One of the many reasons we moved to Oswestry and fell in love with The Old Mill, was the opportunity to walk out of the house straight onto endless walking options. The most obvious one is, of course, the Offa's Dyke Long Distance Path (ODP) which literally goes past the house, so we walk on it every day. Siobhan, having grown up in the shadow of Hadrian's Wall, was well aware of that long distance walk, but we embarrassingly knew very little about the ODP before we moved here. Many of our guests are walking the full 177 miles over anything from 9 - 20 days, but we are just covering short bits of it, and living the rest vicariously at the moment through our visitors.
A couple of hundred yards from the house and we are into the beautiful Candy Woods. We can spend hours in here as there is such variety of deciduous and coniferous woodland, beech tree lined rides, benches hewn out of the rock and - in the spring - carpets of bluebells.
If we're keen, we can go through to the Racecourse Woods and, from there, pop out onto the Old Racecourse Common - all 22 hectares of it - or head across the fields, with big skies and views over much of Shropshire to the east and south, and Wales to the west.
Turning right from the house, we're on the ODP again, going south. It's quite a climb up the road, but at the top we're rewarded with the chance of actually seeing part of the Dyke, and one of my favourite gates! It's a gentle walk then across the fields to Trefonen - and the very handy Trefonen Shop and Post Office.
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