in the grounds of Harewood House and making our way to our lift (thank you, kind wife!) at the Lofthouse Gates.
Total distance - 5 miles
Total time - 3 hours (includes 30 minutes for coffee/baby time!)
Cumulative distance - 5 miles
Cumulative walking time - 2.5 hours
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