Frontier Country

A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

Brian Mooney and Jon Harris

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A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

Brian Mooney

and

Jon Harris

Published by Thorogood, 10-12 Rivington Street London EC2A 3DU Telephone: 020 7749 4748 • Fax: 020 7729 6110 Email: [email protected] • Web: www.thorogood.ws © Brian Mooney and Jon Harris 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser. No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person acting or refraining from action as a result of any material in this publication can be accepted by the authors or publisher. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85418 214 5 Printed in India by Replika Press Designed by Driftdesign

Foreword

It took us more than 30 years to begin this walk. We talked about walking together, ‘doing’ a serious walk, when we first met in the late 1960s. A lifetime intervened, and I worked and travelled around the world. Jon Harris, or Harris as he is affectionately known, stayed in Cambridge. We met up again, and finally set out in the summer of 2003. This account of our journey is dedicated to my wife, Gail. Brian Mooney

CONTENTS One Into London along the old County Boundary

1

Two Down the Thames from Barking

13

Three Round Fobbing to Canvey

23

Four Shoeburyness or bust

35

Five Up the Broomway

45

Six The Crouch Valley

57

Seven The Dengie Peninsula

65

Eight The Southern Blackwater

75

Nine Maldon to Mersea

81

Ten Mersea Island

91

Eleven Mersea to Brightlingsea

99

Twelve Brightlingsea to Clacton

107

Thirteen Round the Naze

115

Fourteen Round Harwich

129

Fifteen Along the Stour

139

Sixteen North Essex

147

Seventeen The Cambridge borders

153

Eighteen South to the Stort Valley

161

Nineteen Down the Stort and Lee

169

Twenty The New Frontier

177

Twenty One End of the Road

185

The ‘Burgundian’ tower south of Holliwell Farm

ONE Into London along the old County Boundary

I found Harris at the top of Highbridge Street. He was instantly recognisable; who else would be wearing shorts, check shirt and heavy walking boots in Waltham Abbey at eight o’clock in the morning? He was sketching the west front of the Abbey Church with his back to the window of Scott’s News, in which cards advertised baby ferrets and a hamster cage for sale and offered the escort services of Tracey, ‘new to the area’. Sex already – the last three letters of the county, but not the parts we were looking for. We were setting out on a very different search – a journey to discover an Essex beyond the mythical white cars, Jacuzzis and stiletto heels.

“I think we ought to begin in the Abbey Church,” said Jon, putting away his sketch pad. Jon’s entire adult life has been dedicated in one way or another to buildings. Ever since a brief encounter with the architecture faculty at Cambridge University, buildings have been the centre of his life – designing them, drawing them, visiting them, talking about them, praising them and, less often, damning them. “But don’t go and get trapped in the triforium,” I said; “remember, we have a tide to catch.” Catching tides from Waltham Abbey, an ancient town that sits by the River Lea in the far west of Essex, more than 25 miles from the open sea, must

One Into London along the old County Boundary

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by all reckonings be an unusual proposition. But we had set ourselves an unusual task, to take 20 or so days, over a couple of summer months, beating the bounds of Essex, and walking every twist and turn around the county’s land and sea borders.

two ladies at the cash till with a detailed explanation of the walk ahead. As we left I turned back and saw their eyes meet in an expression of mutual relief. Their morning was going well; they had got rid of two nutters without trouble.

On the face of it, this was a simple project: nothing like organising a Himalayan expedition, for example. Essex, after all, is mostly flat; we knew the language, or at least thought we did; and we did not require porters, visas, jabs, and water tablets – or at least not that often. But there were some unexpected obstacles, and, if we were to stick to our plan of walking in an unbroken anticlockwise circuit, we only had four days in which to reach Wakering Stairs in time to walk the Maplin sands, when low tide would fall on a day the guns on the Foulness firing ranges were silent.

Out of the Abbey we faced our first challenge – finding the Essex-Hertfordshire border. Passing the gated entrance to the former Royal Gunpowder factory and crossing the river bridge to the Old English Gentleman, we took the steps down to the one path that led south, alongside the Lea Navigation. Leaving behind the modern factories and an old pumping station, we made for the bridge under the M25 and emerged into open country on Rammey Marsh. In a few steps, we had spotted all the major signposts of our journey – church and military sites, water, townscape, open country and the arteries of a crowded transport network. Essex, spilling out from industrial London to the east coast estuaries and peninsulas and to some of the most remote country in southern England, is a county stamped by the church, and fortified along its water’s edge by the military; it is also heavily populated and sliced through by motorways and railways. In between is

It was in the shop in the crypt of the Abbey church, as Jon was picking out postcards to send, that I realised just how odd we looked – two middle-aged men, in shorts and boots, with rucksacks on their backs; Jon, in addition, clutched a supermarket carrier-bag, to safeguard the map clipped to his A4 memo pad. He was regaling the

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

Map 1
The old county boundary, along the Lea and Thames

26 miles 3

a haphazard blend of old villages, new towns, sea coast and wide open countryside. We wanted to experience this, to stumble upon it by accident, by following the arbitrary line of the county border – what we called frontier country. In keeping with its split personality, Essex has two southwestern borders – old and new. For 1100 years, until in 1965 Greater London shifted outwards to engulf all of Middlesex and the Essex boroughs of Barking, Havering, Newham, Redbridge and Waltham Forest, the River Lea formed a natural county boundary. Bow, where the Lea flows into the River Thames, defined the limit of London’s East End and the beginning of Essex. The re-drawing of the borders, (as the county was rolled back by an Act of Parliament to the line roughly of the M25), converted one and a quarter million Essex people into Londoners – at that time, half the county’s total population; but the conversion has never been complete, and many living in the new boroughs still proudly consider themselves to be Essex Londoners. Romford, Essex has a more attractive ring to it than Romford, London Borough of Havering, postcode RM1. Waltham Abbey, from where the two frontiers diverge, was therefore the natural place from which to set out. “We’ll start with the old frontier,” said Harris, “and get Chingford, and all the Industrial Revolution palimpsest that follows, out of the way.”

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

Highbridge Street, Waltham Abbey

That committed us to spending the first day and a half walking into London, and turning left along the Thames through the former eastern docklands and round the old Royal Docks and Dagenham to get back into official, post-1965 Essex, at the end of the Rainham Marshes. As the towpath slips under the carriageways of the M25, the roar of traffic is momentarily replaced by an eerie silence. We were greeted on the other side with views of the new Brimsdown power station; and yet, with such a 21st century utility to lead us on, and within hailing distance of the M25, we were suddenly walking beside a tranquil Essex inland waterway. Willows arched over a line of moored craft on the far shore. The boats are workmanlike, elegant old hulls furnished with homespun cabins, vessels for living in and pottering on. There’s none of the swank that goes with cars and houses; the only competition is for the brightness of the geraniums, whether on deck or on the adjacent strip of neatly-tended bank, and in the wit with which the little ships are named. (Toadhall was my winner.) Never mind the M25, here there is an abundance of bird life: Canada and pinkfoot geese gather on the towpath, coots scuttle

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

by, cormorants cruise past with their chins up, terns fly by with beaks down. Towpaths, more than any other rights of way, guarantee the most trouble-free walking. I settled in to a steady and relaxed stride, happy at the prospect of an easy morning ahead all the way down to London on the Lea Valley Walk. Harris, who has never graduated as a car driver, has walked or bicycled all his life, was fiercely fit. I wasn’t. I hadn’t walked seriously for several months; I could have done with an easy let-in, and I hadn’t reckoned on Harris’ fundamentalist strategy when it came to map reading. We had passed Government Row and the surviving ranges of the Royal Small Arms Factory on Enfield Island, where from 1841 James Lee and his successors produced guns for the British army, notably the First World War Lee Enfield rifle. Explosives upriver, guns here – both once shipped in lethal barge-consignments to ports and railheads, to build the empire and feed battlefronts. These two factories, sprawling ranges of still Georgianlooking workshops, are an essential part of Essex’s military legacy. Both, now in retirement, are being absorbed into prestige 21st century housing

developments. We were passing the Rifle pub at the Enfield Lock end: “I think we’ll take a left here,” said Jon. My heart sank. “But the Lea Valley Walk goes straight ahead on my map,” I said. “Yes, but not the Essex border. Look, that follows the course of the old River Lea.” I consulted my map again. The old beggar was right. While the inviting line of the Lea Valley Walk followed the Lea Navigation to the west of the two giant reservoirs, I saw the Essex path, east of the old Lea River – the ancient border – veering malignantly off into the suburbia that had engulfed the Lea-ward slopes of Epping Forest. It instantly dawned on me that my companion was going to take borders very seriously – no short cuts, and no easy ways round. Only once over 21 days and 490 miles did I have to persuade him to break his ordinance: then, it was to stop him from incurring our certain deaths on a motorway.

So, following the old Lea, called Horsemill Stream at this point, as it rounds King George’s Reservoir, we climbed the first foothills of Epping Forest and turned right along the A112 – a horrid pavement-less trudge against the traffic – down into Sewardstone. Our route led us through Chingford: Jon was quick to point out its sturdy1930s attractions and subsequent enlivenments – a house re-done with crazy paving on its walls, a Riviera villa, eked out (garage as well) with Ionic loggia. After three miles, we side-slipped back to the canal. Here, at Edmonton, we were in London’s E4 postal district, and familiar City landmarks lay ahead. We marched on them across the marshes of Tottenham, Walthamstow and Hackney, as the Lea Navigation and its locks wove between warehouses, workshops, old mills and modern housing. Among all these, along the towpath side in particular, the Lea River Park announces its presence with commissioned steel waymarks, adorned with dolls and snails; the canal itself, though, is often choked with detritus, and the towpaths may be strewn with rubbish. The worst

One Into London along the old County Boundary

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culprit was on the east bank, Towpath Road, outside the Leaside Bus Depot; and yet within a few metres we could see how the sides of the Lea are heading for transformation. The litter finishes; new gravel crunches underfoot, to bring you out into the riverside marshes of Walthamstow – not only a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) whose fields, a mere six miles from Piccadilly, have never been under the plough, but a broad and singularly beautiful champaign of trees and turf, backed by the wooded line of the Epping Forest hills. On the marshes, in 1909, the year that Blériot flew the Channel, the young Alliott Verdon Roe set up a workshop in a brick arch beneath the steam trains of the Great Eastern Railway, to build and fly the first of a line of planes that over time would include the Lancaster, Vulcan and Shackleton. The path goes under those same arches, and a plaque commemorates the birth both of Britain’s aviation industry and also of the industrial world’s first acronymic brand – Avro. “So was this London’s first airport?” I asked. “Try floating an idea like that past the Waltham Forest planners now,” replied Harris.

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

To our right beyond the river, London grew progressively taller. The hint of the approaching city was a structural type peculiar to the capital, the London Board School, its five storeys crowned with a games court, the tall wire screens tethered to even taller turrets and chimneys. We passed two, the one at Silk Mills Square embellished with slated corner spires, château-like. The City’s landmarks started to fall into frame: mirrored in the opening of the Hertford Union Canal, the new smoked-glass bulb of Sir Norman Foster’s Swiss Re building, the Gherkin, stood freed from its encumbering cranes, while ahead, above the bright southern reach of the Lea Navigation, Canary Wharf hovered expectantly. Much of the old industry that crowded the banks has now disappeared; not, though, the locks and precisely-set brick bridges. At Old Ford, Harris spotted one survivor, an old maltings with low storeys and squat windows, end on to the canal. We were still walking among the buddleia boughs of the Essex towpath when the background murmur of the city was suddenly turned up full blast: our neighbour across the water was now the A12-Blackwall Tunnel Link, just where it sweeps past the yuppy apartments carved from the majestic red Bryant & May match factory. We emerged

under the legs of the Bow overpass high above us, making our way to the lane that leads to the best early industrial buildings remaining on Leaside, the Three Mills. Reaching the far side, we leaned on the old dock wall. Our lungs filled with the first rush of tidal brine. Harris pronounced Three Mills quite the finest man-made environment we had come alongside in the dozen miles since leaving the Abbey at Waltham. Lucams and kiln-vanes give this Georgian complex a silhouette partly marine, partly Dutch; the patination of the brickwork is smoky, yet luminous: and it has an advantage, not vouchsafed to Waltham Abbey, of rising straight out of the water. (The structures that survive – two mills really, not three – provide a fine close to the northward view from the windows of the Hammersmith & City and District Line trains where they cross the Lea.) The buildings served during their long history variously as distillery, navy victualling station, gunpowder factory and tide-powered corn mills – the largest surviving in Britain – and they have been handsomely restored and converted into a modern cinema and television production unit, Three Mills Film Studios.

It had faithfully led us to this glorious reception in London’s East End; but now the River Lea turned its back on us, its snakelike mouth inaccessible to pedestrians. The river here turns S shaped and splits into seven different cuts, and without a path through this maze we were left to guess our way down back streets and along walkways, passing the unexplored attraction of the London Gas Museum and the clearly thriving Turkish baths in Bidder Street. From the top of Silvertown Bridge, through the legs of pylons, we got our first sight of Old Father Thames. In the Lea mouth a coaster lay alongside a little lighthouse; behind were the Dome and Canary Wharf. At our feet stood a ziggurat of dead rubber tyres; and beyond the Canning Town DLR station. Now that would have been a good place to stop for the day. Harris, however, had set his heart on symmetry. “Abbey to Abbey,” he proclaimed. “Can you manage another six miles? That will get us to Barking.” We had already walked 20, and I was beginning to understand that Jon was going to be a fundamentalist, not only with map reading but also with going the full distance.

One Into London along the old County Boundary

9

I gave in, though: there was the matter of that tide. So we turned east, and for the first time we had the late afternoon sun on our backs. But I doubt if either of us would have had much enthusiasm for what lay ahead – Tate & Lyle’s deco sugar refinery, the glowing Île-de-France tower of the church at Silvertown, the cars crossing the Thames for free on the Woolwich Ferry, or the big surprise, the Thames Barrier Park, wave shapes cut in parallel hedges along the floor of a former dry dock – had it not been for that saving pot of tea at George’s Café on the North Woolwich Road. The buildings, like the railway, run out at North Woolwich; and for the last couple of miles we tracked across a postindustrial green wilderness. Once, this had been the mighty Beckton Gas Works; but now the only signs of life were the cars going to the new Tesco’s and planes above our heads dropping in to City Airport. Wearily we crossed the A13, and marched the last thoroughly un-Thameside mile – despite the sign to Captain James Cook’s house – into Barking, to finish the day at the gatehouse of the town’s vanished Abbey.

Three Mills, Tide Mill and Distillery on the Lea at Bow

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

TWO Down the Thames from Barking

Barking is one of those London boroughs people drive through, or past, without knowing where they are – unless they live there. It’s bordered on the west by the North Circular Road and carved down the middle by the A13, which is being widened and sunk into a culvert so that people will be able to drive even faster through Barking and see even less of it. Even the footings of the venerable Abbey are shrivelled into a hollow in its precinct lawn. The great advantage of walking is that you have no choice in what you see. We were obliged, so to speak, to take the grand tour. We resumed our walk from the Abbey gatehouse, next to the parish church in which Captain James Cook was married, and looked up at the brick tower of the 1930s Town Hall, its shape recalling

the city halls of Stockholm and Oslo. Re-crossing the A13, we made our way down River Road, a noisy, dirty, pulsing world of car dealerships, workshops and warehouses. Unseen on our right, Barking Creek was leading us back towards the Thames; from the back of Montague L Meyer’s board and timber yard, the sides of its huge sheds all torn wooden slats, we stole a view of the Creek’s deep muddy channel. This is the ancient tidal outflow of the River Roding which, as late as 1900, gave Barking its prosperity as a major fishing port for London. Now it has a giant guillotine-like structure hanging over its mouth – a sluice, forming part of London’s flood defences, which from the little park off the corner of River Road you can watch as it raises and lowers itself in constant practise.

