Baslei two

Verified Slow Way

Verified by 100.00% of reviewers

Walked from Basildon to Leigh on a mostly dry day.

Enjoyable and fairly straight forward to walk. I stopped around half way at the quanit St Margaret's Church and sat on a bench to rest.

Most of the pathways were well kept and there were plenty of ripe blackberries to eat along the way. Easy and affordable trains to London from either end.

Safe, direct and probably a lot easier in dry conditions. Certainly easy to follow. A nice variety of paths and surroundings. Some stiles and steps.

Walked from Basildon to Leigh on Sea. This route is not exactly what we walked, as we followed the first part of the bridlepath through Benfleet Downs, but having moved onto the well surfaced country park track a little later, we decided that it offers a much easier route in wet conditions, though it does have one additional small hill. Other parts of the route are wet and slippery in winter conditions, but these are probably unavoidable. On the whole the walk is enjoyable, though it is quite challenging and much of it is unsuitable for wheels.

The first part out of Basildon station is an easy but dull pavement walk. As others have said, the path across the golf course requires careful navigation as the marker posts are few and don't stand out from a distance. We enter the course on a muddy enclosed path and leave it through a nature reserve. The route down to London Road has several short flights of steps. At the bottom there is a zebra crossing over London Road, and from there the rest of the route to Pitsea station is on pavements, which diverge a little from the roads in places,

The path east from Pitsea is part of the England Coast Path, and is easy to follow but wet and muddy in places. We leave the coast path to pass through a churchyard and continue alongside the railway, then take the lane left underneath Canvey Road. Beyond the bridge, the first path of the path right is very wet and muddy, but not as deep as it looked! We found no obstructions on this path other than some wet patches, so the problem Strider identified in his review of BasLei One must have been fixed. The path takes us past a housing estate and onto a surfaced track through the park into Benfleet, where more pavements take us to the path leading to Benfleet Downs country park.

We tried the bridlepath here and found it very wet, so when drawing this route I used the well surfaced track that stays above the mud instead. The lower path may be more interesting in dry conditions. We did rejoin the country park track at the earliest possible opportunity, and it offers an easy and popular route until it turns uphill to visit Hadleigh Castle, Here we lose the surfaced track, and go straight on along the edge of several wet clay fields, to emerge just above Leigh-on-Sea station, which is reached by an easy pavement walk down the hill.

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