Walking

Local Footpaths

The Test Valley is a beautiful area to walk around, with lovely river scenes and many pretty villages. We, in Longparish, have over 20 miles of footpaths. They are identified by numbers. We have a map of them in the centre pages of our Village Handbook which shows the path numbers. You can see it here (PDF 369K). The Handbook also has some ideas for short walks around our village.

Our footpaths leaflet, "Exploring Longparish",was published in July 2007 with help from HCC under the Small Grants Scheme. It gives details of four walks around the village and a map showing many more. The County Council have featured one of them, The Riverdance Walk, on their website. You can get a copy of the leaflet in the pubs, the shop or the church. As time permits, we plan to publish more information and photographs about these and other good walks in the parish. If you'd like to suggest one or have some pictures we could publish please use the contact form.

You can see all our paths on the HCC site which shows definitive rights of way. Just follow this link, follow the link to online maps, click on "Start Using Rights of Way Interactive Map"and enter Longparish in the search box. You can zoom in and out to see as much detail as you like.

Your rights and responsibilities

We all have the legal right to use our footpaths. But rights bring responsibilities as well. You can see more information in The Countryside Code. There is a special section for Dog Owners. The County Council have also published some very helpful informationabout dogs.

The Test Way

The Test Way goes through Longparish. It is a 46-mile footpath from Inkpen Beacon, nearly 20 miles North of the village, to the mouth of the Test at Totton, near Southampton. For more details, see the Test Way area of the HCC site.

Lots more Hampshire walks

If you'd like to see lots more Hampshire walks try this external link.

RUPPs BOATs and Restricted Byways
Alex Lewis, Senior Rights of Way Officer gave a very useful presentation about the restricted byways to the March 08 Parish Council meeting.  She confirmed that there is no right of way for cars or motor bikes on restricted byways.  You can see her notes here.

Proposals by Hurstbourne Estate

Mr and Mrs Tacchi of Testbourne Farm Partnership have put forward a proposal to

• delete a small section of footpath near Papermill Farm
• dedicate a much longer stretch of path; and
• establish a new permissive right of way between Whitchurch and Hurstbourne Priors.

The parish council has supported this proposal because the advantages of the new paths outweigh this disadvantage of the loss of the Papermill stretch. The County Council has resolved to make the changes but there are still formalities to go through and they are not yet complete. However, parishioners have asked for more information so we are publishing

• a link to the HCC report on the matter
• a map showing the proposal (NB this is a 1.2MB PDF so don't try and load it unless you have broadband)

We must emphasise that this is for information only at present. You should not try to use any of the new paths until the formalities are complete.