Woking; Sunday, 26 June, 2022

Another early breakfast and out of the hotel to pick up an early train down to Guildford and from there a short walk across town to pick up the bus out to my sites for the day. At one point it did look like my plan would fall at the first hurdle as the bus was nearly 15 minutes late – which considering it was coming from the depot was a bit of a worry.

My first stop of the morning was the Claremont Landscape Gardens in Esher, right on the edge of Greater London. The gardens were originally laid out in the 18th century as the playground of Royalty and the rich, with a Grotto, Island, pavilions and either a grass amphitheatre that overlooks an ornamental lake.

The gardens eventually passed to the National Trust shortly after WWII and today are open to look around. With the timing of the buses I either had just under an hour or just under 2.5 hours to have a wander around the gardens, and in the end I needed almost all of the 2.5 hours to do the gardens justice as there was so much to see.

I hopped back on the bus heading back towards Guildford and took it the 20 minutes back down the A3 to Wisley where I hopped off and, after crossing over the motorway standard road on a particularly unpleasant bridge, walked the short distance to the Royal Horticultural Societies gardens.

Wisley is the main garden of the RHS, and is spread out over a large site with formal gardens, orchards, kitchen gardens, Mediterranean terraces, glasshouses and woodlands to walk through.

I spent several hours wandering around the gardens and stopping at some of the viewpoints to take in the sights and in several places – in particular lavender hill – the smells of the gardens – sadly the nearby presence of both the A3 and the M25 mean it’s impossible to escape the noise of the outside world.

By the time I’d seen everything I wanted to see I still had a reasonable time to wait, at a bus stop right on the edge of the A3 for the bus back to Guildford, or about 20 minutes less waiting time at a stop in a Lay-By just off the A3 to catch the bus in the opposite direction, get off in Cobham, and wait on the high street there for the bus back – I chose the slightly less unpleasant option of going via Cobham

I had originally booked to stay through until the Monday, work out of the hotel and then get a lunchtime train back home, but due to a number of meetings that overlapped I needed to head back home, and by the time all the meetings had been booked in it was too late to change the hotel booking. On the plus side it did mean that I was able to keep the room through the day, and by the time I got back to Woking I was able to head back to the room, freshen up, pack my things and use the really good WiFi to get all my photos and video uploaded into the cloud before starting my journey home.

Of course, travelling by rail on a Sunday in the UK is never a great idea and as to be expected there were engineering works taking place. On the way down on Friday the train was non-stop Clapham Junction to Woking direct and took just 20 minutes. The journey back was non-stop Woking to Clapham Junction, but went on a pleasant wander round rural Surrey through Chertsey, Egham and Staines before finally arriving back into Clapham nearly 50 minutes after leaving Woking. At least with the timetabling of the journey the train was on time!