I caught the Barnsley bus to Billingley Green and walked up the road to Billingley. I then took the path that leads right to the northern tip of Middlecliffe and continued down the lane to Little Houghton.
I walked along Chapel Lane, which I remember as being the old pit lane used to reach to two former local collieries. Despite this area only being ten miles from my home in Doncaster, and the area I lived in until thirty years ago I still managed to find a path I'd previously not used, going part way up the former spoilheap, now landscaped...of course when I was younger there wasn't a path here. It leads to a location where there are now several large wind turbines and the layout of the landscape and footpaths is completely different as to how it's depicted on my Ordnance Survey map dating from the 1980s.
It wasn't difficult to select the correct path going up to Great Houghton. I walked through the village for about half a mile and then took a bridleway heading up towards Mount Pleasant Farm and then to the road that leads to Clayton.
Great Houghton has associations with the civil war and Oliver Cromwell, and that's why there's a statue of his helmet in the village.
I was now walking along the boundary between Barnsley and Doncaster which soon becomes designated as the Barnsley Boundary Walk which I stayed with for a while before branching off to Thurnscoe and continuing through the village and then along a track to Highgate from where I caught the bus back to Doncaster.
