Brighstone walk

Today was lovely again so we decided to do another walk.  This is a circular walk where you start and finish in the same place. It seemed more oval to me but who am I to say.  We started in a village called Brighstone in the south of the island towards the west.

Brighstone church has had three of their vicars who became bishops, so the pub in the village is the Three Bishops.  One of those bishops was Samuel Wilberforce, the son of William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner.

After leaving the village we climbed a beautiful path that was overgrown with wild flowers.

This took us to our next path along the cliffs.

We walked towards the forest you can see in the distance.

I had a bit of trouble climbing these trees, well it is only Mini-Kolo here and I am not as experienced as Kolo with all this and they were high trees.

We had quite a steep climb in the forest and then walked along this beautiful path.  After leaving the forest we walked across some fields.

This took us to a road which we needed to walk along for just a few minutes and then a long a beautiful field path until we reached the longstone.

Now nobody is 100% sure what this is but these two stones are thought to have marked the entrance to a neolithic burial ground around 5,000 years ago.

We carried on along footpaths that took us up onto the downs.

I could see towards the western tip of the island from here and I could even see Portland Bill in Dorset in the background.  We had a long but more gentle climb up to this neolithic burial mound on top of the downs.

There are quite a few of these in the west of the island.  After the burial mound we stopped briefly as somebody had not had enough breakfast and needed to eat one of their sandwiches.

Then we walked on along the top of the downs and slowly descended until we had to cross a road.  We climbed up along the edge of Brighstone Forest.  We must be getting close to the end of the walk.

Before turning down to Brighstone I looked back at where I had been.  I could see the cliffs at Freshwater int he distance, where I was on Friday.

It was a long walk.  After that we needed to get back down to Brighstone.  This involved descending two quite steep paths, where humans and young baboons need to watch where they are putting their feet and being careful not to fall over.  There were beautiful wild flowers but we couldn't stop.

Finally we arrived back in Brighstone.  I am sitting outside the town museum and library, the next thatched building is the post office and at the back you can see the thatched village shop.  It was a lovely walk and we were tired, so we ate out sandwiches here and then came home to have a Sunday afternoon nap.