Two Down the Thames from Barking

13

We left River Road at another scenic site – a mass of transformers and wires which Harris dubbed ‘pylonopolis’, the last active element of a huge industrial wasteland that is being transformed into the future community of Great Fleete. For the present, the only sign of normal activity is the placard advertising Dagenham’s Sunday market; and Dagenham, around the end of a raw landfill site, was our next destination. We reluctantly turned inland. A succession of creeks, railspurs and security fences, ensures there is no way through Dagenham Port and Hornchurch marsh, and so for the only time on our frontier walk we were forced to follow a trunk road. We joined the A13 where it rises up on stilts by the Hays warehouse and 90 minutes later, and one pound richer, we came down onto Ferry Road on Rainham marshes. I picked up a pound coin at the kerb side, and kept wondering how it got there. Do people toss coins out of their cars in Dagenham? It had been hard drill, but from the elevated road it was clear why there was no alternative: by now, the other barriers had been joined by the workings of the new Eurostar track, while over to our left they were flattening the old Ford assembly lines.

Map 2
Barking Creek to the new boundary, and on to Grays

19 miles 14

Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

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“Hard to imagine, looking down at all that,” said Harris peering over the parapet, “but Dagenham Marsh was the first place in England that the Dutch engineers reclaimed from the sea. It was Cornelius Vermuyden’s first job over here – 1621.” “There was no way we could have walked through that lot,” I said. “But thank God we don’t have to do any more dodging along busy arterial roads. I’ve never liked walking into lorries.” “We may have to,” replied Jon. “That is, if we can’t find a way round Rainham and Aveley Marshes.” “We will, though; even if we have to swim!” We skirted the edge of Rainham Marshes to rejoin the Thames along an inviting path with fine views of the Kent shore. But the path – unexpectedly – fizzled out at the Coldharbour Point lighthouse: first an industrial estate, and then a landfill site, barred our way. (One day, though, there will be a path all the way to Purfleet and beyond, and when it is opened it will be among the most scenic of the whole tidal Thames.)

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

Rainham has always served as London’s dumping ground, and we either had to find an unofficial way across the Cleanaway site ahead, or face the awful prospect of returning to the A13 to cross the marshes on its stilted carriageway. I persuaded Harris to scramble over the fence and take a chance with the riverside route. Landfills are dangerous and scary places for pedestrians, with trucks coming and going in every direction, dumping and then racing away to pick up their next load; besides, you can never be quite sure what you are walking on. We were stopped and challenged but, to our relief, grudgingly permitted to walk on – thanks, in large part, to a cluster of yurts. These incongruous domed tents, which you would expect to find on the Asian steppes rather than on the Thames foreshore, are pitched opposite a giant reprocessing plant: they are part of Cleanaway’s waste management strategy and a laudable attempt to ‘green’ the refuse industry. Around them has sprung up an organic garden where flowers, vegetables, plants and trees are being cultivated in compost regenerated from organic waste and everything is made from recycled material – just to show what can be achieved. We were given

permission to walk across the site so that we could see the garden for ourselves. This London Remade ‘eco-organics project’ was to be opened to the public a few weeks later by the local Member of Parliament. “Rainham has been a dumping ground since the time of Queen Elizabeth I – far too long,” said John Cryer at the opening ceremony. “It’s time we hit back and started to re-generate our rubbish.” In addition to this small organic garden by the river, the landfill hills, carefully sculpted along the Thames shore, are being greened. “It’s all for the benefit of Eurostar passengers,” quipped Harris. “They’ll pop out of the Thames tunnel and the first things they’ll see are brown cattle grazing in tranquil marshes, and an undulating line of fake azure hills behind – all very pastoral,” he observed. After London Remade, we slipped back onto the riverbank, and there was enough of a track to allow us to walk round the side of Aveley Marshes towards the remnants of the Purfleet rifle ranges: before Cleanaway, this was an active military site; now there is just one line of butts and a red flag.

“Must have been a dangerous place,” I remarked. “Only small-arms fire here,” said Harris. “Wait till the artillery ranges on Maplin, though: that’s real big-bang stuff.” “Especially if we

miss the tide,” I replied.

As we walked towards the hill of Purfleet, we had crossed an unmarked and invisible border. There wasn’t a post, there wasn’t a marker; but if you looked across to the Kentish shore and took a compass bearing on the little promontory of Crayford Ness, you were at the point where the new borders of London and Essex, having run across the marsh on an ancient parish boundary, met on the Thames shoreline. And so we left Essex London or London Essex to enter today’s post-1965 Essex, and a few hundred metres later crossed the Mar Dyke onto solid land, by way of a concrete bridge that

Two Down the Thames from Barking

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still has the narrow-gauge rails to show its original use, for transporting ammunition trucks. Current historians dismiss the old story of how Purfleet got its name when Queen Elizabeth came down to review her battle-scarred navy and exclaimed: “Oh, my poor fleet.” This strategic Thames anchorage, not surprisingly, is knee-deep in a military and naval past. Captain Cook brought in ‘Endeavour’ for revictualling here, and Bligh his ‘Bounty’; the rocket celebrated in the American national anthem was invented here. Purfleet had been a considerable military complex, with barracks and powder magazines dating back to the 1760s; but the Ministry of Defence pulled out in 1962 and, in contrast to the spread of buildings at the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Works, a solitary Georgian brick shed survives as a museum of what went on here. We passed the inviting Royal Hotel, credited with having one of the best panoramic views of the Lower Thames for miles. The view is being opened up, with (beneath a new residential development) a riverside path around the point; but – for now – we were forced to follow the road as far as the

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

railway, where an overgrown path led us back to the shore. The road, though, gave sudden views into the honeycombed interior of Purfleet: the coastal houses are a mere fringe to a series of sheer-walled chalk pits, first opened to supply lime to build the city up-river, then vastly expanded with the invention of Portland cement in the first quarter of the 19th century. Two of the earliest railways – long before steam traction – carried chalk to barges on the shore. Later, cement works would grow up on both banks of the Thames; we would pass the empty silos of one such derelict monster on our way into Grays. From now on, the whole foreshore was dominated by concrete. The seawall itself became a massive concrete defence, at times too high to see over. Ahead and above us towered the giant concrete legs of the QE II Bridge. “What on earth happens here?” “Simple,” said Harris from behind a map. He had by now assumed the role of chief navigator. “We walk under it.”

Around 75,000 vehicles pass across the cablestayed steel deck 200 feet above the river every day – hurrying south into Kent. How many people in their cars and trucks up there, I wondered, know that there is a footpath beneath them? I gazed up the massive concrete pillars of the northern approach viaduct. We were so far from the traffic above us that we actually couldn’t hear it. Down here was strangely quiet – just the lapping of the Thames against the concreted riverbank. After the bridge, we worked our way past refineries and industrial sites, and under, over and round their jetties, wharfs and loading pipes. At Stone Ness, we were confronted with the billowing smoke of the Procter & Gamble detergent plant at West Thurrock. This colourful giant seems to have sole charge of the riverside here – that is, until you notice the squat church tower, banded in contrasting stones and heavily buttressed up to its black flint bell-stage, in its lee. St Clement’s story is stranger than that of most parish churches. Jim Bell, who used to be the electrical manager at the P&G plant, is its chronicler and part-time curator. He shows old photographs of St Clement’s surrounded by lonely

marsh, not a house to be seen; and this is how it stood until 1939, when the American-owned soap and detergent multinational seized the opportunity of a prime riverside site to set up a brand new production plant. The first soap bars began rolling out in 1940 at the height of the Blitz, and the plant has expanded over the years to dwarf the tiny church. “This was a pilgrim church,” said Jim, taking us outside to point out the ring of foundations encircling the tower – the outline of an earlier round nave. (In England, these are a real rarity, usually, like Little Maplestead, associated with Knights Hospitallers or Templars.) “It was built on the shingle shore here because there was a ferry across the Thames,” continued Jim. “Pilgrims used it on their way to Canterbury, Santiago and the Holy Land. That’s why it was named after St Clement, the patron saint of those who go down to the sea in ships.” (In stained glass windows, Clement is always shown with an anchor. After Peter, he was the third Bishop of Rome, banished to the Crimea by the emperor Trajan, to work in the mines. His continuing Christian activities were rewarded by his being thrown into the sea with an

Two Down the Thames from Barking

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anchor tied to his neck.) The stretch of Thames by his church on the Thurrock marshes is still marked on the charts as St Clement’s or Fiddler’s Reach; and the church is still important to the River: the 18th century weathervane on top of the tower, depicting a model of the navy’s first Ark Royal with topgallants set, remains an official Thames navigation marker. This means that the P&G plant may not completely obscure the view of it from the river. St Clement’s ceased to be used in the 1970s, and, in 1987, Procter & Gamble commemorated its own 150th anniversary by formally adopting the church as a heritage site and carefully restoring it. Services are still held there, on occasion; and this church amid the sea of detergent became a global attraction in the 1990s, when it became the setting for the funeral in the film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral ’. We ended the day at Grays, which boasts the first waterside esplanade of our walk, enjoying the cheeky graffiti along the river wall and a pint – IPA for him and St Clement’s for me – in The Wharf Hotel, the first of many oak-framed and weatherboarded pubs along the Essex shoreline.

The ruins of Barking Abbey

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

THREE Round Fobbing to Canvey

When we reconvened in Grays a few days later, I needed to inject a sense of urgency into Harris: we had just two walking days in which to cover the marshes to Southend, and round Shoebury Ness. Without meeting low tide on the Saturday morning, and the following high tide, we couldn’t get on to Foulness from the Broomway, or leave it for Wallasea by boat, as I’d planned. At Gray’s, we were still far up the Thames with the whole of Canvey Island yet to walk around. Saturday was in more senses than one going to be an exercise in logistics; timing was crucial. “Grays is only a misspelt adjective,” I said, “We needn’t linger here long.” “I think I’ll just write a few postcards,” said Harris. Postcards are Jon’s equivalent of e-mail.

He is not in any sense wired up, but he sends out at least four pieces of mail a day. His cards and letters are full of his wit and knowledge, and like his beloved buildings Jon insists on making time for them. So rather than race back to the river, we began the day sitting in warm sunshine among the gravestones in the churchyard facing the station; I watching commuters scurry for their trains while Jon penned his morning cards. That done, it was back down to the river wall. We set out with the hope there would be a path along the Thames to the edge of Tilbury Docks – but there is none on the map, and none on the ground: our way along the riverbank was soon blocked by the wharf of a working cement plant, and we were forced back into suburbia.

Three Round Fobbing to Canvey

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The black-flint church at Little Thurrock, nestling in a grove of ilexes, made up for the loss of the river and the Kent shoreline; and suddenly we were in open country, with views across the marsh to the distinct hill of West Tilbury. A long slog at the side of the A1089 led us past Tilbury Town, and out to the two terminal buildings from which many a soldier and empire builder had embarked. Jon went weak at the knees outside the East Terminal building, as he recalled boarding an Orient Liner here in 1948. “I do feel strange coming here,” he said; “this is where I left from, when I was five, to go to Australia with my mother and father. He was a Commander ‘E’, that’s engineer, in the Royal Navy.” I conjured a picture of Jon more than half a century ago. He was still in shorts, but before I could focus the image and roll back the years, he was off again. “Look at the huge metal roof, and that cupola. Magic,” he said. “Straight off the top of King’s Cross station – isn’t it!” Harris hadn’t lingered long in his childhood. He was back on track. The great liners, and the Dock station that served them, are long gone; but Russian and Baltic cruise ships still berth at the terminal. And, despite interruptions and difficulties, the Gravesend to Tilbury foot-ferry is still in service. This is one of the oldest surviving Thames crossings, recorded in

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Map 3
From Grays along the Thames to Canvey Island

28 miles

25

Domesday, and reaching back to a time when communication between shores was often easier than overland. Kent and Essex used to talk to each other then; today, though, if you walk along the Essex bank and look over to Kent, it is like gazing across to another country: the two shores sit with their backs to each other. We sat for a while at the top of the ferry slipway looking straight up the main street of Gravesend on the other side. The hanging geraniums swayed gently above the white plastic tables.

Martello towers – to keep out the seaborne enemy. Defence of the realm was now on our daily agenda as we walked; it was, after all, from the slopes of Low Street here that Queen Elizabeth, in Armada year, exhorted her troops to defend their land against the Spanish by telling them that, though she had the body of a woman, she had the heart of a king. Below her, across the marshes, she could see the first fort at Tilbury – built there by her beleaguered father when he knew he was in the sights of all the navies of Catholic Europe.

“You’re not the only one to have left from here,” I told Harris. “I took the foot ferry to Gravesend when I walked from Walsingham to Santiago.”

You can get a cup of tea in Tilbury Fort in the shop below the chapel, just inside Sir Bernard de Gomme’s great carved gateway. Wendy Dowman, the senior custodian, has local connections. Her uncle worked in the docks; she herself lives across the parade ground in the Georgian officers’ quarters. Work is underway on the Magazines, part of a £2 million project to put new heart into the empty spaces of the fort where the biggest attraction currently is the thrill of being able, once a month, to fire a 25-pound cannon from the ramparts.

