When you walk right by an oil refinery you expect to see an oil refinery, right? Wrong!
They did a pretty good job of hiding it from view! You had to look quite carefully to see rocket-like structures poking up between the trees. The structure we saw was just about ready to blast off at any moment!
Not all of Fawley stood so hidden. The chimney of Fawley Power Station stood rather incongruously against its New Forest backdrop.
The New Forest? Yes, we had reached its furthest eastern boundaries…
Points on this part of the walk (copy and paste the co-ordinates into Google Earth):
- Blackfield: N 50° 49.580 W 001° 22.350
- Fawley Oil Refinery: N 50° 49.900 W 001° 22.050
- New Forest National Park Boundary: N 50° 49.445 W 001° 20.770
Walk #68 Statistics (of which this post forms the third part):
- Date of Walk: 13 April 2014
- Walk #68 total distance covered: 12.90 miles
- Coast of Britain Walk Total Distance Covered: 576.44 miles
- CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO INTERACTIVE MAP!!!
The Coastal Path 
Another milestone to reach the New Forest. It’s lovely but sadly there isn’t a proper route along the coast, so you’ll be getting used to the tarmac… Even the Solent Way seems to just give up and be routed along the busy B-road into Beaulieu (I’m sure someone could have found a better route….)
Yes! I dread to think how many road miles we walked those two days. Thankfully we blitzed them and got to Lymington the next evening. It’s a pity a coastal route isn’t open through the New Forest…
#2 looks like a Heath-Robinson design for getting a liquid from one side of a structure to the other (without having to go to the trouble of a short length of pipe round the base of it…) RH