M&G's Blog: Wednesday 23 September - Staffordshire Way (Pt 6)

Where's Bertie? He's at Wolverley Camping & Caravanning Club Site at a total cost, for 2 nights, of £40.55 for a grass pitch without electricity.

Weather: A few light showers, but otherwise sunny intervals and warm.

I needed Mick to drive me back to the Way this morning, but I wasn't in any urgent rush to get going, so we had a moderately leisurely start. At the other end of the day I could have walked all the way to tonight's campsite, which would have added 3km onto the end of the Staffordshire Way, but with the earliest permitted arrival time at today's campsite being, 1pm and with feasible intermediate meeting points, I opted to first meet him in a cafe in Enville, then in the parking area on the fringe of Kinver Edge, with Kinver being the decision point as to whether I would stop or go on.

Mick had already had coffee and cake by the time I arrived in Enville, so I just had a pot of tea - perfectly timed to arrive at the table just as I walked through the door. With more perfect timing, it rained sharply whilst we were in there. I'd set out a couple of hours earlier in a very light mizzle that only lasted for a few minutes, and another bit of mizzle hit not long after I left Enville, but it soon passed through.

The last four kilometres of the Way are decidedly undulating, but each little ascent was countered by a nice runnable descent.

I didn't do the final ascent, up to the Way's end point in the middle of Kinver Edge, as Mick said he'd join me to do it as part of a circuit on Friday, when we intend to return to see the cave houses (not open today). By the time we'd had lunch in Bertie (during which time the heaviest rain of the day fell, but aside from the perfect timing of me not being out in it, it wasn't anything remarkable), it was gone 1pm so to the campsite we came.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've covered 110km of the 158km-long Staffordshire Way. Of the bits that I've missed, I know that the 12km on the canal near/through Rugeley then across Cannock Chase are mainly good and I've no doubt that the final 1.5km onto Kinver Edge will be lovely too. That leaves 34km currently unknown, but even so my early assessment of 50/50 good and bad needs to be revised significantly upwards in favour of good. I really did wonder at one point whether this route only had merit for its first 20km, it's final few km, and across Cannock Chase in the middle, with the rest being at best mediocre stitching together of those features, but I'm pleased to say that fear seems to be unfounded.

That said, a bit of maintenance and a scattering of new Way Markers would definitely not go amiss!

This snap isn't overly representative, but the wooded ridge of Abbot's Castle Hill was pleasant

Forest Covert was also a pleasant woodland with a myriad of paths. There were waymarks, but often not in the most helpful of places.

After good paths all the way through, the correct exit from Forest Covert wasn't obvious. The chap who recorded the gpx file I was using detoured through the field to the left of the boundary as shown in this photo (this is looking back into the woods); I tried a different path but ended up on a road adjacent to the woods. Having walked the perimeter to see where I should have come out, I saw that the route runs along the right hand side of this field boundary. I was glad not to have taken it!

Spot the stile. It'd be easy to continue straight on along the field, but if you look carefully the path goes over a stile, through all those brambles on the left.