“So you didn’t walk all the way, then?” The World’s End is well named. At this weatherboarded pub next to the star-shaped moat of Tilbury Fort, marsh and lagoon meet and for the first time since London there is open sky ahead. But the great limbs of Charles II’s fort, crowned with World War II guns, mark the biggest change so far along the Essex frontier. From here on, the seawalls are not just to keep out the sea; they are studded with forts, pillboxes and (in due course)

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Tilbury Fort is an impressive structure; its neighbour, 2 1/2 miles to the east, is a whopper. To get to it, we had to skirt round a dinosaur of a building, a huge coal-fired power station. The coal, scooped from the bellies of ships by giant grabs, is carried by overhead conveyors – the path runs beneath them along the seaward side of the buildings – to feed the furnaces deep inside ochre-grey concrete walls; inland, a monkey-puzzle forest of pylons, their wires buzzing with freshlygenerated electricity, stretches across the marshes to bring power to Thurrock, Basildon, Brentwood and beyond. Back on the seawall, the scale of it all is put into human context by the charred remains of driftwood fires used for impromptu summer barbecues. Like the Rainham Marshes, those at East Tilbury beyond the power station are another historic dumping ground for London: on the riverside path there are signs of rubbish having been serious business. Broken rail tracks, down which loads of urban detritus were rolled ashore on hand-pushed wagons, jut loose from the crumbling estuary bank, while all along the path you can see holes dug by treasure hunters up to five feet into the

ground. The neatly cut excavations reveal successive layers of London’s redundant past. At the edge of one, I picked up a cog from an old timepiece. Harris, meantime, was botanising and reported butterbur, nettles, teasels, every degree of thistle you could ask for, tall lacy hemlock, and the first groves of a plant he had himself only become aware of a couple of weeks before at Point Clear; salsify would become an old friend, constantly reappearing on the seawalls in the days ahead. It was almost disappointing when this wilderness was suddenly interrupted by a brand new strip of tarmac path, which took us effortlessly to our next fort. The defences at Coalhouse date back to 1400, possibly earlier, but the shape of what you see today – an arc of titanic granite blocks pierced by deep set gun ports – is essentially the work of Colonel Charles Gordon. As General Gordon he met fame and death defending Khartoum, but in the 1860s, while officer-in-command of the Royal Engineers at Gravesend, he re-configured London’s sea defences with his forts, Coalhouse in Essex and two on the Kentish shore, Shornmead and Cliffe. These river-mouth fortifications were designed to ward off an invasion from France – “a queer

Three Round Fobbing to Canvey

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reading of the military tea-leaves,” said Jon. “And there’s more of that to come”. Sinister concrete silhouettes, superimposed on Gordon’s granite, show how the fort was reactivated for World War II. Now it stands, in hope of television redemption, with sash windows bashed in and turrets rusting, as the strange centrepiece of a popular childrens’ park. Coryton’s chimneys and tanks now emerged as glinting accents in the middle distance, while the stubby towerblocks of Southend loomed faintly over the low tip of the Cliffe Marshes on the Kent shore, the barrier beyond which the Thames will begin to open out towards the North Sea. Here we chose to follow the estuary wall as far as it would take us onto the wonderfully named Mucking Marshes; even though the map shows the pink dots of the path fading out at the jetty before Mucking Creek; the cry of seagulls and movement of dumping-trucks signalled that we were approaching another landfill site. Rather than back-track to East Tilbury, past the looming Bata shoe factory, we stepped gingerly out onto the Cleanaway moonscape. We were soon spotted attempting to sneak past the loading-jetties. In circumstances like these, Harris has a magical way when challenged. He buries his head in the folds of his map and goes on about lost footpaths, strange compass bearings and stray landmarks, in a manner that is both apologetic and

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The refinery at Coryton from the Canvey side of Hole Haven

confusing; the result is that we are almost always assisted. A sympathetic Cleanaway manager directed us towards the gates at the distant farmhouse, and we trudged on feeling relieved – and more secure – through fields of torn and blowing PVC. We rejoined the inland path at Little Mucking Church, threading our way by the gravel ponds at Stanford Warren. “Our first fenland,” said Harris, as we brushed through reeds. “I get the feeling of being on the edge of East Anglia.” We angled round the top of Mucking Creek and rejoined the seawall, to find the Thames transformed into a wide estuary; for the first time there was the sense of limitless sea beyond. It was only when we were almost at the gates of Coryton Refinery that security barriers forced us to head inland towards Fobbing. Lunch was often passed up on our walk, but this one found us sitting outside the Bull at Corringham enjoying standard English pub fare where there is no food – crisps and nuts washed down by beer and lemonade – but with a fine view across the lane to the Norman church, and the

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farmhouse to our left giving us a sense of being in a real country place for the first time. Leaving Corringham, we climbed sharply up to Fobbing Church, which stands on a tiny hilltop commanding the wide open views across the marshes to Canvey Island. The tower clung defiantly to our horizon for the rest of that hot June afternoon, mockingly, never quite letting us out of her sight as we walked first in an unplanned circle around a bird sanctuary, and then in a huge loop to the head of the creek. The map had given us hope that we could cross the creek much lower down at the point named Fobbing Horse. But it turned out to be another of those guillotine flood barriers, firmly fenced off and definitely not negotiable. This meant a long retreat inland up to Pitsea at the top of the Vange Marshes, almost to the dreaded A13. Chased by cows, impeded by broken stiles, misdirected by false waymarks and forced to wade through water and nettles – in this way Fobbing entered our common dictionary, viz: “I fobbing well told you it was left at the stile.” “No, you fobbing didn’t!”

A footpath just inland of the railway at Pitsea enabled us to avoid our old friend the A13, and led us out through open fields to the isolated church at Bowers Gifford, its timber belfry clad in silver oak shingles. We planed down over East Haven Creek on the A130, and descended a bank onto the north-western edge of Canvey Island, treading warily over marshes until we rejoined the seawall. More than an hour later, we found ourselves back alongside Fobbing Horse; Fobbing church, too, was getting closer again. It was here for the first time that my companion fell seriously behind. I watched with growing anxiety as he wrestled with his rucksack. He pulled out something that looked like an old army field telephone. An aerial sprang up and Jon plugged in two earpieces. “For fobbing sake,” I yelled out. “What are you up to now?” Two solemn words sprang back through the evening air: “The Archers.” Over the next few weeks I would grow accustomed to losing Jon for the twelve minutes it took the BBC to relay him his favourite programme. Life down on the farm –

wasn’t he getting enough of the real thing out on the Essex borders? For another whole hour we crept along the westward curve of Hole Haven Creek – gradually losing Fobbing and its Horse – towards Canvey’s Thames coastline. To our right on the tongue of mainland, the Coryton refineries seemed almost ablaze under the setting sun; to our left, among the island’s rough grazing meadows, we spotted our first egret and no fewer than three foxes. There was a hint of evening in the mid-June sky when we got to our destination, a pub set so low against the seawall that you walk in at first floor level. The Lobster Smack is mentioned in Great Expectations, and, with the terrace of similarly white-boarded coastguard cottages opposite, represents the one coherent remnant of old Canvey. End of a long day’s march: beer for both; on time for the tide. From here we took a taxi back to South Benfleet where I had left the car.

Three Round Fobbing to Canvey

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The Lobster Smack inn on the southwest tip of Canvey Island

Salsify would become an old friend, constantly reappearing on the seawalls Three Round Fobbing to Canvey

33

FOUR Shoeburyness or bust

With just one day left before that early tide, we made a very early start and drove straight to Shoeburyness, where we left the car at the station. A train ride and a taxi across Canvey got us back to the Lobby for 8:30am. “Shoeburyness tonight, or bust,” I told Jon; “about 24 miles, so no loitering in Southend.” The truth is, it was a loitering sort of day. Once we had got beyond the first mile of seawall, built six inches too tall to look over, there was much to see. Canvey Island’s earthenwork and stone seawalls were largely constructed by Dutch engineers in the 17th century. They built them for free in return for parcels of land; some, indeed, settled here,

although only two of their original octagonal thatched cottages survive, one as Canvey’s museum. Their sea defences haven’t fared so much better: in the great flood of February 1953, the entire island was engulfed, and 58 islanders perished – along with all the trees. By Deadman’s Point, once we had passed the big oil depots on Canvey’s southern shore, we could at last climb onto the concrete top. We were greeted, four miles to our south, by the green rolling Kentish hills of the Saxon Shore, while around the seawall at Thorney Bay, Canvey Island began to show its seaside colours. Ahead of us a tall white drum of a building straddled the seawall, sprouting twin lower wings like the bridge of an ocean liner;

Four Shoeburyness or bust

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for the benefit of passing ships, CANVEY ISLAND was boldly painted around its seaward facing curving wall. It had a breezy 1930s air, and the doors to the promenade were open. We stepped in for morning tea. At the eastern spit of the island, suburbia and seawall are left behind. We walked out across scrub and beach to Canvey Point: from here Southend’s mile-long pier seemed just an inviting short walk away across sparkling sands. In lizard fashion, a train crept out along the pier. It was tantalisingly close. Only the Ray Gut Channel, and the threat of an incoming tide, held us back from heading straight for it. Canvey Island’s northern face, towards Benfleet and Hadleigh on the mainland, is entirely different from the rest. It dissolves into a network of tiny mud-creeks, lined with an astonishing range of improvisatory, but well used, stagings crammed with craft of all ages and types, most of them still wooden. “Nothing swank here,” says Jon who suffers from Marina Aversion. “Real boats for real people.” “But don’t get carried away by reality,” I riposte. “There’s a golf course ahead.”

Map 4
From Canvey to Shoeburyness and Landwick Gate

28 miles 36

Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

37

“Well,” comes his return, “we’ve obviously spent three days in the real sticks. That’s the first one we’ve seen since Chingford.” The long seawall, winding its way to the head of Benfleet Creek, brought us back to the mainland and to the C2C, Fenchurch Street to Shoeburyness, coastal railway. We sneaked across the lines through a gate in the hedge, to resume our walk eastwards along the coast. We found ourselves following the contour of rising hills, more like the shapes of Kent, to our south, than anything we had encountered in Essex since the edges of Epping Forest. We had taken to the hills – and left behind the shorefront frontier – to visit Hadleigh Castle; and soon it was appearing, perched on its escarpment, round the end of Sandpit Hill, above a cove of woodland and sloping meadow. Hadleigh Castle was founded in the reign of King John, but was largely rebuilt under Edward III to keep out marauding Frenchmen. Subsequently, the castle and its land became the dowry of many English queens; no fewer than three of Henry VIII’s wives became tenants. Over time it decayed; the geology of the hill undermined it and it was quarried for buildings, roads and breakwaters, leaving one hollow tower and another like a leaning shark’s tooth. “Capability Brown couldn’t have done it better,” said Harris, as we walked out among the tumbled walls.

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Hadleigh Castle – the path up from Leigh

What you see on arrival at the summit is pretty much as John Constable recorded it in his painting of 1821 – the towers set against the clouds, the estuary and the outlines of Canvey and the Kentish shore. For us, on another fine June day, only Constable’s clouds were missing. We would meet Constable’s views again further up the coast at Walton, and finally walk through the painted scenes of his childhood along the River Stour in Dedham Vale. “Spot of competition here,” I said to Jon as he sits down to sketch the tower. “Different medium,” Jon grunted back. “Constable wasn’t really a pen man. The competition that bothers me is John Wonnacott – if he walked up here now from his home in Leigh and found me drawing this! Nobody beats his Essex coastline paintings, and he’s done a real cracker of this view.” We walked down the long gliding ridge, and crossed the railway to Two Tree Island, an early 20th century landfill site that has now healed over. Notices warn visitors of adders. From the slipway on the southern shore, we could easily have tossed

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a stone back to the spot on Canvey Point where we had stood three hours before. The island is uninhabited, and there was no sign of the two trees that gave it its name. And so along the shore to Leigh: a little miracle by the sea that somehow survives as a working port, despite being squeezed almost to its cockle sheds by railway and road. The severe Deco station and the high road bridge beyond just leave room, tight against the beach, for a tiny street, and for little back-lane sheds, where you can buy fish and seafood straight off the boats. It was too early for winkles, so we settled for squash and scones in the Strand Tea Rooms. While Jon knocked off a few postcards, I made my way to see the famous water conduit set up by the town’s benefactress in 1860. By then, with the arrival of the railway, Leigh had begun its big expansion up around the church on the top of the cliff; it was probably only thanks to this new well that Old Leigh, with its tarred clapboard houses, survived into the 20th century and up until now. At Chalkwell station, the railway, turning inland, is supplanted by the first real promenade along the

Essex coast, and by the first expansive beach so far. Jon insisted we walked out to a stocky stone obelisk on the very limit of the sand. The Crow Stone, standing exactly opposite the London Stone on the Kent shore, marks the outer limits of the Port of London Authority. The invisible line between the two officially transforms the Thames in front of Southend from river into estuary, and the architecture behind the promenade gardens seems to catch a new spirit. “Welcome,” said Jon, as we climbed back up to the seawall path, “to the Essex Riviera.” Drawing ever nearer to the long skeletal finger of Southend Pier, he became excitable, practically sniffing the buildings. The cliff top esplanade at Westcliff-onSea set him off, but by the time we had got to what he calls the ‘real stuff’, Prittlewell Square with its “rather North Kensington Italian feel”, Royal Terrace with its refined Nelsonian balconies, and the steel and stucco Palace Hotel like “a stranded Indian lake-fort”, he was almost ready to slip his collar. The perilous state of the cliffs, which threaten the whole of this seaward fringe of the town, brought

him abruptly to heel. In two places, the cliff gardens are collapsing, their paths tilting, and their trees toppling and dying. The slippage is severe: it hasn’t got to any of the famous buildings yet, but Queen Victoria, arm and finger stretched seaward on a clifftop statue, has nothing but a marble plinth and a privet hedge between herself and oblivion. The culprit, as at Hadleigh Castle and, further to the north-east on the cliffs of the Naze – in effect, on all the hilly sections of Essex’s frontier with the sea – is trapped layers of water within the cliffs’ structure. Southend has a battle on its hands to pinpoint and cure the underlying fault, so the cliff gardens can be restored. They are as much a major attraction as its beaches and pier. “The only other fright here,” said Jon. “Why did they have to plonk this bunker in the heart of such a lovely place?” (He scowled at the striped yellow walls of the Royals Shopping Centre.) “I think I need to cool off on the pier.” We walked the mile and a quarter towards the Kent shore. It was good to look back at the towers, beach and Ferris wheel from out in the waterway that we had kept company with for three days and

Four Shoeburyness or bust

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which, in a couple of hours, we would be turning our back on at Shoebury. We allowed Sir John Betjeman to bring us leisurely back to shore – one of the two miniature trains we had seen, from Canvey Island, slow-worming out along the pier early that morning. The parade with its arcades – Electric Avenue, New York New York, Monte Carlo – ends to the east with one last Regency building, the Hope Hotel, in its sober livery of black and white. Its elegantly-lettered Victorian companions, the row of fish dining-rooms, have gone, but the glazed and pillared lantern of the Kursaal continues to challenge the neon and Southend’s dull office blocks. With an eye on tomorrow’s tide, we hurried on eastwards in front of the genteel villas of Thorpe Bay. To our right, beachhuts looked out to the widening mouth of the Thames through the masts of small craft at their moorings. At the end of the seven-mile promenade, Shoebury Ness itself was denied us: the Victorian citadel of the Royal Artillery is being converted to housing and it remains fenced off. Turning north to reach the place appointed for tomorrow’s rendezvous with the tide, we passed between the fine trees and military frontages of Cambridge Town, walking the last half hour under open skies, but shadowed by MoD security fencing. Beyond it stood rank upon rank of mothballed train carriages. There wasn’t a broken window in any of them.

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

The Crow Stone and Leigh Bay

FIVE Up the Broomway

Gail drove Jon and me to Great Wakering early the following morning. All the time I was trying not to think of the obstacles ahead. This inaccessible south-eastern seaboard of Essex was the outermost reach of our frontier country – most of it closed to the public because of things that go whizz and bang here. Shoeburyness range is one of the world’s leading test sites for rocket and jet engines, explosives, bombs, shells and other non-nuclear weapons. What makes it so important and useful for testing is the availability of 30,000 acres of the Maplin tidal sands, over which, at high water, you can lob bombs or fire shells and rockets up to 22 kilometres out to sea, and, at low tide, when the vast sands are only under an inch skim of water, retrieve them in order to test their performance and accuracy.

