Last walk of the Year - Breaston

Thursday 31st December
It was a lovely day today –cold crisp and bright and after the excesses of Christmas we needed a walk. We drove to Breaston which is close to Long Eaton. On the way we drove past a spot where we should have emerged on a path during the latter part of our walk, only to discover that the path was within a Severn Trent water works and meant that we would not be able to do that stage. We parked opposite the church and set off across the fields. Our path was quite dry but the rest of the field was under water and the next field which was also flooded had a horse standing in the water. Our field contained a couple of rams, with very impressive horns, who decided to take an interest in us, luckily we were quickly over the stile, as I think they could have done quite a bit of damage! We crossed the railway and walked along a pleasant lane to a new plantation known as Orchid wood. There was a cache in the nature reserve so we diverted off the path and did a lap around the reserve, finding the cache on the way. A lady passed us with two dogs one of which was very bouncy but after a stern “Sit” from John he promptly obeyed. We continued along the footpath and arrived at Church Wilne. There was a lake here called St Chad’s Water and after finding a cache we decided on a complete lap of the lake, to make up for having the latter stage of our walk cut short. There were lots of birds on the lake, which was frozen at the edges, including swans, moorhens and cormorants. We continued our walk along the road and then crossed a bridge into a field and followed the footpath to Great Wilne. We checked the map to see how the walk should continue and found that we could do a little more and then use the MidShires way to head back towards Breaston. It was a lovely walk even though it was a series of small circles. We found 5 caches and walked 10.5km.
We managed to walk 1276 km this year, a slight improvement on last years 1208 km.
The camera was found (left in the caravan) so Ican now start adding pictures again!