24/08/12 Wyre Forest to Clifton- upon- Tyne

After Cognac had a big bowl of beet pulp and mix for breakfast, thank- you to Graham, we set out through Wyre forest. Really pleasant forest tracks. We thought we had hit a dead end a one point, we wiggled a long way down a little single track country road to the very end, where we were planning on following a bridleway into Wyre Forest, however at the very end of this road, at the start of the bridleway was a notice to say that the bridleway was out of order as the bridge has been broken during recent flash floods. A wave of annoyance flushed through me as I thought about the long, windy road I would have to go back along to find a detour around, but seen as we had got this far and considering what we had traversed already I figured it was worth a look and that we may be able to avoid the bridge and ford the river instead. Indeed we could and we soon got onto a lovely, wide forest track that wiggled along the river bank.

That afternoon, the weather really started to change and it was threatening to rain any minute, we pressed on and it held off. We stopped at the Bridge as their overflow car park was full of lush grass and Cognac was telling me he was hungry (dragging me to a verge at every opportunity. We then planned to follow a bridleway straight up and over the hill and to drop into Clifton- upon- Teme. However it was so over grown we got lost in the woods, which was so steep and over grown, I started to worry we would ever see daylight again, this conveyed to Cognac and he started to get edgy too, at this point I was worried he would knock me out on a tree branch of trip over a tree root, or get tangled in brambles and panick and, and... anyway we survived with just a few scratches and managed to cut across a field back onto the road. The only alternative was to go all the way along the road to the bottom, along a busy road and then back up the over side of the hill, this added a good 3-4 miles onto our day and that rain we had managed to avoid all day had started to fall. The annoyance I felt soon subsided as we found a bridleway further down (still an extra 3 miles on our day) that took us to the top of a grassy field and we could turn and back South on the land still to cover and the Malvern hills rising up in front of us in the distance- We wouldn't have seen this glorious view if we had got over on the original bridleway.