“Just like Pooh-sticks,” said Jon. “Only a bit more real.” Shoeburyness has been a weapons test site for 150 years and the entire area – some 8,000 acres of land – is owned by the Ministry of Defence. The night before we had skirted the southern part of the site when we walked up to the Landwick Gate checkpoint. The security building there monitors Foulness Island: everything within the fence is MoD property and closed to the general public. But, by a quirk of history, it was this road which would unlock the gates of Foulness for us. Foulness Island and its neighbouring islands of Havengore and Potton form a waterbound archipelago that juts up from Essex’s southern coastline to the mouth of the River Crouch, the first

Five Up the Broomway

45

of the major estuaries you encounter going North after the Thames. It was with the threat of German invasion in World War I that the War Office – the predecessor of the MoD – moved in, purchasing the islands and constructing a road, a bridge and railheads to enable guns, ammunition and men to be transported onto and across Foulness. Until then the only ways to get up the cape from the mainland were by ferry, or by walking or driving a cart (at low tide) off Shoebury beach into the sea, and turning up the Broomway. This path, still marked on the map, runs along the Maplin sands parallel to the coast as far as Fisherman’s Head, almost to the top of Foulness Island. It is named after the broom or brush sticks placed along the sands to mark the way, and there is considerable evidence of its having been in constant use since Roman times. In taking over the islands, the military became the guardian of a local population of farmers and fishermen, and with adjustments on both sides, the two communities have lived in unusually close harmony ever since. One of the oddities of this co-existence is that, when the road and bridge at Havengore were first built, the Broomway remained. While farmers and other residents readily adopted the new road, the fishermen insisted on keeping the Broomway open in order to get to their lobster

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

Map 5
The Broomway, Foulness and Wallasea islands

15 miles

47

pots and nets, and they even persuaded the army to refrain from firing when they were out on the sands. Though the working fishermen have long gone – there is now only a farming community on the islands – the Broomway is still a public right of way, and you may walk it at low tide, when it is not closed for operations. Unusually for a footpath, the Ordnance Survey map of the Thames Estuary gives a telephone number you can call. I had duly done so, and to say that this attempt of ours to complete our circuit of Essex’s sea frontier was discouraged, and that in every way we were put off from ‘exercising our rights’ to walk the Broomway would be an understatement. Along with most MoD sites, Shoeburyness is now operated by QinetiQ, formerly the Defence Evaluation Research Agency – the research and development arm of the MoD. Despite some local gripes, they appear to do an efficient job in an ultra-secret and highly sensitive environment. But encouraging people to walk out into the North Sea onto an officially marked danger area, with perilous sands – where you might be caught by mist or rip-tides, sink without trace, or be blown to smithereens by unexploded ordnance – is not part of their brief. Besides, unlike the MoD, QinetiQ does not enjoy Crown immunity.

The Fishermen’s Head causeway out to the Broomway

Determined to press on with our frontier walk, I had turned to a local farmer and conservationist, John Burroughs. When I explained our mission, he readily agreed to guide us up the Broomway.

Five Up the Broomway

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“Well, Harris,” I said as we pulled up at Landwick Gate, “today’s the day we walk on the sea.” Gail warned us: “You boys might be about to go in deeper than you think,” she had spotted John Burroughs approaching the other side of the security gates in waist-high waders. Suddenly our hikers’ ankle-boots looked less than adequate. “Have we come in the wrong kit?” I asked John. “No, don’t worry,” he replied in his soft Foulnesian brogue, island Essex with the edges knocked off. “I use these for duck shooting on the saltings. You’ll be fine. The ground on the Broomway is perfectly firm.” And so, with a local resident as our host, the barriers fell away: we walked onto the site without let or hindrance, and followed John down the lane to Wakering Stairs, where the Broomway begins. Coming over the seawall, we found a rough causeway running straight out. The tide was already a long way from shore and the sands, still coated in an inch film of water, shimmered in the early morning June sunshine. It was exhilarating, but also slightly unsettling, to realise that we were about to walk out there.

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The Broomway is located about half a mile offshore, separated from the seawall by an area of black grounds, or treacherous silt. The headways are the man-made causeways linking the two; eight in number, roughly one every three quarters of a mile. The Broomway itself offers a perfectly good track for a bicycle or vehicle all the way to the top of the island – provided you don’t stray off it shoreward. When horses were stabled at the Shoeburyness barracks, they would regularly be galloped on the sands, and QinetiQ vehicles routinely drive out beyond the visible horizon; even so, they will only venture there with two-way radios, back-ups and satellite navigation. As we set out along Wakering Stairs to reach the Broomway, John stooped to prod the withy matting beneath us: it could have been hazel or willow. “We are going to get this carbon-dated,” he said, “but we have reason to think that this is the original Roman matting. The Romans had salt works on the island here, and it really makes common sense that they would have used the Broomway. This has been perfectly preserved in the mud.”

An agile 55, John Burroughs is one of the four big farmers on Foulness. He counts a fair number of the 200 or so people that still live on the island as relatives, and has five children, including two youngsters from the ‘second time round’. His father-in-law Frederick Farenden, who runs the one remaining pub, The George and Dragon, has written a booklet about pulling pints according to Ministry of Defence rules, and under their strict interpretation in Pax QinetiQa. In addition to his farming and fishing activities, John organises wildfowling here in winter; his clients include a regular party from Germany, who come to shoot ducks and geese over fields where British military scientists developed bombs and shells to let loose on their grandfathers. The season’s average bag, 600 brace, still leaves 90 per cent of the game bird population on Foulness. Half a mile out, and with the sense already of being in an eerie wilderness, we turned left and started a slow slish slosh march towards the distant radio masts to the north-east. Most of what lands near the Broomway is picked up and removed by QinetiQ, but John pointed out a wrecked fishing boat and the remains of motor torpedo boats – used for targets. All about us, flat

shining sandpools ran as far as the eye could see, scored by ripples here and there that marked the course of tidal runnels. “What do you make of this, Jon?” I asked my companion. Harris looked down at his boot which was being menaced, at that moment, by a tiny white crab, on its hind legs. “Miles and miles of rained-on concrete,” he replied. “Does it ever dry out?” “In a gale, or hot sun and wind, yes,” replied our guide. “It all depends on weather conditions. If you have a real blow the sand develops more ripples and holds back water, and if you get a gale from the south it actually blows the water up here out of the Thames. You can literally see it rolling down the sands, so that you’d think the tide’s coming in. But it isn’t.” “How solid is the sand?” I asked. “If you stood in one place long enough you’d start to go down, but you wouldn’t actually sink in. But if you got in a soft patch you’ll start thinking pretty quickly. It’s no good thinking later on. You’ve got to spread your weight as fast as you can, because the suction’s colossal: if you got your boot in there above your ankle, you’d have to dig it out. You couldn’t pull it out by yourself.”

Five Up the Broomway

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We were now passing Sharpness Head, off which John had been fishing that morning; next to it was an offshore lagoon built by Shell in the 1980s for a gas trial. The next head is Eastwick where, from a high slung gantry, they tested Concorde’s Olympus engines and the gas turbines used for the world land speed record. Engines for the new Eurofighter are being run in there, and, behind closed doors in a nearby hangar, an ex-Soviet MIG fighter is being stripped to its joystick. Later we passed a ghostly scaffold tower that used to have a ball suspended from it for target practice. Here and there, old rail tracks stick out of the sand – remnants of a network of miniature railways along which moving targets were winched into place. The black grounds each side of the headlands are studded with old shell cases, rocket cones and spent canisters. “Wasn’t this where they were going to site the third London airport?” I asked, referring to the Government proposal in the 1960s, which had the country and Essex up in arms to protect the wild geese of Maplin. Foulness has one of Britain’s highest concentrations of birds – 220 different species, including 90 per cent of the country’s oystercatchers, and a third of the world’s population of Brent geese; and, like Minsmere, it now provides a home for several pairs of avocets. “We’re walking on what would have been the main runway,” replied John. “See that island behind us there?

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

The George and Dragon at Churchend

Well, they constructed that so as to see what erosion they would have – and look, there it still is. They were going to wall round this whole place, like a giant dyke.” “What was the local reaction, then?” “The real problem was access, because in itself this was not a bad place for an airport. It would have provided a good flat surface, and it wasn’t going to take away anyone’s land. I think the geese would have found other habitats around Britain, quite comfortably. In the end, though, we were all very glad it wasn’t built here.” “So what’s it like living with all this noise?” “On an easterly wind, the Concorde engine was like a bad continuous toothache,” said John. “But, generally, we are used to the noise. We do get one or two shocks. The wall shakes, and you think: that’s a bit excessive.” Most of the noise, he explained, comes from controlled explosions, and before some of the bigger bangs, people living in certain parts of the islands are evacuated, or have to go under cover, into safe areas indoors.

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A lot of QinetiQ’s work for the MoD in Foulness consists of disposing of unwanted ordnance and blowing things up – usually as part of, or the end of, a test. Farmers don’t receive any compensation for having to move off their land – sometimes at short notice – but testing usually stops at weekends and during harvest-time, and on the whole relations between the two communities are good. Why, though, does QinetiQ need all this space and land? Essentially to carry out dangerous operations with hazardous material – in absolute safety. Most of its work is for the UK military and other NATO armed services, and consists in stress-testing (and simulated battle-testing) all weapons larger than small arms. This is obviously vital for the protection of the men and women who could be called on to use them in live conditions. QinetiQ’s mission statement is a concrete poem-poster that any 11-year-old boy would want to have on his wall: ‘We’ll smash it, bash it, twist it, crash it, blast it, batter it, test it, shoot it, squeeze it, evaluate it, rip it, squash it, stretch it, freeze it, crack it, throw it, shatter it, slice it, dice it, analyse it, crush it, fire it, drop it, chop it, chip it, tear it and blow it up. Whatever it is.’

QinetiQ, like the MoD before it, employs a fulltime conservationist. Noise and pollution are monitored and kept within national and international legal limits. The dirty work doesn’t just stop with weapons. On the 26 kilometres of rail track scattered around the two main islands, the decommissioned trains we passed the previous day are waiting to be stripped of their asbestos components and handed over for scrapping. One is a mile long. The tracks used to carry some of the world’s biggest guns. One, tested here in 1917, was of 18.25 inch calibre, and was powerful enough to lob the weight-mass of a family car into the centre of London – some 40 to 45 miles away. It was hard to imagine, as we turned in along Fisherman’s Head at last, that horses and carts once regularly set out from here for the mainland. We came ashore under the watchful lens of a video camera set high enough in its tower to monitor the entire length of the Broomway. Our every step had been recorded. We ourselves were not allowed to take photographs, but Harris looked up, smiled for the camera, and took out his A4 pad, safe at last from splashes. He quickly sketched the outlines of the headway and horizon we had just come from.

We were still a country mile short of Foulness Point, but no one is allowed to go that far. There’s some nasty stuff up there. “It’s not that you cannot get in, and you could certainly walk around the seawall; but they are worried that you may tread on something that goes bang,” said John. It was a jolt to leave the immensity of the Maplin sands and step back onto terra firma. The world had suddenly shrunk; not just that, the black weather-boarded and honey brick houses we were walking towards seemed to take us back 50, even 100 years. At Churchend, the George and Dragon and the attached village shop have an openness about them that’s long vanished from Essex’s mainland villages. But unlocked doors and keys left in cars are a feature of Foulness under Pax QinetiQa. Virtually crime free, with the lowest rainfall in Britain and one of its greatest concentrations of birds, what’s wrong with the place – apart from the bangs? Its vulnerability to rising sea levels. Nobody, certainly not John Burroughs, who was five at the time, can forget what happened in the pre-global warming days of 50 years ago. Something like half the exhibits in the museum,

Five Up the Broomway

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just behind the little spiky church at Churchend, are devoted to the inundation of 1953, when the whole island went under except, remarkably, the Broomway. This path over the sands remained negotiable and provided the escape route. Unlike Canvey, no one died here. Not a tree, though, survived the North Sea salt.

Harris, however, had turned a bit green. He was sad not to have the chance of walking round by Rochford – and, even on a flat calm sea, he didn’t like being in a small boat. “But if we’d done Rochford,” I told him, “we would have missed out the Broomway, and anyway it’s only a short river crossing.”

We left Foulness from the Quay beyond Monkton Barn, towards the north-western corner of the island. Our friend Martin Wells had jumped at the chance of sailing his Windhover down the coast from Maldon to pick us up from this strange island, and ferry us across to the seawall path on Wallasea. Even as we guided him into shore, the snout of a QinetiQ security car poked over the top of the slipway, making sure that the intruders really had departed, and not crept back, bent double, along the seawall.

Martin rowed us ashore round Wallasea Ness, opposite a glorious wrecked steel barge, landlocked in a mud lagoon sprigged with samphire. After Foulness, Wallasea would prove plain sailing – a hinterland of nine giant flat fields with two stacks of straw bales as big as barns. As Martin raised sail to catch the afternoon’s southerly breeze and reach back to the Blackwater, the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club gleamed at us from Burnham-on-Crouch across the estuary. We hacked the final three miles along the riverbank to the Essex Marina at Baltic Wharf, the first place where we could reasonably hope for a lift across the river to the Yacht Harbour at Burnham.

As we chugged across the River Roach to Wallasea Point, the tension that had gone into the first few days of our walk suddenly fell away in the afternoon sun. Since leaving Waltham Abbey, our pace had been governed by tide-tables and the constraints of getting on and off Foulness. Now we only had to bother about where to leave the car for the day, and the state of our own four feet.

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SIX The Crouch Valley

When we walked down from the car park a few days on to the Yacht Harbour at Burnham-onCrouch, it was already a little later in the morning than we had intended. We were going to try to get right the way round the River Crouch in one day – a goal made no easier by the fact that the ferry wasn’t running. But we struck lucky. The harbour master, Ron Platt, offered to take us across the river in his launch to the point where we’d left off at the west end of Wallasea Island. “Why the poles?” Ron enquired. We were armed with Leiki ski poles. “Snakes,” I said. It was John Burroughs who had warned us that the fields around Canewdon were swarming with

adders, so I had bought the poles along to flick the snakes away as we walked through the grass. Despite the day, hot even for an English June, we both wore long trousers. In the event, no adder reported for duty; but the poles were to prove useful for a quite different purpose, up-river from the adders’ domain. The creek that runs inland after Baltic Wharf was the shape of things to come, a warning of the awkwardness of creeks all the way up to Harwich. Seen from the sky, the Essex coast spreads like a giant hand, the fingers and thumb representing the peninsulas that separate the rivers and estuaries – the Crouch, Blackwater and Colne, Hamford Water and Stour. If you lay a miniature hand over each of the rivers, to represent the creeks that ebb and flow

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into them – the creeks-within-creeks – you begin to appreciate the convoluted coastline we had set ourselves to walk. Now, beyond Baltic Wharf, we turned inland only to find ourselves some time later back opposite, and a creek’s width away from, where we had started. But that wasn’t all. Seawalls and riverbanks are great for walking along – until you run into tall grass, sometimes so knotted and tufted that each step is like kicking through sand or snow. The day started with a five-finger exercise in long grass. Behind us, a coaster from Estonia was unloading timber. Once, Baltic Wharf had been a busy working river port; so, too had Lion Wharf, at the head of our first creek a mile inland. Now all that remained of it was a single small wooden hut. As we rounded it to regain the riverbank, two fishermen were setting a net from bank to bank across the creek’s narrow neck. They were waiting for fish to come in on the turn of the tide. “You must catch a lot that way,” I said to them. “We netted 52 mullet once in one go. That was in 2000. Kept us in fish for a whole year.” A mile up river, Black Point took us away from the slopes to the south and nearer the range of northern hills and, as the bank curved south again, we struck inland.

