Sunday 13 September 2026 - Spunch Altrincham

Fechin joined me and Sue for a couple of hours' Spunching on a fine Sunday morning. The Spunch points were mainly close together, so we got our best ever scores. A little local knowledge helped, though I missed an obvious short cut at the end and was penalised for going 19 seconds over the two hour limit.

These two photos were taken on the long straight track that some allege to be the course of a Roman road. It may be more recent, but it's a delight to walk down.

The route that we planned crossed the canal at Altrincham Bridge and took in lots of points between the canal and the railway, before re-crossing the canal at Seamons Bridge. The towpath was then followed all the way back to the environs of Timperley Brook and West Timperley Nature Reserve. In places the canal is full of weed; very few boats come this way these days due to the canal being closed at Dunham thanks to the breach that occurred a couple of years ago. A little further on, a heron chose to ignore the fact that we were only a couple of metres away on the towpath.

Sue went ahead and collected a couple of extra points that Fechin and I didn't have time to visit, and Fechin got a time penalty after failing to keep up and getting slightly misplaced.

Kickback Coffee provided welcome refreshments, and then we returned a few metres to the host venue, Twisted Running, where Sue spashed out on a t-shirt and shorts.

Here's my Garmin 245's take on the route we took - it recorded 11.7 km, whereas Spunch's 'MapRun' app recorded 12.7 km. Click on the next two images for better detail. The second image is an extract from the '120' results for the 53 finishers

Well, that was fun. Our next Spunch will be at Northenden on the evening of 24 September. See here for a link to future events.