A Walk, and Then Another

Another bright and beautiful spring day yesterday -- perfect for walking another link of the Green Chain!

I took the tube and train down to Mottingham (yes, Mottingham, AGAIN) and began the 4.5 mile section 9 to Ravensbourne.

It took me into Elmstead Wood, where I found several whimsical artworks, like these bears carved out of an old tree. There were also a couple of ornate chairs and a tall tree-trunk "gnome house."

The path led me along the fenced Grove Park cemetery, and through the fence I spied a colorful tableau of flowers, bags, a bucket and other items surrounding a grave. I was going to take a picture but then I noticed a guy standing at the next grave, and realized that my standing in a fenced hedge and clicking photos in someone's direction was probably not the smartest thing to do. God knows what he'd have thought if he'd seen or heard me. So I reluctantly pressed on.

This was kind of a weird walk. I wouldn't say there were a lot of remarkable sights once I got out of those woods. A lot of it was on suburban streets, albeit several of them unpaved gravel.

I passed a couple of peculiar houses, including a modern-looking one with this incongruous historic entrance gate that had once stood at the London School Board offices on Victoria Embankment. The offices were torn down in 1929 but the gate was re-erected here the following year. Maybe someone from the school board owned the property and kept the gate as a (very large) souvenir?

I finally reached a bridge over the River Ravensbourne, and walked up a street mystifyingly named Crab Hill into Beckenham Place Park. 

I found these Bulgarian Martenitsa dolls suspended from a blooming tree. Weirdly, I had a Martenitsa doll in my bag that I'd found on a sidewalk a week or two ago. I tied it next to these two. I think they're supposed to come in pairs, but now these Martenitsi have an unconventional menage-a-trois!

And then I reached the end of my walk. But why did my map have two more pages?!

Well, this is what I get for not reading the introduction carefully. Turns out the 4.5 mile segment was merely 9A. There was also a 9B, an additional 1.7 miles that began in a completely different place -- the suburban village of Chislehurst. So I had to do some quick research on my dying phone about how to get there, and managed to figure out a route involving another train and then a bus just before my battery went kaput.

Forty-five minutes later, I was sitting with a cheese-and-pickle sandwich on the shore of the amusingly named but not particularly attractive Prickend Pond in Chislehurst.

This route took me through more neighborhoods, like the one in the top photo where the trees were spectacular, and then back into Elmstead Woods.

More bears!

And then, lo and behold, I was back at Grove Park Cemetery, so I went back for my photo of the colorful grave.

The man was gone, but the light had changed by this time and the photo wasn't quite as good. Still, you can bet I'm going to blog it after all that.

For some reason, the segment ended there in the middle of the woods, and I was left with a choice of how to get to a train. I decided to walk once again the Chinbrook Link of the last Green Chain segment, which had ended right where I was standing, back to Grove Park train station -- and that turned out to be a good option.

Which begs the question -- why don't the people who oversee the Green Chain add the Chinbrook Link (now a pointless spur off Section 8) to Section 9B of this segment, and create a whole new 2.5-mile segment from Chislehurst to Grove Park? It would be a continuous linear walk and would begin and end near a train station. Makes sense to me.