July 18, and 19 Ludlow

 Max took a train a little after 7:00 to make his way to London via Newport and then on to Heathrow.  It is already lonely without him.  I took off on a walk through the Mortimer Forest.  Mortimer, remember him?  He's the guy who has the trail form hell—at least near Kington— named after him, and ALSO a forest!  Ludlow is one end of the trail and Kington the other.  The Forest is better than the walk—which, in all honesty, is not the fault of Mortimer but of property owners who make devilish changes to a route.  Back to the forest: It even has trees:

Some really pretty ones:

But the woods are not so benign as you would think.  Remember Little Red Riding hood?

The walk took up a good portion of the day.  After refreshing, I took off for the Tesco to buy a loaf of bread.  It is a good thing I did not have to  go to the bathroom.

Why they have to advertise IN SUCH BIG LETTERS that the toilets don't work, I do not understand. (The sign reminds me of other irritating signage such as "can tuna.")

The next stage of the walk is from Ludlow to Wheat Hill.  From Wheat Hill you have to take a taxi back to Ludlow (try that for fun), OR you could take a taxi to Wheat Hill and walk back to Ludlow.  I was contemplating the latter, but somehow just did not have a good feeling about it, so I decided to walk about half way there and walk back.  And that is what I did.

Maybe it was the rain (not too bad) or the humidity (high) or the challenges (many) or the elevation (lots), or all of the above, but I found this outing demanding.  Most of the route was lovely,  especially the return, which was mostly downhill and because of the direction, you don't have to turn around ton see the the very pleasant views:

This is a pipe bridge:

It is a pipe bridge—hang on to your hats for this bit—because in addition to there being a pedestrian bridge, there are big pipes going across.  Yes, sir!

And they don't want any shenanigans at the bridge, either!

My question is:  Is the danger from falling into the abyss or from those spikes?

Speaking of danger, Max would not have liked walking through this field:

But, again, the real danger seems to be related to crossing the street:

This field was a killer.  It was huge and there was no path through the wheat where there was supposed to be a path.  Figuring out what to do took a long time...both going and returning, although on the return I managed an efficient detour...there is luck in that, though, because you never know if you will be able to access a gate or there will be some manner of egress. 

I was so glad the the fallen tree was not the means of crossing:

Directional posts such as these are not helpful:

Nor is this remnant of a stile:

If I were a cow and wanted a drink, how much would I want to wade through that huge, deep, muddy puddle?

As a human, how much to I want to scale that barbed wire wrapped fence in order to get to the adjacent field?

You couldn't see it from there—which, let me tell you, was VERY ANNOYING—but about 50 feet farther along, there was a stile.  When you  were coming from the other direction, it was perfectly obvious.  That is how these thing are sometimes.