Into The Runknown

A group of intrepid explorers met at Acton Central station one Saturday afternoon. Our third Slow Ways walk didn't start as expected as we waved at one of our group who'd found their way to the wrong side of the tracks (level crossing).

Soon we were reunited - cue triumphant music - and we set off towards Hammersmith. Our mission was to verify an ancient route to Hammersmith tube station from Acton Central and to correct the map for future travellers.

We started by walking through somewhere very familiar - Acton Park - before we headed into the wilds of the borough of Hammersmith. Acton Park is the home of Acton Juniors parkrun, where we've volunteered many times and we cut straight across the middle of it.

We had the benefit of a Hammersmith native, Divya, to guide us on our quest. As we crossed into Hammersmith, we entered our second park, Wendell Park. This was somewhere that many of us were entering for the first time. We followed the marked path over grass and through muddy puddles, which posed no danger to our feet or Divya's bike wheels. Stay tuned to find out if we faced further dangers later in the route.

As we left Wendell Park, we encountered a busy road. Luckily, the ancient map brought us to a modern pedestrian crossing and we were able to safely cross at this point. From here, Divya was in his element and guided us into Ravenscourt Park.

In Ravenscourt Park we found piles of woodchip. The first reaction that a GoodGymer has when seeing woodchip is "where's my shovel?". This time though, we didn't have time to squeeze in an extra good deed and we'd found that others had already spread the chippings along our route. That wasn't ideal for any wheeled chairs, but that didn't affect us though, so we charged onwards.

By this time we had almost arrived at the big red X on our map, a coffee shop in Hammersmith. We weaved under the District Line and along a road parallel to King Street and soon arrived in Hammersmith without having lost any of our party to hunger or needing an extended loo break. We had more importantly proved the modern worth of our old map. Our expedition had been a success!