I have very little to add to the epic review of my co-stroller except to show a picture of a very nice oil beetle found on the path, and a typical honey coloured stone house. Very nice walk, slightly irritating diversion as detailed by MM....

Steve_Roser

We walked from Castle Cary to Wincanton. The first, near the Castle Cary end, uses tracks and the other, towards Wincanton, a footpath through a zone of pastures and arable fields.This latter part of the walk has the best of the views. The road and track parts are all easy to navigate but this Slow Way doesn't have the best signage and there is some ageing path infrastructure in the fields at the Wincanton end where at some times of year (including now, with mowing grass and wheat crops growing on), the path of least resistance may be to walk around the western headland edges of some fields rather than taking the direct line of the footpath through them. The route out of Castle Cary town leads uphill to cross the main road before heading back down the other side into Hadspen village in a pretty valley. The landowners are clearly encouraging people to take a permissive path to the west of the mapped right of way using a new green lane they have created around the edges of their (quite possibly horse-grazed) fields. The line of this permissive path is the obvious route to take if you are coming from Wincanton, but not if you are coming from Castle Cary, when you can happily head up the hill on the (still existing) actual right of way but arrive at the top of the fields to find that the access stiles have fallen into disuse and are now scrubbed up, and you have to divert 50m or so to the southwest corner of the field (w3w coherent.petulent.trips) where the new access gate from the permissive path is, and then have to hop over a post and rail fence to access it. Eventually the route exits a field corner via a kissing gate onto a lane (it doesn't look like the path right next to it in the field on the OS map still exists) and very shortly arrives at the edge of Wincanton....

Mockymock