Chiltern Walks: Penn Wood
Start / Finish: Penn St, Penn, Penn Street, Amersham HP7 0PX
Distance: 6.3 km (3.9 miles)
Elevation Change: +/- 75m
GPX File: get via Buy Me a Coffee
Other Routes Touched (walk): N/A
Other Routes Touched (cycle): Milton Route
Pubs / Cafes on route: The Squirrel and The Hit or Miss both at the start and end of the route
Map: OS Explorer Map (172) Chiltern Hills East
Links: Penn
Unlike many of my recent walks this had no geeky excuse to be there. No Trig Pillars, no County Tops, no National Trail to complete. Instead, this was a simple New Year’s Day walk in the heart of the Chilterns. The guidance below will help you navigate but don’t use it as a fully accurate turn-by-turn guide. Always take a map and/or a GPX route and prepare well for the weather and terrain.
The best place to start is at the Squirrel Pub where there’s good free parking on Penn Street. From here cross over the small green, past the cricket pitch and head for one of the openings in the fence. Penn Wood has a lot of paths criss-crossing it so there’s many options for walks there. We chose a diagonal North-East route that heads toward one of the main gates to the A404 at Beamond End. At this point you’ll be 1 km into the walk and you’ll turn right, heading South-West for 1.5 km to the crossing of Gravelly Way.
Continue South-West between Two Sisters Plantation and Gravelly Way Plantation then take a path crossing a field in a roughly Southerly direction. At the end of the field the path re-enters the wood and climbs steeply up to Chalk Track. Chalk Track is a long, straight Bridleway running to the South West. It eventually meets Common Wood Lane but we took a left turn about 300 metres from the end on a path that crosses Gravelly Way again. There’s a final 0.75 km climb up out of the woods, past Grove House and back to Penn Street.
Penn Street is fairly busy and the best place to walk is on the grass verge on the Northern side. It’s a very short walk along here to the first pub, the Hit Or Miss, and and even shorter one from there back to the Squirrel.
