The Fridge Door Walk

This is a new walk for most of us, so we rely for directions on the confident recollections of one old hand who takes on the walk leadership.

We start by following a residential road parallel to the campsite. A friendly greeting from some pot-bellied pigs on the way, so worth a photo.

The road takes us onto scrubland at the back of the campsite from where we follow a pipeline. Presently we pass some bee hives. Thinks: good for a photo, but at that very instant we are attacked by the bees, and they mean business. We run as we try to brush them off, but are all stung. I have two stings on one ear and one on the other. But we’re all ok, throbbing a bit, but it maybe gives us a “we survived this ordeal together” bonding, and a tale to repeat at every opportunity.

But that mysterious title, the “Fridge Door Walk?” Well this is the fridge door and it marks the start of the walk proper. It doesn’t matter that it may not be a fridge door as the name is already set in stone.

Ever wondered what happens to the rejected tomatoes from all these plastic greenhouses? Look no further than these heaps dumped right by the fridge door. This is your golden chance to start up the ketchup factory you've always dreamed of.

And our leader’s happy: he spots a path, and off we go through the esparto grass. Walkers dislike esparto as the ears embed themselves in clothing and socks and then poke into your skin, scratching as you move.

It is soon apparent that the route we need is higher up so we climb through the undergrowth to reach it. Not bad going now we’re on it: there’s a steep gorge hidden in the shadows on the left in the next photo.

The track was no doubt constructed to service these agricultural terraces, next photo, in a previous age. It’s all overgrown now and hard to imagine how they managed to produce a crop yield worth having from this rough, rocky hillside with limited rain. 

Having passed the terraces, it’s about here that fortune deserts our leader- and by implication the rest of us. The path disappears. We head for a distant dirt road through scrub, now not just esparto grass but woody shrubs and thorn bushes. Like this.

The next photo is dead ordinary: a dirt road, and one we all knew. But what a welcome sight. Easy home from here.

We’ve collected some deep scratches to go with the bee stings and picky esparto ears. There are some great walks in this area but this isn’t one of them. Even without the hazards, we all agreed it wouldn’t have delivered much of interest. Super talking point though!