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Kingsley is a village in Cheshire, England. It was a settlement when the Domesday Book was compiled. It was probably called "Chingeslie", meaning "King's Clearing in the Forest". It has long been associated with Delamere Forest. It is, at the time of writing (June 2000), a village of some 750 homes, some quite old and with two estates built in the 1960's.
Here is a brief account of the start of the Kingsley walking group:
When my wife and I first came to live in Kingsley, some 15 years ago, I set out to walk all the footpaths within a five mile radius of home. This was later increased to ten or perhaps a bit more.
I also walked each of the four Mid Cheshire Footpath Societies walks in sections with a view to providing a description to go with the strip maps which MCFS had published. I realised that I could use the same technique (talking to a small tape recorder as I walked along) to describe walks near Kingsley so that they could be published in the "Kingsley News" and others could enjoy the walks too.
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I then realised that it would be helpful if the footpath number was painted on the signposts where each footpath leaves a road. I was doing this at the end of Footpath 1 one day when Reg and Maureen C. came along and we got talking. I said that I had had a thought about offering to lead walks round Kingsley, based on what I had done. They though it was a good idea and we agreed that we would publish in the "Kingsley News" a date when we would meet at the Community Centre, see how many turned up, and go for a walk.
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There were about 20 when we met on Whit Monday, 1993 (see some of the group, opposite) and we made sure that we included Kingsley 1 in the walk. During our picnic lunch we talked together about what we might do in the future and agreed that we would meet every second Tuesday in the month for a walk of eight to ten miles, more or less locally, with a picnic lunch. Initially somebody on the walk would volunteer to lead the next one.
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First walk of the Kingsley group. This is the spot at 'Waterloo' where Maureen spoke to Frank about organising some walks - Monday, May 3rd 1993.
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At the end of that year I circulated a note so that we could gather names of walk leaders for the next year and give them chance to try out their walks. In 1998 we had a short walk in December and a Christmas lunch at the "Red Bull" in Kingsley so that we now have a pub Christmas lunch on our December walk A brief article about each walk is written for the "Kingsley News" of the next month. This serves as an advertisement for the walks, as does the notice in the Walking Map notice board, which is updated each month.
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