6th December 2008
For a sunny late afternoon I chose a lovely muddy tramp through one of my favourite places locally. Telegraph Woods is beautiful at any time of year. In the winter it has a sparse beauty with a forest of pale beeches facing tall dark pine trees across the wide main path through the woodland.
I chose to follow one of the more indistinct paths which winds through pine trees into more ancient woodland of beech and oak. The trail is one of the type that is not clearly marked and often looks as if it's coming to a dead end, but is always there and the apparent dead end is a tight corner in the narrow path leading you on.
It was very muddy and so, of course, great fun. The path ran down behind a small woodland lake and up again to emerge beside a fence that separates the woodland from the Rose Bowl Cricket Ground. However, as you come down to the radar gate on to the footpath that runs down beside the golf course, there is a clear view down into the cricket ground and then a fabulous view out over the countryside to the north.
I came back to the main path and soon diverged off it to descend a stepway to a lower path which runs around the base of the ancient earthworks and rises again to a fork. I took the right-hand fork back to the main path. I only cleaned my boots a couple of days ago; they're covered in mud again!
Near the main entrance to the woodland from Telegraph Road there is a perfect circle of open space which has a low wooden barrier running around it to mark the position of an ancient Beacon, one of a chain fired to raise the alarm that the Spanish Armada was approaching the coast of Britain, during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Just inside this entrance, nailed to a tree, is a sign: No fires are to be lit in these woods ...
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