Lunch Hour Exploring: Finding a Nice Place to Eat a Sausage Roll

It was my 44th birthday recently. I’m not too fussed about ageing yet, but I’m sure that’ll change when I get nearer 50. My wife bought me a Garmin hiking watch as a big upgrade from my £15 retro Casio that I thought made me look cool. It didn’t. This new smart watch told me I wasn’t in terrible shape, giving me a fitness age of 43.5. Technically six months younger than I actually am. Fantastic. 

The watch also guilted me into walking at lunch instead of sitting in my car next to the skips at work. My first walk was to Greggs, which felt daft given the point was to be healthier. When I arrived, I didn't actually go in. I decided to swap sausage rolls for a healthier Morrisons meal deal, and I also hit my step goal for the day. 

I've recently been trying to visit as many grid squares as possible on the OS map I have with our house in Ledbury in the centre. After checking the map, I realised that my office is on it, so I could actually now spend my lunch hours walking the nearby footpaths and trying to find interesting things on my map. 

Malvern Link, where I work, isn’t quite as posh as the rest of Malvern but it’s a decent enough area and there are a few characters about. When I broke my wrist once falling off a stool and a blinds exhibition (honestly), I ended up drinking in its pubs and met some real gems. One bloke swore smoking was good for you and another kept asking me if he would be OK to drive after six pints. Good times, sort of.

Armed with my map, I set out to explore as many local footpaths as possible. Memorial Wood was my first stop. It was pleasant at first but then I noticed a lot of dumped rubbish. Really irritating in a place that had been tidied up by volunteers for the local community, only for the local community to use it as a tip. A bit further on, things improved slightly with a path past a derelict nunnery, but still not a lunch spot to savour.

The next day I tried the Community Wood. Much nicer and rubbish free. Pretty peaceful, even though there was a main road nearby. In my backpack, I had two sausage rolls and a doughnut from Greggs, which wasn't exactly healthy but I felt that going on long walks instead of sitting in my car would kind of justify the occasional unhealthy snack. My lunchtime exploration was now effectively a quest to find a nice place to eat a sausage roll. 

I left the wood for a bit to find one of the ponds I had spotted on Google Maps. My work trousers got splattered with mud as I walked the sodden path to the pond. I got there to find it overgrown with reeds and looking like a place you might get ambushed by an alligator. It was very, very, very unlikely there would be a lost alligator in that pond, but it still wasn't the nice spot I'd hoped it would be. It was too overgrown to sit nearby and would have been too muddy anyway. Never mind.

I moved on along the path through the wood and found a decent little section with a couple of fallen trees that would make a good place to sit and enjoy my sausage rolls. I'm not sure if it would be the best spot I'd find on my wanders, but it was definitely an improvement on what I'd seen so far.

The following lunchtime ramble took me through a little wood that runs alongside the main road out of Malvern Link towards Worcester. It had some paths through it, but they weren't well-trodden and there were lots of fallen branches across them. There was also loads of litter and at least three dog turds right in the middle of the paths. I shook my head as I swerved it all, keen to get out of this overgrown dumping ground. This was not a nice place to eat my lunch at all. Memorial Wood had felt like a dogging hotspot and this unnamed wood looked like the sort of place you'd hide a body. I wasn't keen to sit amongst the shit, litter and possible death for even a short period of time. Another frustrating let down. The good news was that my watch now said my fitness age had gone down from 43.5 to 43, so it was effectively making me younger. You can't really ask for more than that from a watch. 

I then decided to attempt to reach the wonderfully named Hornyold Road and back in a lunch hour. I upped my walking pace for this one as Google Maps estimated it would take half an hour to get there which would give me exactly zero minutes to stop and eat any lunch. I went past the Morgan factory and found a muddy footpath that took me over the railway bridge and alongside the common that sits in the shadow of the hills. Cockshot Road runs through the middle. Hornyold Road at the very top. What a place. 

I managed to get to Hornyold Road in just 20 minutes. That's only two thirds of the time Google suggested, which made me feel like some sort of superhero that could walk quite fast. I can also confirm that if you are on Hornyold Road you are only 7 minutes away from Cockshot Road. 

This all meant I now had 20 spare minutes to grab something to eat and to eat it. I got a fairly disappointing sausage roll from the nearby shop and headed back towards the office via a different route. This took me past the intriguing Women's Temperance Fountain which was erected in 1900 to offer the women of Malvern fresh water to discourage them from the evils of alcohol. Apparently the previous water supply was rank and made people ill, so everyone just started drinking gin instead. It sounds like Malvern Link could have been quite a lively place back in the 1900s with all the wild, dehydrated pissheads roaming the streets. 

The common was a cracking spot to try to enjoy my crap sausage roll. There are a few benches around that circle some trees in the common. I'm sure on a summer day there would probably be other people to chat to, but for an introvert like me, the benches face outwards from the circle so it would be really easy to just ignore anyone else sat on them. I could get there in 10 minutes ish from the office and I'm not sure why I hadn't been on these walks in my 18 years of working in Malvern. 

I still had another pond that I'd found on Google Maps to visit, but the footpaths to that were through muddy fields so I had to wait for a couple of days of sunshine to get to it without my work trousers getting filthy. 

When the sunshine finally came I made my way along those paths towards Madresfield. This would be another walk that would push the boundaries of what was achievable in a lunch hour. I was treated to some great views of the hills though. 

Much like the other pond I'd visited previously, this wasn't quite the hidden oasis I was hoping for. It would definitely be a lot nicer if you could get near it, but the perimeter was too overgrown. There was a small, half deconstructed jetty that suggested it might have been a fishing lake in the past, but I was trespassing at this point so couldn't really find someone to ask. Glad I gave it a look though. 

I left the pond and followed the footpaths back towards Malvern Link. If I'd had a picnic blanket this would have been a corker of a spot to sit down for lunch. The mooching about round the pond meant I had to eat the sausage roll on the fly, but I got to these fields in about 20 minutes from work so I'd have time in the future. 

So I'd found a nice place to eat a sausage roll. I'd found lots of other places to eat a sausage roll which weren't quite as nice, but were still pleasant. I'd also found places that were full of litter and dog mess which made me angry and determined to help clean up those paths. I've learnt a bit more about the history of the area I work in and I've had considerably more exercise than I was getting spending my lunch hours sitting in my car next to the skips round the back of my workplace. My resting heart rate was getting lower and my fitness age was now at an astonishing 40.5 years old when I'm actually 44 years old. At this rate I could become young enough to start skateboarding again or something. Probably not. 

I'll continue walking other footpaths in my lunch hours and hope to find some other nice spots. From Malvern Link you can get some great views of the hills, but you can't really see that much of them from the posher parts of town that sit along the hillsides. The view from Great Malvern is basically a view of Malvern Link. Getting away from the office and enjoying some fresh air definitely does you some good anyway. I imagine even in the most boring industrial estates of the UK, if you looked at a local map you'd find somewhere to walk to and escape for a bit. Find your workplace on https://footpathmap.co.uk/ and have a look at which walks you could do in the local area during your break time. Enjoy!