Walking from Richmond to Hendon (34km)

I walked Capital Ring a few years ago and I wanted to walk it again for various reasons including just for the enjoyment of the route and to record all of the route on MapMyWalk so that it would be in my CityStrides LifeMap. It annoyed me that I had not always mapped the route when I did it before leaving some notable orbital gaps in my LifeMap.

I got a nudge when Go Jauntly created a challenge to complete Capital Ring on their app. I like the Go Jauntly app and have done a few of their challenges and this gave me the opportunity to try it out on some routes, which is the main point of it.

The final nudge came from the monthly British Czech and Slovak Association social in West Hampstead. I usually walk to this and have taken ad hoc routes via Greenford before so it was easy to pick a route that followed Capital Ring most of the way.

My original, possibly overly ambitious plan, was to walk Sections 7 to 10 of Capital Ring, Richmond to Osterley Lock to Greenford to South Kenton to Hendon Park, and then walk on to West Hampstead. On the day I left home later than hoped so having done the four sections I took public transport the last few miles. 

In the end I was only half an hour late for the start of the social which I celebrated with a very quick pint of Pilsner Urquell.

The point of trying Go Jauntly is that it has a map that you can easily follow on your phone. The first time I did Capital Ring I was reading the text instructions on a PDF file on my iPad while also trying to follow a map on Google Maps that someone else had created. It was cumbersome work checking both and they did not always agree. We got off track regularly. 

Google Maps should have worked but it kept forgetting that I was using the Capital Ring map and I was constantly reloading it and then zooming back to the section I was on. Useful in case of emergencies but not really good enough for constant use.

The Go Jauntly maps worked very well.

This is the map of Section 8 and you can see how clear it is. I usually worked around this level of zoom but in the few more complex areas, such as crossing a major road, I zoomed right in to check that I was in the correct place.

At all times the familiar blue dot showed where I was so there was never any question of wandering too far off the route and any errors I made were quickly corrected.

The one thing I did have to get used to is that the map is a series of straight lines between waypoints and the paths sometimes wiggled quite a way from those lines. That was never a big problem as all I was doing was following an obvious path as it curved towards the next waypoint. 

Again, any confusion was quickly resolved by zooming right in to confirm that the path (shown on the map) did indeed head towards the desired waypoint.

One nice surprise was that Go Jauntly recognised when I had finished a section and automatically updated the challenge.

The walk gave me the first four of the fifteen badges needed to complete this challenge.

The big bonus was that following the route was easy and so I spent much less time looking at my phone and more looking at the scenery. 

I did not bother looking out for Capital Ring signs either, relying solely on the digital map. On previous walks that had been a bit of an issue as the uncertainty over the PDFs and Google Maps meant that I was often looking for the reassurance of an official sign.

Og course I only have Go Jauntly's word that their version of Capital Ring is the same as the official one but I was deliberately doing the Go Jauntly version so I was not worried about any differences or discrepancies

The walk itself was fun, even though the first half of the route, as far as Greenford, was very familiar. It had been (mostly) dry for some time and so all the paths were easy to walk; a few brambles here and there but very little mud.

I did have to take a detour around Paradise Fields in Greenford as that was heavily fenced off to protect the recently reintroduced beavers.

Across the road from there was Horsenden Hill and the first steep climb of the day. I do most of my walking in inner London where hills are almost non-existant and it is always something of a shock to the system when I venture further afield and have to climb. I still haven't quite got used to the fact that place names that contain "hill" are clues to be respected.

The 34km took me almost 6.5 hours, which is just over 5km/hour; not bad considering the hills and the condition of some of the paths.

Overall I call that a success and I plan to continue the Capital Ring challenge with Go Jauntly.