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Map 6
From Wallasea round the head of the Crouch to Burnham

30.5 miles

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“You know the drill,” I said to Jon, as we came into sight of Canewdon up on its hill. “I go first and disturb the snakes, and you get bitten.” We were heading to Canewdon in pursuit of stories of witches and of a ‘cunning man’; we were led on uphill by the village’s mighty church tower, whose shining ashlar is visible for miles up and down the Crouch valley. Canewdon’s name has nothing to do with Canute. His church, a victory thanksoffering, lies just two miles west at Ashingdon, but Canewdon’s tower, stoutly battered, tapered-in, like a bigger-than-usual windmill stump, was Henry V’s own thank-offering for his success at Agincourt. Each year on Hallowe’en night, hundreds of revellers come to dance round the foot of Henry’s tower – the very spot where they recently buried their last vicar: he was 92, and died unaware that he had been stitched up by a witch! “He wouldn’t have liked it,” says Sybil Webster, “but folklore must be preserved. I’m not a witch, I just study them. In any case, you can’t be a witch in Canewdon unless you were born here – or so I am told.” A noted embroiderer, Sybil had been commissioned by the church to make a kneeler showing the life of the village, and running the

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entire breadth of the sanctuary step in Canewdon church. At the extreme southern end – under the last kneeling communicant at the vicar’s right hand – she had incorporated a tiny but distinct witch aloft on her broomstick. “We never told the vicar. Bless him.” Sibyl came originally from Helmsley in Yorkshire. She studied embroidery and moved to Canewdon when her husband became assistant station master at King’s Cross. Canewdon fired her interest in stories of local witches, or wickens, and she has written a book on them. There are many stories about witches in Canewdon; very few are rooted in solid fact, and the best sources are court records. Here, Sibyl found that Rose Pye of Canewdon was accused of witchcraft at Chelmsford in 1580, after a baby died in her care. Five years later Cicily Makin was compelled to own up to witchcraft in front of the church congregation – but she was not penalised: in fact, no witch ever went to the stake from Canewdon. Living in the village, Sibyl was struck by the local folklore of witchcraft; but it was the story of George Pickingale that led her to investigate the local wickens and wizards. Pickingale lived in

Canewdon all his life until his death in 1909. At the age of 90 he was still working as a farm labourer. He had a reputation for uncanny wisdom, and was known as a cunning or wise man. He communicated with animals, and household articles were seen continually dancing about inside his cottage. “No one can really explain the Witches of Canewdon and the ‘coming out’ at Hallowe’en,” says Sibyl. “Every year, on the right, hundreds of revellers come up here. It’s hereditary almost. They don’t know why they come, but we have to have the police up here, to maintain order.” Sibyl’s history records all the legends associated with witches and Canewdon. One, for example – which presumably doesn’t operate at Hallowe’en – has it that every time a stone falls from the church tower, a witch will die in the community and another will step into his or her shoes. “Do stones still fall from the tower?” “Yes, especially in this dry weather. A horrendous number have come down in the last few droughts, enough to wipe out the whole village, if it’s that full of witches.”

“So, are there any witches in Canewdon today?” I ask. “Not to my knowledge, but really that would depend on what you called a witch.” We left Sibyl with the clock ticking loudly in the living room of her cottage in Anchor Lane; and half an hour later we were back down on the riverbank, heading for Landsend Point. The River Crouch by now is visibly narrowing, but the banks between the two Fambridges and South Woodham Ferrers open up into three big awkward creeks. Across the one on the southern bank, before Brandy Hole, the map prints a line of pink dots. I was all for giving it a go and jumping a few channels. “I don’t fancy our chances of crawling back up the other side,” said Harris. “That bank’s at least ten feet, and by the top we’d look as if we’d done the Maldon Mud Race.” In the event the unofficial path around the creek turned out to be rather beautiful – even though it added a mile to our journey. The approach to Brandy Hole, where a little yacht-haven replaced the old smugglers’ hideaway, was by a path

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through a hedge of very ancient small-leafed elms, and beyond the boatsheds an orchard enclosure gave permanent pasture to vintage touring caravans, that have been put out to grass here. Our path upstream exchanged flood-bank for firm rising ground, where an impressive and orderly estate of chalets, Crouch Park, ran inland. One riverside garden appealed to us in particular: gnomes had invaded the entire front lawn, and even appeared to be holding a tea party on the roof. A thickening of trees and houses on the bank ahead marked the approach of Hullbridge. A fraction of the size of its north bank neighbour, South Woodham Ferrers, it has presence and a sailing club; while, as we looked across, the barn roofs at the Marsh Farm Rare Breeds Park were the only indication of Essex’s Third New Town. South Woodham Ferrers was given that development status in 1973, 20 years after Harlow and Basildon. “Harris,” I said, “It’s time to walk on water again. We’re going to get to use those poles after all.” “Yes, we never did test them out on the adders, did we?”

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We were sitting in the garden of the Hullbridge Anchor – looking down on the River Crouch that, almost at low tide, had shrunk to a trickle. When planning the day, I had noticed the magic word ford at this point on the large-scale map, and two lane-ends linked across the river by a dotted red line. The conventional crossing, upstream at Battlesbridge, would add five or six miles. “If we can walk across here, we might just be able to get back to Burnham tonight,” I said. “Fords are in the rules – what do you reckon?” Harris looked alarmed. The ford wasn’t something that had been attempted in the collective memory of the Anchor. It was only when I took off my boots and socks and slung them round my neck at the water’s edge, that he realised I meant business. Probing my way with the Leiki pole, I stepped gingerly into the unknown. We emerged on the north shore with rolled trousers dry – but with bleeding feet. We had found the ford all right, but had trodden on broken glass, and banged our toes on chunks of concrete the shallow water hid from our view.

“I think we should tell anyone who follows us to pack a pair of flip-flops, at the very least,” said Jon, as we dabbed our cuts dry and reviewed the feasibility of completing the return along the north bank that evening. We took the long loop around the creek east of South Woodham Ferrers; a slog, but visually rewarding. At low tide, Clementsgreen Creek has a superb topography of its own: the open mud glimmering and scored with the automatic writing of rivulets, the lagoons with their silt capes and castles, raised edges of unknown continents. And when we reached the farther side of the creek-mouth, there was scarcely a yard of water separating the silky slopes of mud. “You know, Jon, I reckon we could have crossed anywhere here.” “Yes,” he replied, “and you could drown your companion in six inches of water, too.” Harris was through with walking on water. Half a mile on, Stow Creek presented more of an obstacle, interrupting the river-bank path and sending us inland across the railway to walk a mile or more along a dangerous and twisty road. We

couldn’t have been more relieved when lanes and paths took us back down to the waterside through North Fambridge. We had one more creek to go, forming a tidal haven round the north side of Bridgemarsh Island; we turned to the sun, gradually dipping above Battlesbridge, and the whole of Bridgemarsh Creek seemed to glow and flame. To our south, the tower of Canewdon, itself almost incandescent up on its green hill, became the measure of our slow progress down the Crouch. Opposite Althorne station, there was a neat boat repair business, and yachts were thickly moored at the lane end: imagine stepping straight from your evening train and down your own companionway. By now the northern hills were closing in on the river. A mile short of Creeksea the path climbed a cropped meadow above a 45-metre cliff, giving the altimeter on my wrist-watch its first thrill since Epping Forest. We dropped back down and limped past Creeksea’s attractive waterside green. We had by now walked 29 1/2 miles. The last mile into Burnham Yacht Harbour seemed a very long one. “A wonderful day,” I said, “but perhaps a creek too far.”

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The Royal Corinthian Yacht Club through a sheerlegs crane, Burnham

SEVEN The Dengie Peninsula

Walking along the waterfront at Burnham-onCrouch is a delight at any time of the year. Whether the anchorages are crowded in summer with moored sailing boats, or deserted in winter, the river here never stands still. The promenade, however, has been gracefully frozen – the old Tucker Brown boatyard is now a museum, and a few modern houses here and there have been well set in; otherwise the yacht clubs, the sheds, the houseboats, the fish stall, the old red buoy by the seawall, the floating jetties and 18th century riverfront houses have all held their ground. We had come into Burnham across the Common from the yacht-harbour, pausing at the mosaicfinished viewing-seat to check our maps for the day’s walk. Jon also wanted to sketch the

ferroconcrete houseboat-barges – War Department surplus, 1947 – at the west end of the Quay. “Hey, look at this, Brian. It’s actually called Mulberry!” “As in floating harbours, I suppose? Or are you off on your botanising again?” But it’s a far grander concrete construction half a mile to the east that draws the eye: with its cantilevered decks and spick-and-span paintwork, the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club has the air of a Blue Riband liner. Its dazzling white structure should have shocked the socks off the old seafront, but instead pulls it all together: a Cubist book-end balancing a row of leather-bound volumes.

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“Real authority and adventure,” says Harris. “Look at the plaque there: the RIBA gold medal for 1931.”

wooden sailing boat in Burnham, while Peter himself was a former shipwright. He is writing a book on Burnham’s vanishing boatyards.

The Corinthian was put up as Burnham came into its own as the Cowes of the east coast; but boat building here goes back many centuries. Shipwrights sail-makers and riggers used to service oyster smacks and coastal colliers at Burnham’s quayside. Recreational sailing took off with the arrival of the railway in 1889, eventually displacing all the commercial activity. Many fine racing yachts first slipped into the Crouch from the yards of such builders as William King, John Prior and Tucker Brown. As we left the last crane behind us, there was a seat looking out over the river, with a little brass plaque carrying Sunny Cole’s name. Sunny, who died in 1990, was one of the last owners of Tucker Brown. Fittingly, it stands at the point at which the river opens out towards the sea.

“Once Burnham’s atmosphere is in your blood,” he told us, “you’ll never want to leave.”

In a nook of the seawall downstream, crushed cockleshells made a little secluded beach. We first spotted the beach-umbrellas. Three generations of the Pearson family were enjoying a picnic. Peter Pearson came up and greeted us on the seawall path. He and I had something in common: many years ago, I had kept a Tucker Brown-built

“Looks just like a Burgundian church, wouldn’t you say?”

Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

But this time we had to; and we were soon almost opposite where the River Roach enters the Crouch at Wallasea Ness, to which Martin Wells had ferried us two afternoons earlier. “There’s a building ahead,” I told Jon, “and it’s going to surprise you.” An odd pointy outline took shape, located somewhere within the marsh behind the zig-zag of the sea banks. Gradually, a pyramidal dome defined itself, set on high shoulders; from the inland side, a buttress swept steeply up against the mass.

Harris consults the map. “No church marked here,” he says. “Not even a dot for something so big. What is it, Brian?”

Map 7
The Dengie coast, from Burnham to Stansgate Abbey

25 miles 67

“You wouldn’t guess from here, but in fact it’s a threestorey pill box.” “Then, apart from German ones I’ve seen in the Channel Islands, it’s the only pill-box I’m aware of with a shaped roof. Do you think they had the Diocesan Architect down here on the marshes designing it in 1939?” Those buttresses can’t be explained, though the rest can. The base is a conventional ‘pill-box’ gun emplacement guarding the marshes; the superstructure was designed to look out over the estuary. It controlled coastal anti-submarine minefields and from the river it looks just like a squat watchtower. It’s only down on the marshes, below sight of the seawall, that you can appreciate its awesome scale, and even then it eludes you: it grows out of the marsh fields the other side of a deep drainage channel. To try and make sense of its shapes, Harris had to sketch it from three viewpoints, but I stopped him from embarking on a fourth. We still had a Saxon Minster and a nuclear power plant ahead of us, and some of the most isolated coastal walking in Essex. The eight miles of seawall from Holliwell Point to St Peter’s Chapel may well be the loneliest spot in Essex. The scattered farms of the Dengie peninsula are set well back inside the marshes, invisible in the slightest sea-mist. Initially, the seawall follows the shore, the grass path of the

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The ‘Burgundian’ tower south of Holliwell Farm

bank along the Crouch giving way to level-topped concrete. Towards Grange Outfall, though, a fringe of seamarsh develops, and with it a sudden silence that allows you to hear the position of every lark and gull in the sky. So few people make this circuit that oystercatchers are not afraid to nest on the seawalls. We counted two little scoops hollowed in the blown sand on the concrete, each with two big blotched and scumbled eggs. Remembering my own childhood collection, I found it hard not to stoop and pick one up. But, let alone what the oystercatcher herself might have thought, I could feel a pair of rebuking eyes burning into my back, and walked on. St Peter’s Chapel comes into view a long way off, as if it has you under surveillance from its high windows. Begun in 654 AD by the Papal emissary Cedd on the gate-foundations of the Roman fort of Othona, and built with stones from the halfdrowned ruins, it has been a seamark to guide vessels into the Blackwater estuary ever since. It stands, apparently without neighbours, at the point where the Roman road runs down a long spur to the North Sea. Once, long before St Paul’s in London exerted its authority, it was the

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cathedral for this part of East Anglia; then it declined from church to chapel and, for three centuries, shorn of its sanctuary and with its twin chancel arches blocked to make a wind-tight barn, it stood unacknowledged on the sea’s edge. Now a place of pilgrimage, and the destination of a longdistance path (St Peter’s Way) across Essex, the chapel draws and radiates strength through its solitude, stillness and simplicity. I left Jon sketching the chapel and black-boarded Signal Cottage, and slipped into the woods behind to visit the Othona Community, a lay Christian house that began life here after World War II in a ramshackle collection of tents and ex-army huts. Othona, named after the Roman fort, was established in 1946 by Norman Motley, a former RAF chaplain, on the very day the area around the seawalls had been declared safe from mines. German prisoners of war were still working on the sea defences. It was St Peter’s that had captivated him: later he would write of his first encounter with the chapel: “The sense of thirteen centuries of prayer was almost overpowering. The moment we entered the building I knew that we were home.”

Half a century on, the Othona community enjoys the comforts of a modern half-million pound building, but the early pioneering spirit of makingdo and self-sufficiency lives on, along with one of the original military accommodation blocks. Fresh water and electricity come from the mains but, in keeping with modern green practice, the waste from the complex has been filtered through reed beds since 2003. Rae Gingell, a Sheffield lady with flaming red hair who has been coming to Othona ever since 1953, welcomed me with a cup of tea, while Suki, a young visitor from Korea, offered me a warm slice of vegetarian pancake from her country. “Go on,” said Rae, “far too spicy for me.” The fullness of the buildings varies according to the calendar of activities. The main block sleeps 30 and there is a core of four staff permanently on site. The appeal is inter-denominational: “We welcome people,” the Othona programme states, “of all faiths and none.” Study weekends range from ecology and community care, through ‘tree hugging and carolling’, to pilgrimage and issues of faith. The Community at present owns about 300 acres of land down to the seawall onto St Peter’s Flat, but

there is a proposal currently before DEFRA and the local community to make two breaches in the bank between Sales Point and the end of the old World War II Mosquito runway, and so create a new and significant area of tidal wetland to compensate for areas lost further up the East Anglian coast. The two new creeks created will provide marsh roosting and nesting places for wading birds, as well as nurseries for fish such as bass, mullet and herring. “Flooding that north-east corner wouldn’t do any harm,” said Rae. “I believe we should let nature take its course. I’ll give you an example: a villager had his dog up here to kill all the adders – but next year we were invaded by rats. Of course, they never stopped to think what the snakes ate.” I looked at Jon. “Time to go nuclear,” I said. With West Mersea opposite us across the mouth of the Blackwater, we turned west, round the tip of the peninsula, to face one of the most forbidding sights anywhere on the Essex frontier: the nuclear power station at Bradwell, with its massive twin cubes of dusty curtain walling. There isn’t a glint of life behind the high fences. The plant has stopped generating power, and is now in controlled

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melt-down; the process could take 100 years – no one can be quite sure. The reactor started operations in 1962 at the dawn of a new age of nuclear energy, using Magnox fuel-rods. Press photographers made it an icon of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ era, and during its 40-year lifetime the station supplied almost 60 billion units of electricity to the National Grid. Bradwell cost around £53 million to build, and is estimated to have generated electricity worth about £1.2 billion in today’s wholesale prices, or £4 billion at the price we pay as domestic consumers. It was shut down as uneconomical by British Nuclear Fuels in March 2002, leaving the poisonous hulk towering opposite the Blackwater and Colne shipping lanes, and a controversial legacy to administer. Decommissioning has begun with a two to three-year programme to remove the uranium fuel rods from the reactors, but it will be decades before the site is free from contamination. As Bryony Worthington, Energy Campaigner at Friends of the Earth, explains: “No one knows how much it will cost to clean up Bradwell, or where the waste will go.”

