Over the years Chewton Common has become fragmented, reduced in scale by successive housing developments, today it remains as various sized and shaped pockets of dispersed common. All these pocket have an official path(s) crossing them, though these paths don't really allow you to appreciate the natural worlds your walking through, to do that you have to follow the folk paths created by.... local folk. When you leave the official path you realize that the common is not homogeneous (something you could do if you stayed on track), it's rather a diverse patchwork of different environments, heath, grassland woodland (deciduous and coniferous) and where streams flow, fingers of wetland. Put some headphones on to block the sounds of man and modernity, and it's easy to imagine yourself walking outside of the urban sprawl. So lucky to have these natural boltholes literally on my doorstep.
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