Fred Perry

I am always looking for long walks which I can get to, and from, on public transport – and we have one here in Stockport which I have been putting off doing for years.  Why put off doing it?  Because it has always looked like the most boring walk one could imagine.  It starts in Reddish and then meanders around taking in a few parks and things, but a lot of it is through housing estates and the occasional industrial estates.  But today I decided to do it anyway.  It is called the Fred Perry Way.
 
History lesson time –
 
Fred Perry is one of Stockport's most famous sons and was born in Portwood in 1909.  He won the men's singles at Wimbledon in 1934, 1935 and.  Fred Perry was also a member of Britain's winning Davis Cup team from 1933 to 1936.  He was made a freeman of Stockport in 1934.
 
So after achieving all that they created a walk in his memory, of around 14 miles, through Stockport, which misses out where Fred was born, and which starts in a park and ends in the middle of nowhere.
 
So was it as boring as I’d expected?  Not quite to be honest.  I obviously know Stockport pretty well having lived here for 30 years, but today I walked through parts of Stockport I didn’t know existed before today – some nice bits too.
 
And I had a trip on a bus too!  I don’t recall ever having traveled on a bus before in Greater Manchester – I live very close to a railway station and I use the train a lot – which I did early this morning to get to Reddish (Reddish North station that is; Reddish South only has one train a week and only in one direction!).  But a bus was the only practical way to get back home from the end of the walk.
 
Including the bit from Reddish North station to the start and the walk from the end to the bus stop, I covered 15.5 miles today, in 5.5 hours, but that included about 30 mins for lunch in what I thought was a lovely quiet little wood, until a Virgin Pendolino thundered passed and I realised that I was having lunch about 10m from West Coast Main Line!

I did enjoy your walk, Fred, but it is one that I'll be in no hurry to do again.

The extra is the source of The Mersey which you pass on the walk, with stationary traffic on the M60 just to show that Manchester too has an "orbital car park".