Signal Cottage next to St Peter’s Chapel, Bradwell on Sea

Residents of West Mersea, who live down-wind from the site across the estuary, have consistently complained over the years about the hazard to their health. Studies have pointed to a higher local instance of breast and other cancers, stemming from radiation from Bradwell; but these findings have routinely been dismissed by health authorities as ‘unrepresentative’.

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As we walked past, within a few hundred metres of the reactors, families were sunbathing and children skinnydipping along the seashore. After a drink at the Old Green Man above the slipway at Bradwell Waterside, we crossed the marina lawn and, in setting out down the long curve of St Lawrence Bay, encountered the first practical illustration of the changes that will take place up at Sales Point if it returns to wetland. The path had been moved back to the base of the hill, and the former fields, with dead hedgerows and trees running towards the breach in the seawall, were glistening with a new crop of samphire. We trudged along the pebbly foreshore to The Stone, caught our first sighting of Osea Island end-on across the water, and arrived at the Marconi sailing club next door to Stansgate Abbey Farm just in time for our rendez-vous. The taxi we had booked to take us back to Burnham was driven by Peter Tunbridge, whose father Gordon had built boats for Tucker Brown. “Everyone in Burnham eventually goes down to the sea,” said Peter. Next day, he himself was locking up his cab and flying off to America, to crew a boat across the Atlantic, back to Burnham from Maine.

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EIGHT The Southern Blackwater

It was blazing hot when we set out again, early in the morning, from Stansgate Abbey Farm. Low tide had laid the estuary bare, uncovering a sheen of silvery mud through which the occasional white or red sail would glide as if across land. Declining the path that runs inland across the point, and hoping to glimpse something of the Wedgwood Benn ancestral acres, we started round the beach, with the east point of Osea Island on our shoulders, till treacherous oozy ground forced us back onto the seawall. “It’s going to be a five-finger day,” warned Harris as he unfolded the next panel of the map and clipped it back onto his sketchbook. “What’s that?” I asked, stopping in my tracks.

“Creeks that we have to walk round, you old fob. Wake up.” “No, that,” I repeated pointing to a silver coil in the grass beneath my left foot. “That,” said the sage, “is an adder.” In this June heatwave, we were both in shorts. We had dispensed with the Leiki poles after Canewdon. Now, shorts are great for walking in, and you even get used to the sting of nettles on your bare legs, but there’s something not quite so great about them when you have to hack through snake-infested grass. Jon tapped his boot-toe firmly on the ground and the snake slithered away down the bank. It was a big ’un.

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“How many creeks did you say, Jon?” “About five.” “You go first today.” “What, pole-less in pole position?” “Yes, you can hiss better than me.” After the snake, much of the going was through long matted grass, so wild that at times we had to retreat from the path itself and walk in the fields below; and three creeks later, three and a half hours out from Stansgate Abbey Farm, we stood on Mundon Stone Point – almost able to shake hands with our starting point. “I’ll be glad when we begin to lose sight of Osea Island,” said Jon. “I’m getting sick of the thing.” We had filed round Steeple Creek, Mayland Creek and the biggest of the three, Lawling Creek, the channel to the yacht harbour at Maylandsea. We had passed many changes of scenery: marsh meadows with their grass blooms creating a coppery sheen against the light, lagoons full of samphire, hulks of abandoned barges, riverbanks where the path tunnelled through groves of

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blackthorn, a chain of carp lakes fringed with rushes, and, in the distance, inland across the Mundon flats, a drowned grove of oak trees, standing like silver skeletons against the hill behind. And we were still only abeam of Osea Island. “You know those people who walk around the coast of Britain?” I asked, thinking aloud. “I begin to wonder if they actually hack round every single creek the way we are doing it.” “Well there’s that chap David Cotton doing it right now, just about finished,” replied Jon. “As far as I know he’s been up and down all the creeks. As for others, like Spud Talbot-Ponsonby: did she do those two points back there or cut across? Did she get out here to the Mundon Stone?” “I’m sure some of them made sensible compromises,” I said. “Cut corners, you mean.” Two more creeks lay ahead – Cooper’s and Limbourne – and by the time we had come alongside the slightly disappointing site of the Battle of Maldon, where an invading Danish force overwhelmed a Saxon army on the outskirts of the

Map 8
The Blackwater’s south shore from Stansgate to Maldon

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town in 991, we were overcome not so much by the mileage – 181/2 miles, a long half-day for us – as by heat and thirst. We sat outside the Queen’s Head in the midday sun, feeling the two pints each of cool fluid gradually making us human again. That gave us just enough energy for our own assault on Maldon, the final half mile up to Fullbridge. Leaving behind us the marine park with its tall fountains, we passed the tug boats and great Blackwater barges moored at the Hythe, and made our way past the black sheds of the Maldon Crystal Salt Company, which has been making table salt here for more than 200 years, and can trace its ancestry back to the Roman and mediaeval salt workings all along the estuary. Turning opposite the smart new ‘lighthouse’ apartments and houses at the bottom of Market Hill, we finished our day’s walk with a smart climb up to the grey church tower at the top of the hill – and poked our heads into the cool of Doctor Plume’s Library, for a look at the splendid riposte of Maldon’s Embroiderers’ Guild to the ladies of Bayeux – the Maldon Tapestry.

The Jolly Sailor, Hythe church, and a World War II mine, Maldon

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Mud-berths, the Hythe, Maldon

NINE Maldon to Mersea

It was at the Fullbridge that we resumed a few days later, at the start of another hot June day. Striking out past the former railway station, now splendidly rejuvenated, we took the unofficial path between buddleia bushes out round the creek-head, and followed the seawall path down the Heybridge side of the haven. From here views opened up of Maldon on its hill, with its three church towers and ships, covered slipways and salt-works tucked into the flanks. Wood smoke rose from a boatyard where they were bending new timbers onto a barge. As we stepped across the lock to Heybridge Basin, we worked out that for the first time since we had approached Holliwell Point from Burnham, we were walking due east.

Inside the gift and tea shop at the Basin, a painting class was in progress; I was tempted to break in on the gentility of their watercolouring, and announce that the man in steamed up glasses, check shirt, shorts and heavy boots with tray in his hand was a bit of an artist himself. “Don’t you dare. It will put them off painting for the rest of their lives,” said Harris; and he steered our tray firmly out to the terrace, where we fell upon our tea and scones in full view of the estuary, and the purposeful masonry of the sea-lock of the Blackwater and Chelmer Navigation. We were going into the wilderness again, so fuelling up this early made sense. Although we both carried several litres of drink – I took sugared

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mint tea and Jon orange juice with a pinch of salt – we were walking through increasingly remote country, and in this hot summer we were soaking up liquid like a rocket burning fuel. Unless we diverted a mile inland into Tollesbury, we would see only two houses on the frontier route we planned today; no pubs or shops. Heybridge Basin is the start of an 18th century canalised waterway, stepped with elegant brick locks, that leads all the way up to the county town of Chelmsford. The row of weather-boarded canalside cottages has grown (down the bank behind) into a village with two solid nautical pubs and, on the estuary side, a single trace of old industry: the tilting wall of a granary, that now carried the quarterdeck of the pretty Blackwater Sailing Club out across the path. Beyond, a thick tamarisk hedge hid the waterside gardens. A grandiose converted maltings turned the corner of the creek ahead. From the seabank at Mill Beach, the view across Collier’s Reach was filled by the National Trust nature reserve of Northey Island; while inland from the path lay the biggest caravan and trailer-home site we had so far encountered. William Brown, a retired builder from Gants Hill in London, was strimming the section of bank that sheltered his trailer.

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Map 9
The north shore of the Blackwater, and round Tollesbury to Salcott

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“Hot work,” I remarked; Mr Brown gladly seized the chance to stop and clambered up the bank.

being cut off twice a day when the tide covers the causeway.”

“Not bad for 90,” he replied, flexing the muscles of his knotty, sun-tanned forearm. He has been making his annual summer migration to Mill Beach since 1956. He and his fellow caravanners are for the most part holidaying Londoners. Their caravans are now really fixed homes, though seasonal ones, plumbed into the mains with concrete bases, and some are super-deluxe. The site closes at the end of October and doesn’t re-open until April.

When Mr Brown first came down here Osea had belonged to the Charrington family. “One was a church-goer and the other ran the breweries,” he explained, as if the two activities were totally incompatible. “The church-goer used to bring the drunkards over to dry out, but they would get fishermen to row beer and liquor across the river from Maylandsea; and the carter used to smuggle in the odd bottle over the causeway.”

“When we first came here we would live in old army bell-tents in the fields, all mixed in with sheep and cows. There was no seawall here at all – just a ditch with a plank across it – which they only culverted in when they built the wall some good time after the floods of ’53.” Mr Brown has picked up his share of local lore over the years, but he also keeps up to date. “See Osea Island over there? That footballer, what’sis-name, Becks, he was going to buy that; only he pulled out because Posh didn’t like the idea of

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It was in the early years of the 20th century that the church-going brother, F.N. Charrington, set up one of the country’s first treatment centres for alcoholism on his isolated property in the Blackwater. He had cashed in his interest in the brewery and spent the proceeds on campaigning for temperance and running Osea as “a home for gentlemen suffering from the baneful and insidious effects of alcohol”. His experiment in turning lives round was short-lived, however: Osea became a naval base during World War I, with its own gas-works and a complement of 2,000 men. “The pier the navy

built is still there on the south side,” said Mr Brown. He recalled the paddle-steamer that plied from Tollesbury to Clacton, the timber-boats from Scandinavia that came up to Maldon to supply two yards that made pit-props, the coaling boats that discharged at Collier’s Reach, the grain barges sailing out for the Thames, and the two railway lines that used to serve Maldon East and Maldon West. “Beecham, that’s the bloke,” he said searching for the name of the czar appointed by the then Conservative government, who had a quarter of Britain’s rail lines axed in the 1960s. “There’s not even one station now and it’s a thriving town. Ridiculous.” We dipped our toes into the water at Decoy Point, the site of a lake where ducks were netted and dispatched in commercial numbers for London tables, and where the causeway to Osea Island starts. A barge was moving under power, gracefully and smartly, up the channel on the far side of the island. “Bit of a problem here,” I said. “The frontier is under water.” The tide was up, and there was no way we could get across. The causeway slunk off

under the ripples and was lost. For the next couple of miles we had Osea as our companion to the south – from this view, a handsome place with trees and even the hint of a hill, and as we walked along the north banks of the Blackwater and the island slipped gracefully by, we felt none of the previous day’s resentment towards it. The seawalls now followed a course more or less due east, barring a few minor creeks. Opposite Bound’s Farm with its extensive glasshouses, we found a retired farmer from Goldhanger about to go for his morning swim in the estuary. I enquired about Jeremy Bamber, the local man jailed for life for shooting his parents, his sister and her children in their farmhouse nearby in 1985. Bamber had just lost his latest appeal, although he still has supporters who believe him to be innocent. The farmer told us that his own cousins were now living in the Bambers’ home, White House Farm. I wanted to know whether he believed Bamber could be innocent. “Nobody wants to know about it round here,” he replied. Leaving him to his solitary swim, we continued on pleasantly worn paths round to the head of the

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creek – the most idyllic anchorage we had seen so far and the berth of a blue painted ketch, Curlew River. We skirted Goldhanger itself – “a shame,” said Jon, “the name means grassland where the corn marigold grows, and it looks a lovely little place”. Joyce’s Farm, an old timber framed house re-fronted in Queen Anne brick, under a snug roof of tiles even fierier than the brick – typical Essex colouring – commands the head of the next creek, and overlooks a meadow with a lone pair of walnut trees. “You know who loved planting walnuts?” asked Harris. “Queen Elizabeth the First.” From the next creek, above Gore Saltings, we were quite unable to spot the famous Red Hills. Two-a-penny on the map but, when we passed, hidden in thick hay, they are the sites, dating as far back as the Iron Age, where sea water was boiled away in large clay vats to extract salt. Excavation shows that the fires were also used to bake pottery, and the burnt earth and pottery fragments show up as reddish patches in the winter fields. At least the next duck decoy on the map showed up clearly as we approached Mill Point – if only as a set of scrubby hedges set at angles in the field. By now, the two riven chunks of Bradwell’s dead power station had come back to dominate the skyline to the southeast. Almost opposite it, we found ourselves scrambling

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The seaward end of the Blackwater and Chelmer Navigation at Heybridge Basin

across the old Crab and Winkle railway. The line opened in 1904 from Kelvedon south through Tiptree and on to Tollesbury; in 1907 it was extended down to the seawall and beyond: a wooden pier was built out here, with the intention of developing a continental packet service. Arthur Wilkin, the proprietor of the jam factory at Tiptree, backed the line heavily; it was a boon to business, but otherwise it never really prospered. The pier trains and the steamers they served were withdrawn in 1921; the lines were used for mobile guns in World War II, and the pier itself was demolished in 1951, the year the passenger service between Tollesbury and Kelvedon finally gave up the struggle. A few lengths of fence is all that remains of the railway, and where hill runs into marsh a solitary steel goods-van. There’s something more of the pier to see, though: a massive concrete baulk at the beach end and, trailing out to the low water mark, the sawn-down stubs of timber struts. Tollesbury Wick Marshes found us walking three sides of a great squashed square, where the outer angles of the seawall are studded with pillboxes.

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The circuit led us up Woodrolfe Creek and into Tollesbury’s tiny port and marina. On the approach, the visitor is greeted by the distinctive silhouette of a beached lightship. As we walked landwards, beginning to pick out the tall timber sail lofts on stilts (the indigenous feature of Tollesbury’s waterside), Harris spotted the first avocets we had seen since Foulness, and enthused over the way they drooped their legs behind them in flight: “half-Storch, half-Stuka”, he said, like the good little plane spotter he is. As for myself, I was thirsty and had only one thing on my mind – finding a tap. In the event, the Sailing Club opened its bar for the dusty travellers and graciously sold us four litres of iced lime and lemonade. “Enough to make us squelch,” said Harris, as we took our glasses out to a table on the clubhouse’s lawn. In the lee of the sail lofts, their weather-boarded elevations with ladders, hoists and shuttered balconies beautifully restored, we saw our first lizard, and found ourselves walking on the first metalled road since Maldon. “Amazing to walk eight hours without treading on a road,” I said. “No wonder I was so thirsty.”

