Hello there,

My hubby and I live in London and were thinking it would be great to do a day trip to the Cotswolds to go for a walk this spring.

We plan to spend about a week there later in the year with my parents (my dad is from Gloucester) but just wanted a fun day out and would love to see the Cotswolds in the spring.

So my question is, can we leave London early, train somewhere in the Cotsolds, do a walk, and then train home early evening? Most websites advertise 3-5 day walking tours, but we are just looking for something different and fun to do on the weekend.

Thanks!
Jamie

The train to Charlbury (roughly hourly from Paddington: approx 75 mins journey) is your best bet, though later stations on the line to Worcester work too.

There's a book of walks based on the line ('From the Wye to the Thames'), letting you start at one station and end at another, available from www.clpg.co.uk. Charlbury's not got its act together to produce a downloadable map of its local walks: try the Jarrold's/OS little books, or the town's paper shop, which - as in every small town - stocks a good selection of local walk books.

I would take myself to a large bookstore and poke around in the travel section--you are sure to see books on Walks in the Cotswolds, an area which is covered with Public Footpaths. Doing much of a walk in one day is ambitious if you're going out by rail. The line you want runs out of Paddington station through Oxford to Moreton-in-Marsh. It might be a pretty village to poke around in and would have bus service to other key villages such as Stow on the Wold. Bottom line, there are day walks with strategically placed pubs--I'e done two short walks, one near Whichford and one around Minster Lovell which is pretty cool (for M.L., I think you would be better off taking the train to Oxford and a bus from there. Speaking of walks, if you haven't been to Oxford it's great for walking. Hope some more experienced walkers respond but as you live in London, you should have lots of local resources for research.

Thanks so much!!! Will definitely check out a travel bookshop this week. I know its ambitious to try to do in one, but we have 2 dogs and its quite costly to get a dog sitter for 2 days so that we can stay overnight.

Appreciate the help!

Jamie

If you're going to walk, don't you want to take the dogs with you? They'll be fine to take on the train.

We would love to take our dogs...but they are pugs, not exactly good walking dogs...but we would consider it if we could find a good B&B that accepts dogs.

There's nothing remotely tricky about doing this in one day. It IS difficult, though, to have a decent day's walk (ie, you have to get a train leaving London before sparrowsfart) if you faff about with bus connections.

On a Saturday when there's no engineering work (as there is about once every six months), the 0851 from Paddington gets you into Charlbury at 1006. A nice 8-10 mile, six hour walk, of which an hour is stopping off at a boozer, will get you back to the station for the 1535 or 1735 train back, arriving 1659 or 1859.

Oxfordshire Country Walks: Vol 1 (Evenlode and Wychwood) by Mary Webb and Alan Spicer (published by the Artisan Press, Winscombe) is good on this part of the Cotswolds. I strongly disagree about Oxford: it's a great place for interesting urban walks (with a surprising amouint of industrial archaeology), but it's not the Cotswolds and "country" walks starting from Oxford are simply suburban.

Thanks so much!! Will check out all of this info!