Gail and I decided to brave it for the fourth leg, despite forecasts of rain, but we managed to complete it in blustery but mostly sunny weather. This took us from Eltham Park through a series of mostly playing fields to Eltham Palace itself. This was once a royal palace, favoured by Kings John and Henry VIII, with traces of the moat and old stone walls, surviving medieval outbuildings and a tilt yard, but it was wrecked during the civil war and abandoned until the Courtauld family took it on and turned it into an art deco masterpiece. One for the list of places to revisit in the summer.
We continued along King John's Walk, an ancient track that led from the palace to royal hunting grounds to the south, that passes through an area of stables and fields with horses and ponies in winter coats. These and the golf courses reflect the relative prosperity of these classic 'leafy suburbs'. Part of this path has been renamed the Railway Children's Walk as it features in E. Nesbit's book - she lived in the area. There is a very well kept nature reserve at Grove Park.
From here, we descended into extensive garden city-style 1920s LCC council estate. They are quite well laid out with wide avenues of mature trees between the houses, and the planners thoughtfully kept a series of old woodland walks at the backs of the houses, which we followed for over a mile. This brought us to Beckenham Place Park and, with a squall rapidly approaching we made it to the station for a Thameslink train to St Pancras.
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