English County Tops: West

I have visited five of the six county tops in the West of England. Milk Hill in Wiltshire, south of Avebury, awaits me.

Three of those six featured in my cross-England walk.

• Cornwall: Brown Willy (1378ft) on Bodmin Moor, Friday 18 July 2008. Taken on a very damp crossing of the moor.
• Devon: High Willhays (2039ft) on Dartmoor, Monday 27 August 2008. High Willhays is the only Hewitt (2000ft+ hill) in southern England. A bit grey, but unlike on Brown Willy I could see where I was.
• Gloucestershire: Cleeve Hill (1083ft) in the Cotswolds, Sunday 16 October 2011. This was a stage end for me, and we (Barbara was with me) dropped down to the Rising Sun pub below its summit, so we climbed it again the following day.

That leaves two more.

• Somerset: Dunkery Beacon (1705ft) on Exmoor, sometime in the mid 1970s, on a motorcycle trip round the west country. All I have is a very clear memory of parking at the layby below the summit, walking to the top, then walking back down again.
• Wiltshire: Lewesdon Hill (915ft), west of Beaminster, in 2025. Described below.

We could have been down very quickly but took a longer, more circuitous descent, to see something more of the north Dorset countryside. Rather than drop sharply down the scarp, we roughly contoured north-west for a bit, until finding a place to drop down – still steep though. We turned south-east, and descended by Crabb’s Hill.

Tracks took us past Brimley Coombe Farm nearly as far as the B3164, where we turned sharp east on a track known as Lewesdon Hill Lane. The last mile was a drop back along the ascent path.