The loop I am talking about is four miles, give or take. Out along a farm track, across two field boundaries, down a bit of green lane, and back along the road for the last half mile. I did it at least twice a month for a year, partly by accident and partly because I got curious about what changes.
The honest summary is that the same four miles took me somewhere between seventy minutes and just under two hours depending on the month, and the difference had almost nothing to do with how fit I was.
Winter is faster than I expected, until it is not
Frozen ground is the best walking surface I get all year. A rutted track that is soup in November is like a pavement after three hard nights, and I have done my quickest times on that loop in January. Everything is visible, nothing has grown over anything, and I can see the shape of the land through the bare hedges.
The problem is that the good frozen days are maybe two weeks total, scattered. The rest of winter is the worst walking of the year. Thawing clay grabs your boot and does not want to give it back, and the green lane section holds water for weeks because nothing dries out with the sun that low.
I also badly misjudged the light one December. I set out at half past two thinking I had plenty and finished the last half mile of road in the dark, on a road with no verge. That was genuinely a bad decision and I have carried a small light since.
Spring is when the route disappears
This is the one I did not see coming. Through March the loop is fine. By late May the two field boundary crossings had grown in to the point that I could not find the gap at all on one of them, and I went round the long way.
Nettles and cow parsley along the green lane went from ankle height to over my head in what felt like three weeks. The lane is still walkable, but you are pushing through rather than walking, and in shorts that is a genuinely miserable experience which I made exactly once.
The compensation is that spring is the only time the whole loop smells of something. I am not going to try to describe it well. It is the one thing I actually look forward to and it lasts about a month.
Summer is the slowest, and the busiest
Hard ground, long light, no mud. It should be the fastest and it is the slowest, for two reasons.
The first is that crops come right up to the field edge in a way they do not the rest of the year, so the walkable strip narrows to about a boot width and I am picking my way rather than striding. The second is heat. On the exposed track section there is no shade for a mile and a half, and I slow down whether I intend to or not.
Summer is also when I meet other people, which is worth saying because the rest of the year I meet nobody. Two or three encounters on a loop in August, none at all in February. I like both, but it is a different walk.
Autumn is the best of it and the shortest window
If I could only walk this loop in one season I would take October without much thought. The ground has softened just enough to be quiet underfoot but not enough to be work. The crops are off so the field edges are wide open and I can walk two abreast where in July I was single file. The vegetation on the green lane has collapsed back down. The light lasts long enough that an after work walk still works.
It lasts about six weeks. By the third week of November the clay is back and the whole thing is a different proposition again.
Mud is not one thing
I would have said, before this year, that mud is mud and some months have more of it. That is wrong in a way that matters for planning.
There is the clay on the track, which is heavy and sticky and adds real weight to each boot, and which is at its worst in a thaw rather than in the rain itself. There is the churned ground around gateways where stock have stood, which is deep and unpredictable and is bad from October through to April regardless of the weather that week. And there is the shallow surface slop on the green lane after summer rain, which looks dramatic and is basically nothing to walk through.
Once I separated those three, my weather guessing got much better. A wet week in August does not stop the loop. A mild wet week in February after a frost absolutely does, and I have learned not to bother.
What the year actually taught me
Two things, and both of them changed how I plan.
The first is that a route is not a fixed thing you either can or cannot walk. It is a thing that is good for a few months and bad for a few months, and the useful question is not whether a route works but when. I stopped writing routes off and started writing down seasons next to them.
The second is that the road section, which I had always thought of as the boring compulsory bit, is the part that decides whether the loop works at all in winter. Half a mile of unlit road in December is the actual constraint on that walk, not the mud, not the distance. I now plan winter versions of routes specifically to avoid road time, even if it means a less satisfying shape.
I am doing the same thing with a second loop this year, mostly to find out whether any of this generalises or whether it is all just facts about one particular bit of ground. My guess is that it is somewhere in between.