River Ray Parkway Walk Part 1

20th June 2018

Discovering the River Ray Parkway Walk Part 1

Every once in a while, as Jess Robinson describes below, she and I go a-wandering round odd/random/interesting bits of Swindon.

Some time ago now we went checking out some of the town’s roundabouts – more interesting than it sounds. Read about that EXPOTITION here.  And part two of that adventure here – in round and round we go again.  

I’ve always known that Swindon, and West Swindon is green. Very. But this work makes West Swindon’s verdant quality ever clearer.
So here we go: discovering the River Ray Parkway Walk Part 1

‘Continuing our occasional series, “Jess and Angela wander interesting parts of Swindon”, we ventured out on a sunny day to discover what the River Ray Parkway was all about.

If you live or have wandered in the south-west/south-east parts of Swindon you may have come across the odd dark green metal signpost. Some of them still contain actual signage – as you can see in the image below. 

This one is at the Kingshill end of the canal towpath. It reads:

They’re labelled,where they’re readable: River Ray Parkway.

About the River Ray Parkway Route

The River Ray Parkway is a green walking and cycling route, introduced in 1991 as part of the Great Western Community Forest scheme, it ran for 8 miles from Coate Water to Moulden Hill. The route was expanded from the original effort to create the Swindon Old Town Rail Path, developed with the help of Sustrans, then a small Bristol group formed to create better walking and cycling routes.

Today the route is mostly maintained as National Cycle Network route 45, started by Sustrans with a National Lottery grant in 1995.

Our starting point

We started out at the Moulden Hill end, and wandered along the route of NCN45, looking for the first sign. The purpose built NCN signs are quite obvious in the landscape …

But the green Parkway signs tend to blend into the trees so it took a while to find one.

After leaving the roads we walked through a long leafy corridor, spotting our first Parkway sign as we were almost at Shaw Forest Park (Shaw Tip on the River Ray Parkway map!).

The route from here follows the edge of the Shaw Forest Park (pop in for a wander across the hill), past the Swindon Lagoons which have signs describing the habitat readable through the fence.

Continuing south east, we catch up with a tributary of the actual River Ray, and follow it underneath the Great Western Way dual carriageway, around the giant Mannington Rec sports ground + park and into Bridgemead retail park.

A link to a map below

For PDF of map go here: River Ray Parkway trail map

From the map, you will notice that the River Ray Parkway follows two routes from Wootton Bassett Road to Rivermead, we followed the eastern route.

The western route follows the western tributary of the River Ray, via Westlea Park and alongside Westlea Primary school. It follows the current NCN route 45, and the Western Flyer, a newer route created recently to provide a cycling-commuter route into the town centre.

(See also: The Western Flyer) 

The end of the River Ray Parkway Walk Part 1

We ended up this first half of the River Ray Parkway Walk Part 1 route with a cuppa at John Lewis, which is on the western part of the route.

On the embedded map you can see our route, follow the green markers from the north west corner (darker green marker), clicking on the markers will show images of the signs we found. The blue markers are the signs on the western route, as found by Jess the previous week.]

The River Ray Parkway Walk Part 2:

For the second half of the walk go here: https://swindonian.me/2019/08/09/discovering-the-river-ray-parkway-part-2/

See also:

Richard Jefferies Old Town walk part one  and Richard Jefferies Old Town walk part two