After arriving back from America Stuart had to quarantine for 14 days before he was allowed out. However, unexpectedly at the weekend the government changed the rules to make it 10 days which meant Stu was now free. To celebrate his freedom we decided to go for an early morning hike up Cleeve Hill. We have a walking route of about 6km which we have done a few times so thought it would be a good first outing.

We dropped Tom at school at 8am and headed up to the car-park behind Cleeve Hill Golf Club. We parked and I went to get my walking boots out of the boot of the car to find that they were not there. Stu had his boots already on (but no spare shoes as they were in the same bag as my boots) but I wasn’t going home so the muddy walk had to be done in trainers!

We set off down the lane passed the golf course. The track was a bit muddy but nothing major.

It wasn’t long before the track became really muddy, quite slippery and covered in leaves. We carried on down towards the valley where we could see the sun rising over the hills through the trees.

Eventually we reached the little lake which we needed to cross to then head up through the valley to make our way up to the common.

^{Wash pool}

The climb back up to the common was pretty hard going – only because we hadn’t been hiking for a while. Although you know you have made it when you spot the tree with the seats around it.

We carried on passed the tree to go to the edge of the hill to see the views over Cheltenham. The wind really picked up at this point so rather than walk the narrow path along the edge we walked about 10 meters into the fields. At this point we saw quite a few dog walkers – up until now we had the walk to ourselves.

We headed up to the Trig Point where we got into a conversation with some locals who thought I was a tourist as I was taking so many photos. They advised us of a different walk to another trig point which is a few meters higher so we said we may look at that for tomorrow.

^{Trig point}

From here it was only a short walk back to the Car Park – and we didn’t get too muddy!