Pittville Park and Honeybourne Line Walk, from Hannah and family.

A firm favourite in our house, this walk is often pulled out when we have guests to show around Cheltenham as it’s nice and flat and most importantly the kids can ride bikes or scooters.

Starting at the bottom of Pittville Park on Wellington Road, you wander up through the park where at the moment the autumnal colours are particularly stunning.

We tend to pick up coffees at the Central Cross Café (GL52 2DX) prior to walking up to the play area, it’s a quieter café and means a nice hot drink to hold whilst the kids have a play.

After you’ve prised your children out of the playground go back on yourself slightly and under the tunnel taking the right-hand path down past the Boat House Café. Continuing along the lake (with it on your left-hand side), we had a lovely stop off at the waterfall to admire the swans and how pretty the stream (managing to resist the urge for a paddle time but that’s always an option depending on how prepared/brave you are).  

Keeping right you continue walking right through until you reach Tommy Taylors Lane, here you cross straight over and go down Prince Regent Avenue, around the Prince of Wales Stadium. Take the first left hand path before you hit the housing estate going around the back of the Stadium. Follow it along past the barrier that indicates the start of the Honeybourne Line. 

This path is the perfect mix of beautiful wild flowers and the higher you go the better the view of the surrounding hills is. But the best part for me has to be that you’re essentially walking the breadth of Cheltenham on an overpass that at any point you can peer over and be in the middle of town, despite feeling as though you’re in the countryside. 

This years Paint Festival has treated us to some truly fabulous pieces of art along the way too, and if you’re lucky you might spot a few lingering fairy doors in the trees, leftover from this summer’s fairy door hunt provided by Lisa at the local pub The Bayshill. 

You stick right along this route along the “wibbly wobbly bridge” as it’ll always be referred to by my children, under the tunnel to check out all the paintings and then we loop left into the next tunnel because the lure of the art is too much for the kids to want to take a short cut.

From here its very simply following the path past Waitrose, past Jessops Avenue Playground (a little play area perfect for toddlers who have just started walking!), towards the final stop The Bayshill. 

They have a great child friendly garden so it’s the perfect finishing point whether its for a fabulous Sunday Lunch or coffee and a delicious home-made cake with their new weekday opening hours of 7:30am – 2pm. The marquee and heaters are already being set-up to make it the ideal child friendly winter stop any day of the week. 

Hope you enjoy this walk :)