“A good job they took pity on us,” said Jon. “It looks from the map as though we’ve got two more hours of the same ahead of us, before we get into Salcott.” He was right. The seawall round Old Hall Marshes was beginning to exhibit all the aridity of late summer. It took us half way to Bradwell and then almost to the line of yachts off West Mersea town, before sending us back down its other side – towards the little rounded inland hills of Peldon and the Wigboroughs. We arrived at Salcott Church in a state of parched weariness, to find the PH marked on the map no longer there. The public house was now a private house.

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Horatio the Bull

TEN Mersea Island

The marshes or saltings to the north of Salcott are being given back to the sea and the seawall has been intentionally breached, or let go, in several sections. This ‘return to nature’ and recreation of wetlands is happening in small inlets and creeks all the way up the Essex coast: a boon to conservationists and a way of saving public money, but for us it meant taking the long way round to Mersea Island. Soon after Virley Hall, we found ourselves trudging along the B1026. We passed through both the Wigboroughs and diverted up to Peldon to see whether the big ragstone tower of the church really lists so perilously to starboard, as it seems to in distant views. It does; though whether because of old settlement, or as a result of the 1884 earthquake that did so much damage in the churches surrounding Colchester, can’t be said.

In 1916, Little Wigborough became momentarily the most famous village in the land, when the German Zeppelin L33 was forced down in the fields there. The crew picked themselves up unscathed, scuttling their craft by setting it on fire; their commander then marched them down country lanes in search of someone to surrender to – in the event, the village constable on his bicycle, to his great surprise. Subsequently, pieces of the burnt out metal frame of L33 found their way into houses and museums; there’s even a section in Great Wigborough church. The road was unpleasantly narrow and busy. This is an area of Essex where all the country footpaths seem to have been rolled up. “A walker’s wilderness,” says Jon. It was a relief to pass the

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Peldon Rose pub and turn down to the Strood, the causeway that links Mersea Island and the mainland. The causeway, which has existed since Roman times and where a Roman centurion’s ghost is sometimes seen at dusk, floods at spring tides. As we approached, the cars were coming off with dry tyres: it was safe to cross. Once on Mersea soil we turned right, along the seawall. Morning light emphasised the lean of Peldon’s church tower, up on its hill beyond Strood Channel. This little creek still has its shore fenced across with timber groynes: twin ranks of posts interleaved with hurdles to slow the damaging surge of high tides. Along much of the Essex coast these skilfully hatched defences are in terminal decay. “They’re deliberately letting them go,” said David McMullen, with whom we had fallen into step. “Partly costs and partly a philosophy of allowing nature to take its course.” David has deep links with the island and the Essex country on the other side of the Strood. His grandfather once owned the marshland on which the Tollesbury railway ran, as well as oyster beds in West Mersea, which David’s waterfront house now almost overlooks. Retired from farming, he sails a

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Holman & Pye sloop built in Burnham-on-Crouch by Tucker Brown. We passed a large modern house looking out over the water from the high ground on the edge of town – a builder’s post-Modernist dream, with panels of oak planking and a glazed atrium, its huge sheets of glass canted forward as if to counter the sun blazing off the westward moorings. “You know what they call that?” said David. “They call it the University of West Mersea.” The scale changed distinctly as we reached the old seafront of West Mersea. There were lofts and lanes, and minute black-boarded cottages huddled together. Yachts and an elegantly-planked motor patrol vessel were drawn up on the shingle foreshore, when, all at once, Bradwell power station loomed back into the picture, framed between masts: those two inscrutable, scaleless grey boxes rising above the shoreline two miles to the south. “It’s Mersea’s beaches that have born the brunt of the fall-out from that,” said David. “Nasty stuff, including secondary waste, which spews straight downwind onto the island.”

Map 10
Salcott to the Strood, and Mersea Island

20 miles 93

By the Old Victory inn with its ‘Trafalgar’ veranda, he waved goodbye and walked off up The Lane. We were opposite the Company Shed. Here, at lunchtime, you can turn up with your own wine and feast on the Company’s oysters and other seafood at tables on the hard. A little early in the day for crab; we’d find some tea later. The shoreline is a magnificent purposeful clutter. West Mersea is one of the last ports on Essex’s east coast to resist the temptations of building a marina. The one thing that is gleamingly modern along the waterfront is the brand new lifeboat house. Wooden sheds on stilts, left over from the great days of the shellfish industry, now outnumber the working cockle and oyster beds, and you can barely decipher the outlines of the old holding pools among the hawsers and jetsam on the beach. To the south of the yachts, facing Cobmarsh Island and the baleful spit of Old Hall Marshes, a fringe of marsh is crossed by wooden stagings serving a parade of houseboats, some with hulls so fine and sweetly swept that they could only have started as grand Edwardian racing yachts. Not so long ago, one of them was recognised for what it was, and ‘rescued’: it was a yacht that had once been owned by the Spanish royal family.

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“I bet you didn’t know this, Harris, Semprini used to live here,” I said. “I wonder which one it was.” “Semprini’s Half Hour,” Jon replied, instantly recalling the concert pianist’s BBC radio programme. “It would have to have been big enough to house a grand piano, whichever one it was.” We asked a man cutting the hedge outside his seafront house if he knew where the pianist had lived. No, but he did remember hearing Semprini practise across the yard from the shop he worked in. Below Well Square, the marshes draw in again. Just before Monkey Beach begins, below the central square of the town, a secret path dips down from the road, and here we found St Peter’s Well, still with a trickle of water. It has the reputation of never running dry, even in the kind of June we were having. It was time for a tea break before we tackled the eastern end of the island. We turned uphill from the beach for elevenses and unslung our packs at the Artcafé, right opposite the tower of the church. Inside, the mystery writer Barbara Erskine was signing copies of her latest book, Sands of Time.

“Now you’ve got competition,” said Jon. “Ah, but I don’t write about ghosts,” I replied. We set off along Mersea’s southern beaches, with boats and bathers bobbing in sunlit sea to our right, and, above the shore, well-upholstered homes and steep gardens giving way to a long line of bathing huts; they were triple-parked, by the time we reached the edge of the town. From now on to the Mersea Stone at the mouth of the River Colne, the terrain alternated between farm fields and caravan and holiday parks. At the shop at Cooper’s Beach, the path turns inland – an excuse to visit East Mersea Church, where for 10 years from 1871 to 1881, the rector was Sabine BaringGould, once admired for his novels, now best known for the hymns ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Now the day is over’. He fathered 15 children, and wrote more than 100 books including Mahalah, a lurid novel set in the Essex salt marshes; and he left the church unspoilt. Below Fen Farm, we rejoined the seashore at Cudmore Grove Country Park. Here there was a sudden crest of brittle clay and septaria cliffs, almost orange in colour. Tree trunks and pillboxes

lay forlorn at their feet; sand-martins flew in clouds around their burrows near the top. Beyond, the seawall path runs out: if you want to visit the point you must wait for low tide and go along the beach. At high tide, as elsewhere along the coast, the breaching of the banks is allowing the sea to reclaim the eastern-most tip of Mersea Island. Mersea Stone marks the site of a small fort that was pulled down in Cromwell’s time. From it there are magnificent views across to Brightlingsea, and to Essex’s southern-most, and earliest, Martello tower guarding the harbour entrance at Point Clear. We had reached the Colne, the next river up the coast after the Blackwater. Here the inland view opens up into the kind of vista we hadn’t seen until now, with wide green margins to the still water, and wooded slopes inviting the eye gently up to the skyline like a Georgian landscape park. The next day’s walk would take us up the Colne, to the water’s-edge of Colchester; opposite us lay Pewit Island, no building visible on it now; only the red flags flapping above the seawall beyond, on the rim of the Fingringhoe ranges. The old packing-shed on Pewit Island used to host the ceremony with which the Mayor launched the Colchester oyster

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season; it now takes place on a Maldon barge, and the first oysters are washed down with neat gin, followed by gingerbread. The ginger’s to stave off seasickness – or that’s what they tell you. In turning west up the Pyefleet Channel, we lost our fine view up the Colne; but the sunlit northern shoulders, and grazing marshes, of Mersea more than made up for it, as we headed back to our starting-point on the Strood.

East Mersea church: font, pulpit, and south window

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ELEVEN Mersea to Brightlingsea

Even though the distance between Mersea Stone and the tower at Brightlingsea harbour is hardly more than half a mile, it took the whole day to get there from our starting point by the Strood. Setting off up the B1025 from the old smuggler’s pub, The Peldon Rose, we turned up the lane to Langenhoe Hall and were greeted by the sound of gunfire and the onset of rain. We were approaching Fingringhoe Ranges, another big chunk of coastal Essex marked Danger Area on the map. It is army land, to all intents and purposes closed to the public, with Geedon Creek completely out of bounds. On this damp morning, even the areas sometimes open were closed: red flags were flying at every post, and we skirted the ranges amid the incessant crackle of gunfire.

In the clearing below Post Wood, young soldiers in fatigues, one with a blond ponytail sticking out under her helmet, were taking up positions in a pair of blockhouse villas, with blanked out or gaping windows, preparing to defend them from ‘enemy’ attack. “With those high mansard roofs,” said Jon, “you’d think you were somewhere in Belgium or the Pas de Calais – not Essex, that’s for sure.” “Maybe you’re onto something. Now we know where the MoD is planning the next war.” “Well, yes, but don’t rule out Essex,” said Jon. “I’ll show you a place in a few days’ time where the British army actually invaded Essex.”

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Down a long lane beyond the ranges, at the gate of Fingringhoe Wick Nature Reserve, it was simply bucketing: almost the only time we got a drenching in the two summer months we were walking. We missed the notice that said CLOSED ON MONDAYS but, seeing a head at work inside the Visitor Centre, we stopped to ask our way. Laurie Forster, the Warden, came to the door and hauled us in out of the rain. “You wouldn’t have got any further,” he said. “The marshes above here are completely impassable.” Laurie listened enthusiastically to our story of avocets on Foulness, oystercatchers on Dengie and the adder at Stansgate. He has been warden for 24 years, so all the living creatures here are in a special sort of way his. “I get a lot of satisfaction from knowing that all the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and teeming invertebrates that live here now have come on my watch,” he said. “I spent 16 years helping multinational companies spend millions on products like aero engines, mint sauce, Guinness, Xerox copiers and car polish; that’s how I knew the man behind the famous Guinness slogan – ‘Guinness is good for you’. But I got sick of the

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pressure and the commute to London. I left my amazed colleagues on a Friday, and I started working with the Forestry Commission the following Monday. I’ve never looked back.” Through the Centre’s picture-windows, we could now just about see the woodlands across the Colne. Warmed by the tea Laurie had made us, we headed, by the paths he had recommended, towards Fingringhoe village; and by the time we reached Ferry Lane – worth the small diversion back down to the river, in order to look across it right into the eyes of the little town of Wivenhoe, and up its lanes towards the arched cupola of the church – the sun was beginning to shine. We walked up to Fingringhoe pond and, crossing the Roman River at the tide mill below East Donyland Hall, followed it through woodland back to the Colne. Pulling in for lunch at the Anchor, on the Rowhedge quay, we found the view of the little riverside town across the watermeadows totally transformed by new buildings. Wivenhoe’s new westward extension, from the quay back to the railway, all granary-shapes and pert cupolas, completely misses the variety and warmth of the older waterside. It probably doesn’t

Map 11
The Strood to Fingringhoe and Hythe Bridge, and back down the Colne to Brightlingsea

25 miles 101

help that it presents itself en bloc against marsh and woodland. Rowhedge has been cleverer and done its expansion on a smaller scale, less wholesale, and with more infilling. From here we marched up the empty flood-plain into The Hythe, Colchester’s working tidal river port. “Ten days from London,” I said. “I’m sure the Romans did it quicker.” “You bet,” replied Jon “They marched straight up the A12, and bypassed all those creeks.” TOTAL DISASTER AREA is scrawled in large letters on an old wooden storage shed as you enter The Hythe from the field path. Whole areas are already closed, earmarked for demolition and redevelopment; the rest, including the scrap-metal yard and the tall freezer plant, will follow. A rusting coaster is still moored alongside the quay, a Coles crane crudely welded to its deck. It’s the other side of the river that shows the way Colchester intends to go. B&Q and the new residential plaza for Essex University are clean and bright in a sort of London Docklands way, and

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make Tesco’s and the road bridges over Colne and railway, which favour a sub-Roman style, look faintly silly. The brand-new University campus building on the northern bank is a smart accommodation complex, whose undulating outer walls seem to echo the contours of the river. “All this for students?” I ask one of the workers. “Yes, and a new railway station by that footbridge there.” The footbridge is at first floor level spanning a quarter mile; the station will provide a link between Colchester and the main campus. Below the new student blocks, an elderly woman passed us with her dog along the still unfinished riverside walk. “Been a few changes around here,” I said. “That’s nothing. You won’t recognise this place in a few years’ time. There’s even going to be a marina on the old dockside,” she said. With the tide out, the channel of the River Colne below Hythe Bridge shrinks from ship-sized to little more than the beam of a dinghy. This marina will require a lot of dredging.

To our left, as we followed the river path away from Colchester, the six flint-coloured towerblocks of Essex University etched the skyline. “Surprisingly,” says Jon, “some people get quite enthusiastic about them. My favourite thing, though, is the raised piazza, running up the middle of the valley between them and the faculty buildings.”

Brightlingsea. Once again, the map had caught my eye – or, rather, the word ford printed just up from the creek-mouth. Crossing here would cut off three miles round the head of the creek. We found the headway by a weather-boarded house on the marsh, half tarred, half white painted. “The best free-standing boarded Essex house so far”, Harris declared.

We walked along the newly-extended quay into Wivenhoe. Threading our way through the waterside gardens towards the Rose and Crown, we found the Nottage Institute of Seamanship and its museum of barges closed; open only on Sunday afternoons. It was too late for tea, too early for beer, so we pressed on south beyond the giant lockgates of the Colne flood barrier, installed below the town in 1994; behind Wivenhoe yacht club, which has chosen to remain tidal in perpetuity; and past the noisy gravel-elevators of Fingringhoe Ballast Quay on the far shore.

“No one has crossed on foot for years,” the lady of the house told us as we started to probe for firm ground towards the water’s edge; I soon discovered why, sinking into deep slub before even reaching the water.

From here the path merged into the shaded course of the old railway trackbed that led us the two miles to the broken bridge at Alresford Creek, over which trains used to steam all the way to

At Thorrington Tide Mill, at the head of the creek, a nesting swan greeted us, along with a sleek motor launch – Essex Swordsman – out of place and character amidst the hulks lining the muddy creek banks. A brand new footpath by the side of the B1029 led us up the church hill on the edge of Brightlingsea, and Jon jokingly claimed credit for it: “Last time I was here, I was doing an article on Brightlingsea and couldn’t help commenting that the only way you could walk from Gatehouse Farm to the

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church was up this frightful road, with its blind corner and tide of traffic. See! Essex County Council has made us a pavement. Bless them.” From the church – set on the hill above, and well out of, Brightlingsea town to serve as a seamark, with a tower to rival Southwold’s – we worked our way down lanes back to the mouth of the creek. (The ford we hadn’t taken was down to a ribbon of water.) The old railway embankment made a splendid path into Brightlingsea, with ever-widening views across the river, from the nature reserve at Fingringhoe to the long whaleback of Mersea Island. At last, the east point of Mersea detached itself from the tipsy harbour tower on the seawall ahead, to reveal a narrow slice of open water: Brightlingsea Reach. We walked in through the beach-huts, and into the streets of the little working port.

