Running in Richmond Park: routes, deer and the hill at the end

Richmond Park is the best running in London and it is not particularly close. It is the largest of the Royal Parks, it has free roaming deer, and it is big enough that you can run for an hour without repeating yourself.

It is also the one people get wrong most often, usually by driving in, parking badly, and running the perimeter path with everyone else.

Getting in

Richmond station, on the District line and the Overground, is the usual way. From there it is roughly a ten minute jog to Sheen Gate, mostly flat, which makes a decent warm up. Barnes and Mortlake are the other rail options on the north side, and Norbiton is the one for the Kingston end.

Each gate gives you a different park. Sheen Gate puts you straight onto open grassland. Richmond Gate starts you at the top of the hill with the view. Pembroke Lodge is the middle.

Three routes worth knowing

The Tamsin Trail

The perimeter path, a shade under twelve kilometres, surfaced and signposted the whole way. It is the obvious first run and it is genuinely good, but it is also where every runner, cyclist and dog walker in the park ends up. Do it once for the lap, then get off it.

Across the middle

The real character of the park is in the interior: open bracken, hollows, and paths that are proper trail rather than gravel. There is no fixed route and that is the point. Pick a distant hill and head for it. You will get more climbing than you expect and see barely anyone.

The Isabella Plantation loop

A walled woodland garden in the middle of the park, at its best in spring for the azaleas and in autumn for the colour. Not a running route in itself, it is small and you should not be hammering through it, but a good thing to run to and walk round.

The deer, and the bit people get wrong

There are several hundred red and fallow deer and they are wild animals, not park furniture. Two periods matter:

• •The rut, roughly September to November, when the stags are aggressive and vocal. Give them a very wide berth and never run between two of them.
• •Birthing season, roughly May to July, when the does will defend a calf hidden in the bracken you cannot see.
• •Keep at least fifty metres away year round, more during the rut
• •If one is on the path, go round it. Do not try to squeeze past.

Most incidents in the park involve someone with a camera or a dog rather than a runner. Running past at a distance is fine. Stopping to get closer is not.

The hill

Richmond Hill, outside the park gates, is the climb everyone forgets about because it is at the end. It is short and steep and it is also where the view is, out across the Thames Valley, a view protected by its own Act of Parliament.

The Roebuck sits at the top with a terrace facing it. Finishing there is the correct way to end a run in Richmond and people reliably stay longer than they meant to.

When to go

Early morning, for the light on the grassland and the chance that the deer are still out in the open. Autumn is the pick of the seasons: the bracken turns and the low sun makes the whole place look like somewhere much further from a Tube station than it is.