Bawtry, Scrooby, Mattersey Thorpe, Mattersey, Lound, and Cooks Cottages

A later start today and so only a short bus ride out to Bawtry. The bus ride was even shorter than I'd planned though; I wanted to start the walk at Scrooby but the Retford bus that goes there didn't turn up and so when the Worksop bus showed up on time twenty minutes later I boarded that...meaning that I had a mile and a half to walk down the road until I reached Scrooby.

I took some photographs in the village and then headed over to Mattersey Thorpe and then Mattersey. I was walking along a dusty bridleway along this section of the walk and a car was approaching me. I jumped over to the right to get well clear of the cloud of dust it was causing but I nearly stood on a young hare or rabbit and then stumbled and needed to briefly put my hand on the car's bonnet to get my balance. Fortunately the car was only travelling slowly, at walking pace, but I was coughing for the next few minutes as I recovered from inhaling copious amounts of dust particles.

The church at Scrooby was locked, the one at Mattersey wasn't though.

I've not visited the ruins of the priory at Mattersey yet, access is via a mile and a half long dead-end footpath...so it entails a three mile detour.

There's no church to photograph at Lound.

I headed to the south, walking down the road for a few hundred yards until I reached a lake which I think is part of the Idle Valley Nature Reserve. I progressed further into the country park and some of the paths had been blocked off and re-routed and so I couldn't work out where I was; I had to stand still for a few minutes until I could hear a train travelling on the East Coast Mainline. It was easy enough then for me to get my bearings...this is a technique I wasn't taught on my mapreading and navigation course at Northern College.

The path which led out of the nature reserve took me to a bus stop on the main Doncaster road right across from a noisy garage. I didn't fancy waiting there for thirty minutes and so walked down to the next bus stop at a location called Cooks Cottages, only two miles north of Retford. I now had only twenty minutes to wait; about five minutes before the bus arrived though a couple of young men in a white van waived at me and honked their horn; I don't think they were being friendly though - and I certainly didn't know them. They probably objected to how I was standing, what I was wearing, how I was observing the passing traffic as I looked out for my bus. Maybe they were offended because I'm too tall, or too thin, or they didn't like my glasses or my haircut...whatever it was, it's always something for some people.