Burnham Beeches

Burnham Beeches

A lovely sunny autumn morning and I made an impromptu decision to go immediately out for a walk. And where better on such a day than Burnham Beeches? Not everybody knows that it is owned by the City of London, who bought the site in 1879 when it was on sale as land for housing. It is now maintained as a nature reserve. One manifestation of this is that fallen branches are left in place, unlike at Westonbirt Arboretum, where we walked a few days ago, which is remarkable clean and tidy beneath the trees.

Equipped with an excellent leaflet, available from the information centre, I set off along Halse Drive, one of the main routes into the wood. I had roughed out a clockwise circular walk to get a good sense of the Beeches.



After a short distance, in a dip, I turned left onto a footpath named Victoria Drive. Already I appreciated the discrete names for all the pathways which are displayed at major junctions. Burnham Beeches is not as dense as many woodlands, but these signs certainly deal with the greater risk of getting lost when on a walk through woods. We saw the same sort of thing on a much larger scale in the forest of Fontainebleau recently.



After a while, approaching the road which bounds this side of the woods, I turned off onto a smaller path to the right to walk parallel with it. I emerged at the junction of Green Lane, Pumpkin Hill and Park Lane and walked up the quiet Park Lane with woodland on both sides. I soon re-entered the wood and headed along McAuliffe Drive.


The wood was more open here and soon looked even more different as the beeches gave way to Silver Birch and Oak. Crossing Halse Drive again, I continued on the delightful Burnham Walk - possibly the prettiest of the paths so far.




This curved round to again reach Halse Drive where I planned to retrace my original path back to the start. However, I was enjoying it too much to stop, and I spotted an opportunity to turn the route into a figure of eight and see some more corners of the wood. I headed across and quickly turned left up Mendelssohn's Slope ...



... to eventually reach another of the main thoroughfares, Lord Mayor's Drive, where I had noticed the Druid's Oak marked on the map. This turned out to be a battered, pollarded oak, 800 years old - the oldest tree in Burnham Beeches.



I followed Lord Mayor's Drive back to the car park, just taking a short diversion to the right to see the Upper Pond.



Distance: about 4 miles.

Map: Explorer 172 (Chiltern Hills East).

Rating: four stars. Lovely colours, including a surprising amount of green from young beech leaves, and more variety than I had anticipated.


Sightings

Passing through a clearing on the edge of the wood I was pleased and surprised to see a very late-flying Red Admiral. The excellent Learn about butterflies site also reports sitings of red admirals this week - and 10 other species.

I could not resist photographing this sign. The "Please don't pick the mushrooms" message is unremarkable, but the translation into (only) Polish was unexpected. I had noticed some Polish shops as I drove north out of Slough, so that is part of the explanation. Does Polish cooking depend heavily on wild mushrooms?


Postscript

It was clouding over as I finished my walk, and pouring with rain by the time I reached home 35 minutes later. Strong reinforcement for applying the principle of carpe diem.