2018-06-16 51 0

Sat 16 Jun 2018 in London East: 51.1846292, 0.0526949 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

51.18462921, 0.05269490, in the middle of a field south of the river Eden, in the south-west of Edenbridge, Kent, England, United Kingdom. (near the Kent-Surrey border).

Participants

• Saxbophone (talk)
• Saxbophone's friend Robert

Plans

We plan to set out from London Bridge station and proceed to Edenbridge Town station by train. We will then walk along the public footpaths that follow the river Eden to get as close to the location as legally possible.

Expedition

Saxbophone (talk) and Robert arrived at London Bridge station by Tube and (after a quick stock-up on snacks) caught the 14:07 train to Uckfield. Our train arrived at Edenbridge Town station at 14:43 (2 minutes early, Southern Railway sure are reclaiming their reputation![1]).

We then proceeded through the town of Edenbridge, heading south down the high street then turning west by the Waitrose to head to the riverside footpaths.

After a brief hesitation, we decided to take the northerly path that goes away from the river Eden rather than the one that follows it. We took a fairly meandering, diagonal route through many fields with long grass. This public footpath we followed sure does traverse its fair share of fields!

We had to double-back on ourselves a bit to negotiate the river Eden, which was in our way a bit. A few times we had to go back on ourselves after realising we were going the wrong way (which is reflected in the included tracklog).

At just under 200 metres from the location, we encountered the most interesting feature we encountered on our expedition today, an Airfield! Strange as it seemed, the public footpath clearly crossed the runways of this airfield (with notable yellow signs at both entrances warning walkers to be wary of aircraft). Crossing an active runway was one of the freakiest things I've ever done, but we applied the Green Cross Code in this situation and this worked well for us (except if I saw a plane coming I wouldn't stop, I'd run the hell away!).

We also saw two Pill Boxes[2] around this area —perhaps the airfield we traversed was a former RAF site?

On the journey, we had to cross a few bridges over the river Eden and other streams that interact with it.

The final landmarks we passed before getting the closest we could to the location were a camping ground and a fishery.

In the end, we were able to get within 131 metres of the location. We could see where the location was, a yellow field just on the other side of a private woodland area. We assumed that the field in which the location was situated was also private, so decided to all it a day.