Having moved to Coventry in September of 2007 and over wintered there, I started to look around for local long distance paths to get the walking legs going again in Spring 2008. The obvious one to go for seemed to be Coventry Way which is a 40 mile circular walk around the circumference of the city, no more than five or six miles out from the city centre at any point.

I'd looked for a guidebook for the walk, but only managed to find "A Coventry Way - Circular Walks" (ISBN 0-9526631-2-0), which details 21 circular walks apparently based on the route of A Coventry Way. In actual fact most of the route descriptions etc are for places not actually found on the route itself so its a bit pointless for my purposes really, but at least buying the book helps support the Coventry Way Association that maintains the route. Click here for their website and more information about the route.

Many people who do this route do it in one day challenges! 40 miles in one day isn't my idea of fun, so a friend and I had decided to tackle the route in nice easy days of 8-10 miles at a time, with pub stops on the way and using public transport to get to and from our start points.