HAM HOUSE & RICHMOND PARK
Keith Miller
This walk takes you along the western edge of Richmond Park and into Pembroke Lodge Gardens, climbing King Henry’s Mound. From here it wanders through the tranquil gardens and mature trees (surrounded by drifts of snowdrops at this time of year) of Ham House, before tracing the course of the River Thames back to Richmond.
Start/finish: Richmond underground station, The Quadrant, Richmond, TW9 1EZ, grid ref: TQ180751. Distance:
4.5 miles/7.2km. Map:
OS Explorer 161; os.uk/ hamhouse
When we started diffidently stepping out together some years ago, after a fairly chaotic period in both our emotional lives, my partner, Susanna, and I quickly found walking was something we actively enjoyed doing together. You get to see the world – at a pace that allows you to think about what you’re seeing – and, crucially for a pair of Myers-Briggscertified introverts, you don’t have to talk to each other all the time (even if it’s somehow easier to talk when you need to than it is in many other situations).
We were, and remain, fairly evenly matched in pace – I’m faster uphill, she’s faster if she thinks there’s a train to catch – and stamina. We have “done” sections of officially sanctioned, bye-lawed, waymarked trails: both ends
(but not the middle) of the
South Downs
Way; a couple of tracts of the
South West
Coastal Path; the whole of the Thames Path except one niggling but uninspiring section near Egham.
But city walks are good, too: a walk’s not quite a walk if it doesn’t include at least one stretch of dual carriageway, we reckon. We even went from Naples to Herculaneum on foot once, an exercise in gritty realism that haunts me to this day.
Late every summer, we walk from Bushey, where Susanna’s work organises a summer school for young composers that someone really ought to turn into a YA drama, along a blackberry-laden path frequented, after 5pm or so, by usually despondent Watford FC fans, to Rickmansworth: the Appian Way itself couldn’t hold more fascination or romantic allure.
This walk, a limping loop from Richmond to Ham and back, is ideal for a couple of impromptu weekend hours. You’ll see some river, several eyots, plenty of wildlife – though the little information boards they place by the entrances to Richmond Park tend towards the optimistic – and gallons of heritage, in the form of the grand 17th-century villa at Ham (tended by the maenads of the National Trust), and the famous view of St Paul’s Cathedral from King Henry’s Mound in the park, slightly messed up in 2016 by a tower block in Stratford.
It has been a sad start to 2020 for us, as Susanna’s mother, Janet, died very suddenly after Christmas. A crossword fiend and loyal Telegraph reader, she was also (along with her husband, Francis) a keen walker. We even met up with them along the way once, converging on the clifftop west of Clovelly like a stereoscopic Stanley and Livingstone, then continuing westward to warm our cockles in front of the Hartland Quay Hotel’s sustaining dinner menu.
So for the time being, there’s a third who walks always beside us. I only hope the day will come when Janet’s memory greets us as she did on that blustery day, her sensible outerwear clapping like thunder in the wind, her pale blue eyes a-crinkle and a grin of delight and welcome across her face, as if the four of us had found ourselves on the same path by the purest coincidence.