Ten Miles From Chester and We Still Don’t Go Enough: Revisiting a Riverside Walk We’d Let Slide

This post contains one affiliate link, to my existing Hoka sandal review. Everything else here is unpaid. Nobody sponsored a walk along a river, and the only money that changed hands was £6.50 for a day’s parking.

It was gone 3am on the Friday night and I was doing the thing I always do, lying awake with the phone too close to my face, drawing a wiggly line along the River Dee on Komoot instead of sleeping. We live ten miles from Chester. Suzy and I both grew up practically on its doorstep. And somehow we visit about as often as people who live next to a famous landmark actually go and look at it, which is to say almost never.

The van makes it embarrassingly easy to fix that. Park up, walk in, no faff finding somewhere to leave the dogs. So on Saturday afternoon I did exactly that, parked at the Little Roodee, and went back to a Chester riverside walk we used to do all the time and had somehow let slide for years, instead of the city centre. Here’s the full route.

Full interactive route on Komoot, including elevation, timings and a downloadable GPX if you use the app.

The Little Roodee: Chester’s Cheapest Overnight, Right Next to the Oldest Racecourse in the World

The Little Roodee car park sits right next to Chester Racecourse, which everyone locally just calls the Roodee, and within sight of Chester Castle’s sandstone walls rising over the far side of the car park. I always assumed the racecourse was one of the oldest in Britain. It’s actually recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest racecourse still in operation anywhere in the world, with racing on record here since 1539, though some accounts trace the very first meeting back to 1512. The name Roodee comes from Rood Eye, meaning the Island of the Cross, after a stone cross that stood on a silted-up island in the river back when the Romans were using this spot as a harbour.

Cheshire West and Chester Council run the car park. Our size of van gets charged under the Buses, coaches and goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes tariff, not the standard Cars rate: £7 for up to 3 hours, £9.50 for up to 6 hours, £11.50 for up to 12 hours, or £5.50 for arrivals after 6pm through to 10am the next day, which is the rate that makes an overnight stay here genuinely affordable. We’ve stayed under that overnight rate many times. There was also a variation notice taped up next to the main board, since the council had just put the prices up from 24 June 2026.

Worth checking their current rates before you go, since councils update these things without much warning. What matters for us is that it’s a genuinely useful spot. It’s a 10 to 15 minute walk into the city centre, which makes it perfect for the evenings when Suzy and I fancy dinner in Chester with the dogs and a couple of drinks each, then a two minute stagger back to bed rather than a taxi home.

Along the River, Walls on One Side, the Dee on the Other

I hadn’t fancied the city centre that afternoon, but I did fancy a proper walk with the dogs, so I picked up the river path with the water on one side and Chester’s city walls running along the other. The walls are worth a mention on their own. They’re generally reckoned to be the oldest, longest and most complete set of city walls surviving anywhere in Britain, first built by the Romans getting on for two thousand years ago and added to steadily ever since. Walking alongside them at ground level, rather than up on the walkway that runs along the top through the city centre, gives you a completely different sense of scale.

Queen’s Park Suspension Bridge (And Why It Looks Familiar)

The path brought me out at the Groves, Chester’s riverside promenade, with Queen’s Park Suspension Bridge crossing the Dee just ahead. The current bridge dates from 1923, replacing an earlier chain bridge from 1852 that was built specifically to open up the new Queen’s Park suburb on the far bank. If it looks familiar and you can’t place why, it’s probably Hollyoaks. The bridge has turned up in the show’s opening titles across several different eras, most recently with a drone shot flying straight towards it, which is a very Chester way to become famous.

Into the Meadows

I crossed the bridge and kept the river on my left, following the path into what’s known as the Meadows, or more fully Chester’s Earl’s Eye Meadows. Once you’re through the last of the trees it opens right out into proper wide-open grassland, a real contrast after the enclosed riverside path.

There’s a good information board on site that fills in the history properly. The land was gifted to the council in 1929 by Harry and Phyllis Brown for all the people of Chester to enjoy for recreation. Phyllis Brown went on to become the city’s first female mayor. Two of the events still held on the river here are amongst the oldest of their kind in the country, the Chester Regatta, which dates back to 1733, and the Dee Mile swimming race. The name Earl’s Eye refers to an area surrounded by water that once belonged to the Earl of Chester, and drainage ditches had to be cut across the meadows in the 18th century just to let cattle graze on what was otherwise waterlogged ground. Kingfishers, kestrels and sedge warblers are all regularly spotted here, and the board mentions Friends of the Meadows, a local group set up in 1980 after resident Adele Edwards noticed the land was being neglected.

Riverside Houses and the Deva Divas

The path carries on alongside some genuinely lovely riverside houses, the kind you slow down and gawp at a bit. Cujo trotted this stretch like he owned it.

