A few photos from a 2-day walk of the Mersey Valley Timberland Trail (MVTT), a route of ~21m (~34km) from Runcorn Hill to Oughtrington near Lymm, extended to start at Runcorn station and continue from Oughtrington to Altrincham.
The trail is very sparsely waymarked as such in the eastern half and not at all in the west, as far as we could tell, though some faded illegible waymarks might have done so. The actual route sometimes varies in minor detail from the line shown on OS mapping, our map shows these small deviations as accurately as we can remember them.
With a mixed weather forecast of sunshine and occasional showers, we dusted off this local trail from our bottom drawer of factory seconds, a route of variable character that starts at a small green high oasis in urban Runcorn and passes through town parks to more rural Cheshire countryside and ending near Lymm, the highlights being the fine woodlands, some managed by the Woodland Trust. The weather was much better than expected with no rain and quite hot on the second day.
Pitching on this type of low level trail is often hit and miss, the possibilities appearing very grim for a while in the evening, but we eventually found an excellent woodland pitch, albeit a dark one – this was the first time we needed head torches to pitch with the sun still shining.