Grey-Roosevelt centenary walk

History

The walk commemorates a bird-song walk taken in June 1910 by Theodore Roosevelt and Sir Edward Grey. Roosevelt asked the British Embassy in Washington to arrange for an expert on British birds to walk with him, and Grey, then Foreign Secretary and a keen ornithologist, agreed. The Theodore Roosevelt Center dates the walk to 9 June 1910 and places it in the Itchen valley and the New Forest. The New Forest Heritage Centre's account has them walking from Tichborne to Kings Worthy, being driven to Stoney Cross and walking about seven miles to Brockenhurst, where Grey gave Roosevelt a list of 41 species they had seen and 22 they had heard. Grey re-enacted the walk in May 1921, the Hampshire Ornithological Society walked a six-mile stretch of the route from Tichborne to Easton in 1984 as part of National Heritage Year, and it was walked again on 9 June 2010 for the centenary; the society published a booklet, Grey-Roosevelt Walk Centenary 2010.

Hampshire County Council's Grey-Roosevelt centenary walk is a circuit of 6 miles from St Andrew's Church, Tichborne, by the Itchen Way and St Swithun's Way through Itchen Stoke, Avington, Martyr Worthy and Easton. The council's page lists the birds Roosevelt and Grey recorded, among them skylark, yellowhammer, goldcrest, cuckoo and swift, and says the site of Sir Edward Grey's cottage, just south of the path beyond Avington, can be visited.