Further along, a group of people were setting up gazebos and tables near the river, clearly getting ready for something the next day. I now know exactly what it was: the Deva Divas Triathlon, run by Chester Triathlon Club, held on the Meadows every year on the first Sunday of July. It’s a women-only short-distance event, and it’s the only race ever to win British Triathlon’s Event of the Year award twice, in 2009 and 2016. My first guess was the Chester Triathlon, which was wrong, since that ran a full month earlier on 7 June. Worth knowing if you’re planning a July weekend here with a van and want to either watch or avoid the crowds.

Pleasure Cruises, a Sailing Club and a Free Ferry

A bit further on one of the local pleasure cruisers, The Jackie, came past packed with passengers, followed shortly by Chester Sailing Club with a yard full of small dinghies under cover, then a proper ferry crossing point.

The ferry only runs weekends and bank holidays from Whit through to the last Sunday in September, sailing between 10:30am and 4:30pm on request. Adult and senior fares are £1 each way, children under 15 are 50p, and dogs and bicycles are also 50p each way. It’s a genuinely useful thing to know about if you’re on foot on one bank and want to reach Sandy Lane or the Meadows on the other without doubling back two miles to the nearest bridge crossing.

Horses (Understandably Unnerved)

I also passed a couple of horses grazing right across the path with the dogs on leads, and I’ll admit I gave them a wide berth. I was once chased off a farm by a genuinely angry horse years ago, and it’s the kind of thing that stays with you. Cujo and Blaze were more curious than bothered, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Turning Around Halfway Through the Chester Riverside Walk

I reckoned we’d gone about two and a half miles by the time I turned around, and the GPX track backs that up almost exactly. The whole loop came out at just over five miles door to door, which lines up neatly with two and a half out and roughly the same back, especially since I came back a different way rather than retracing my steps. The whole thing, including every stop to read a sign and take a photo, took just over three hours.

An Old Stone I’m Still Working On, and a Plantain Worth Knowing

Somewhere on the way back Blaze took an interest in an old stone marker, and having now had a proper look, I don’t think it’s a mile marker at all. The shape is wrong for that. It’s short and square-topped rather than the tall posts you normally see with “X MILES TO CHESTER” cut into them. What’s carved into the face looks more like a date, possibly 1710, with something else worn away above it that the lichen has taken over completely. My honest guess is this is an old parish or estate boundary stone rather than a distance marker, but I’m not confident enough in that reading to call it fact. If anyone locally knows this stone, I’d genuinely like to know what it says.

I did get a good look at the plant, though, off the back of a foraging course Suzy and I did recently with a chap called Gavin, who’s written a book about nettles. This is Broadleaf Plantain, the broad ribbed oval leaves growing in a rosette with a seed spike coming up through the middle. It’s the actual traditional remedy people reach for on nettle stings. Gavin told us that dock leaves don’t really do anything for a nettle sting beyond cooling it for a couple of minutes, but Plantain, crushed and rubbed on the skin, apparently sorts the sting out properly within about five minutes.

A Pint at The Ship, Then Back Over the Old Dee Bridge

The walk back took us past The Ship Inn at Handbridge, right by the Old Dee Bridge.

It’s properly dog friendly, does good food, and has a beer garden looking over the river towards Edgar’s Field. We stopped for a pint each. The Old Dee Bridge itself is the oldest bridge in Chester, a Grade I listed structure standing on the site of a Roman crossing, with the current red sandstone bridge largely dating from a major rebuild in 1387. It has seven arches, no two the same size, and there was a defensive gate tower on it from around 1399 until it was demolished in 1781.

We crossed it, kept walking, and were back at the van inside twenty minutes.

What I Wore: Hoka Infini Hike TC Sandals

Five miles, one pub stop, riverside path, meadow grass and a bit of gravel track, all in the Hoka Infini Hike TC sandals I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. Still no blisters, still no smell. This walk is exactly the kind of mixed terrain they were built for, and they didn’t put a foot wrong.

Would We Do It Again

Without question. Just over five miles, flat the whole way, two decent bits of history at either end of the loop, a pub stop, and the whole thing starting and finishing at a car park that costs less than a round of drinks. The bit that actually sticks with me is how close it all was the whole time. Ten miles from home, a walk we used to do all the time, and it had been years since we’d last bothered. No excuse for the gap, and no excuse to leave it that long again.

Related reading: my Giottiline Giottivan 60T review and the North Wales campervan sites roundup, if you want to see where else the van has actually taken us.

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About Pete

I’m Pete Harrison. I’m 55, I run a business, and I have a mild case of insomnia that means I spend a lot of time at 3am reading about gadgets, gear and ways to make life work better. Things I Learnt at 3am is where I write honestly about the things I’ve actually bought, tested and lived with. No fluff, no rehashing the spec sheet. Just the real verdict from someone who uses this stuff every day.