The last boatyard at Wivenhoe, with Rowhedge across the Colne

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TWELVE Brightlingsea to Clacton

There’s a slightly glum air to the waterfront at Brightlingsea as the boat-building industry, with its dominant sheds, prepares to give up its prime seats on the quay to developers. The chandlery has already moved to East Yard; and the one obviously festal building overlooking the water, the former hotel with its exuberant barge-boards and timber corona, stands there all spick and span, slightly unsure of itself in its new role as fashionable apartments. When you look at the map of Brightlingsea, Flag Creek seems to arch backwards over the town, and as we walked right out round Eastmarsh Point and turned west to reach the head of the creek, Harris remarked that he finally understood how

Brightlingsea used to be an island. Indeed, the ghost of the channel around the top of the island remains as a mile-and-a-half of dyke linking Flag Creek on the east to Alresford Creek on the west, rounding the bluff the church stands on. Brightlingsea Creek, guarded by the promontory of Toosey Stone to the south, has always been a superb haven. A port here was inevitable, and a prosperous fishery – combined with ship-building, commemorated in the rescue and rebuilding of the skillinger Pioneer – existed here until well into the 20th century. Islands, however, can be the chesspieces of history, making moves that their mainland neighbours can’t; and so, since 1360, this Essex port has uniquely been a limb of the Cinque

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Port Liberty of Sandwich in Kent, and an affiliate of the five royal charter ports in Kent – the others being Hastings, Romney, Hythe and Dover. Each year Brightlingsea’s elected Deputy declares an oath of allegiance to the Mayor of Sandwich; and, just in case the Kings of Spain and France should sail up the Channel once more, he is required to make a token payment of 50 pence, representing the men and ships Brightlingsea places at Sandwich’s disposal. The ships by now, of course, would all have to be ocean racers and dinghies. The far bank of Flag Creek has a sting in its tail: we were no sooner back to the level of Eastmarsh Point, than it sent us inland again to Hollybush Hill, up a long tributary lined with yachts in their mud-berths, and with tiers of parked holiday trailers. “I think I’m done with creeks,” I said, as we slogged along the B1097. “You won’t be after the next one,” said Jon, stepping through a gap in the hedge at the top of Flag Hill, “for one thing, it sits right underneath the finest Tudor palace in the county, and that gatehouse, I promise you, has got flint flushwork on a Hollywood scale. The creek, itself though, has to be the most beautiful of all we’ve seen.”

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How right he was. We followed the woodland path down the edge of St Osyth Priory Park. Parapets and castellations and the glinting white cupola of the palace appeared, and disappeared, between distant trees as we made our way back down to the marshes. A rising field track gave us height and there, below us, was St Osyth Creek. From either bank, rough-hewn jetties between beached houseboats led out to the central huddle of seaworthy barges, cruisers and yachts moored against the causeway at the head of the creek. That carries the road to Point Clear; but it also holds in the fresh water lake which, until 1962, was the tidal pond of the mill that stood here. Downstream, secure in mud and reeds, rest boats that were long ago paid off. Twice a day the sandy sea tide sweeps in to cover them. In all the Essex estuaries and creeks, we never tired of these sunken silhouettes or raised skeletons; some are still shapely, others are now just an outline of bow or stern. From the southern end of the tide-mill causeway, we followed the seawall under the slopes of Point Clear to reach St Osyth Stone Point, ‘Toosey Stone’, at the southern entrance to Brightlingsea harbour, and within hailing distance of where we had started that morning. Looking across the

Map 12
Brightlingsea via St Osyth and Point Clear to Clacton

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sparkling moat at our feet and the roofs of the chalets, we found our seaward view interrupted by the unmistakable bulk of a tawny-brick Martello tower, still crowned with flagpole and gun-barrel-like rounded chimneys. ‘Tower A’ was the first of the chain of forts built, from 1805, along the coasts of south-eastern England to thwart Napoleon’s invasion plans, and recommissioned a century and a half later to keep Hitler at bay. The concrete turret above ‘Tower A’ remains to this day a tiny military post, monitoring the detonations from Foulness. Harwich’s Redoubt Fort is part of the chain, but is of so different a design that ‘Tower A’ can claim to be the only martello open to the Essex public. It is a museum that sets out the story of Essex and the Second World War, and pride of place is given to an American P51 Mustang of the US 479th Fighter Group that ditched in the sea off the coast of Clacton on 13th January 1945. The pilot lost his life, despite a brave rescue attempt. The cockpit and forward fuselage of ‘Little Zippie’ was eventually retrieved from the sea and brought here as the show-piece exhibit.

‘Tower A’ on Point Clear, still with its camouflage-paint

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Point Clear truly marks the beginning of ‘seaside’ Essex. (Whatever the claims for Southend – Disraeli called it the English Riviera – that popular resort and its neighbours either side, Thorpe Bay and Leigh, are still estuary-bound). From Point Clear on, Essex looks out to sea and, with no creeks or rivers, our frontier began to follow a straight north-eastern line. Essex-sur-Mer comes in many guises and – as if we were slicing through geological layers and faultlines – in this short 15-mile stretch, from Point Clear to the Naze, we walked through just about every social and financial class in the county. On its northern side, Point Clear is a prodigious caravan park. The southern rim is a cluster of closely tiered holiday homes – some vintage – at first, small single storey dwellings looking expectantly over the seawall, then, as the land rises, arranged sedately on a gently sloping cliff. Near the top, one of them has been opened up and given the oak-beam treatment to become the Tudor Café; from the mock timbers, electric fans whirl over trestle tables laid with plastic cloths. It was time for a break. The proprietress, Pat, cooked Harris a magnificent ‘special’.

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“This building should be listed,” said Jon, over a second mug of tea, “and Pat’s breakfasts, as well.” In the yard of Lee Wick farm, for the first and only time on our entire frontier walk, we were seriously challenged as ‘trespassers’. From Point Clear to Colne Bar the coastal path peters out; we were aiming for Lee-over-Sands by the most direct and likely route. There was a distinct sound of metal barn doors being clanged shut as we were sent on our way. Half-marsh, half-dune, the cape is a lonely spot, the footpath through it closed to all but birdwatchers. A Barbie doll’s pink boot lay uncooked on an abandoned barbecue, and a black bikini top dangled from a thorn bush – there was no other sign of life along this empty expanse of sandy beach. “That’s a nudist beach,” said Jon. “Must be one of their away-days,” I replied. I couldn’t see a soul, clothed or otherwise. Rather than walking up the naturists’ beach we turned discreetly towards the seawall that led inland behind a creek. The beach would have made an attractive route but neither of us fancied walking naked, dressed only in boots and

harnessed to rucksacks, amid the nudists. We chose wisely; for, as we came closer to Seawick, the more populated end of the beach, we could indeed make out a number of distant sunbathers in the buff. Like Point Clear, Seawick revolves round a leisure centre; but the caravan park here is even more prodigious. At least the densely packed and regimented township of mobile homes – deluxe, kingsize and imperial – is finite: it ends at the next Martello tower. And this point marks the beginning of perhaps the most extraordinary seaside development in Essex. Jaywick is earthy, raw Essex, dismissed by some as ‘seaside shackery’, compared by others to a South American shanty town – although it resembled none that I came across in four years of living and working around that continent. What makes it so special is that it should never have been built. This is the real South American dimension: most of the houses were originally ‘abusivos’ – erected without permission. They are sandwiched together with slivers of garden, or no garden at all, as summer holiday homes. No one was ever supposed to live here permanently and, indeed, even today, more than 70 years after the development began on

reclaimed marsh, there is an air of impermanence and an unfinished quality about the place. There’s a whiff of anarchy on the Essex coast. It all goes back to 1928, when a businessman called Frank Stedman bought the marshlands at Jaywick with the dream of creating a bright new seaside centre and village. He built his first chalets on Golf Green Road, and then opened the resort in a blaze of publicity, even with an unofficial air service to whisk passengers up from London. Without any proper infra-structure, he expanded into meadows along the shoreline and by 1931, even though there were only six permanent residences registered in Jaywick, there were in excess of 2,000 unregistered chalets. During the 1930s, Stedman built two estates – Brooklands and Grasslands. Avenues were named in accordance with the emerging popular culture of motor cars – Talbot, Austin, Riley, Morris and the local brand, Essex. Buses, shops, an amusement arcade and a miniature railway all followed; but Stedman’s grand plan to build a mock Tudor village, complete with green, was thwarted by the outbreak of the 1939 war.

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Seventy years on, Stedman’s dream spills back from the seafront, along the high street, known as Broadway, and into crowded alleys and streets of old wooden huts, bungalows and chalets. In any of the avenues, some of the properties may be boarded-up or dying, others spruced up or made over, but even after this time there is a shared jauntiness and character among them; while just beyond the promenade, on the line of the seawall they had to build after the 1953 floods, lies one of Essex’s most perfect sandy bathing beaches. On a hot summer’s day, plenty of people were still enjoying Frank Stedman’s dream. Three Martello towers and ten rocky granite moles further east, we marched into Clacton, our destination for the day. Its attractions seemed positively tame after Jaywick.

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THIRTEEN Round the Naze

Down a steep concrete spillway and under a painted Rialto bridge, crowned with giant Oscar figurines, we approached the gates of Clacton Pier. At just after eight o’clock, it still had half an eye shut. The slot machines, carousels and bumper cars, and signs to the Haunted Mansion, Seaquarium and Mad House were all winking at us with their garlands of flashing light bulbs, but apart from a few cleaners the place was deserted. Despite its inviting notice promising all-day breakfasts, the Jolly Roger restaurant at the pierhead was closed, and there was no-one to read Tarot cards for us. “Clacton standard time,” noted Harris. “It’s Sunday after all: they’ll still be in church.”

Harris was in a good mood. He had already toured the centre of Clacton and feasted on the blue-chimneyed Royal Hotel and its near neighbours. Architects feed on buildings, and we had still more to take in. After leaving the sleeping pier, we walked on up to the cliff promenade and continued along the coast. Every pace was another step up the social and money scale, as the houses grew bigger and competed with each other for columns, finials, balustrades and wrought-iron electronic gates. None, however, could quite match the class of Moot Hall on the corner of Lancaster Gardens. This is mock Tudor with a difference, constructed with the frame-parts of a medieval barn moved here from Hawstead in Suffolk. Harris examined the two ‘show’ sides.

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“Even the bricks used for nogging between the timbers, and for building that sumptuous chimney, come from a good home,” he said. “But it’s a sheer reinvention of history, a medieval villa built square for middle-class comfort. Apart from the shape, the name’s the giveaway: nobody was ‘mooting’ along this lonely clifftop in Tudor times.” Just along the clifftop, a plaque stands in Albany Gardens which took us back to ‘Tower A’ at Point Clear, the East Essex Aviation Museum. It marks the point on shore closest to where Raymond King brought ‘Little Zippie’ down into that icy January North Sea. A local boy put out to sea with friends in an attempt to rescue him, but he was dead by the time they brought him in. By chance, in 1987 the plane was found, and the same boy set about recovering it and establishing the museum around the plane, and Flight Officer King’s memory. King’s nephew came to this spot to unveil the little memorial to his uncle at the side of a well-kept English garden. Holland-on-Sea, next along the coast, has been called ‘the older people’s Clacton’; the houses here, never more than 70 years old, seemed more relaxed. We had left behind the architectural

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gamesmanship of Clacton. Once again, the cliffs had sprouted a fringe of bathing-huts with, here and there, little clusters of beached sailing dinghies. And now, at the foot of a tall lattice tower, the houses thinned to nothing, giving, for the first time on this coast, fine views to our left as well as to our right: inland, the distant brick Tudor tower of Great Holland church and (near to hand) a red farmhouse competed with the seascape and the masts of barges coming round from Harwich, pushing south under power over a glassy sea. The next plaque on the seafront matched the promise Jon had made on the Fingringhoe rifle range. It marked the spot from where the Duchess of Connaught and her daughters had watched the British Army ‘attack the County of Essex’ in a major military exercise in 1904. “Extraordinary when you think about it,” I said. “Troops who fought in Africa in the Boer War, and Tommies who would die in the trenches in France, were landed here to shoot their way up the cliffs near Clacton. What war were they planning for?”

Map 13
Clacton to the Naze, and round Hamford Water

27 miles 117

“The name Holland-on-Sea must have confused them,” said Harris. “They probably thought it was Belgium.” From Holland Haven, the marshes, part nature reserve, part golf course, are protected by a long curving mole of concrete that ends under the towers of Frinton. A slight bulge in the beach is dignified with a grand Norman-French name: Chevaux de Frise Point. “What’s all this French for now?” I asked, “I thought we were still in Holland.” “Doesn’t it describe those concealed pits you’d place in the path of a cavalry charge – with pointed stakes, for the galloping horses to impale themselves on?” “You mean you had cavalry charging up the coast here as well as the British army? Tell that to the Marines.”

The Royal Hotel, Clacton, from the pierhead

We approached Frinton by the side of the seafront golf course and, stepping onto the Greensward, encountered our first thatched cottage – the rustic public lavatories. Here we felt not just ten miles, but ten continents away from Jaywick. Frinton is the Beverly Hills of the Essex coast. There are white Crittall villas in the international style, and the beach huts here, which are on stilts, change hands for the price of a luxury car. We crossed to a grove of trees to find what claims to be England’s smallest church, St Mary’s.

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Around it, the town is so 1890s that you could easily take the church for a crafty fake – to give Frinton a pedigree; but parts of its pebble walls go back 700 years. It was Sunday, so it was closed. Frinton Free Church, though, its flank to the café where we had breakfast, sheltering from a brief rain shower, was doing good business, hoovering in a constant flow of rather gaily dressed people in their hats and umbrellas. Walton merges with Frinton in an elderly aunt-like fashion. Developed between the 1820s and 1860s, a bit older as a resort than Frinton, Walton is now trying to regain its 19th century elegance by doing up its High Street, and highlighting some of the Regency houses. This isn’t to everyone’s taste, though. As we turned the corner of the cliff to face the Sanctuary, Walton’s feistiest building, we ran into Maddie Fuller, standing guard over her own beach-hut at the foot of the shrubby slope. “There are only three of us left who are holding out and still using our huts,” she told us. The 140 tenants of the huts clustered up this part of the cliff have all been served with notices of eviction. But Maddie was having nothing of it.

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“These huts have been here since the early 1900s and they are trying to push us out with no compensation. I’m staying, and that’s that. I’ve got ten kids, 32 grandchildren and my first great grandchild. This is their heritage. I’m a British bulldog, and I’m built like one and I’ll fight to the end.” The huts are owned by a seaside resorts company Cinque Port, or ‘Zinc Port’, as Maddie calls them; they have bought the pier and the adjoining cliffland, and are exercising their rights to redevelop the site. The Fullers will probably lose their battle, and in the process Walton will lose some of its character. We walked out onto the Pier to get a better look at the Walton they are trying to resurrect. At Southend there was the magic sense of being halfway to Kent; here there was just the open sea, but of the two landward views, Walton wins hands down. As a pier, Walton’s can’t match Southend’s for length, or Clacton’s for razz-matazz, but it has a measured dignity, and big gaps between its old planks. One of the volunteers at the pierhead lifeboat station jokingly observed that the most dangerous part of any rescue mission is the ride down to the boat. “Our bicycle wheels get stuck in those gaps,” he told us.

On the flat top of the Naze, the headland guarding the entrance to Hamford Water, an octagonal red-brick tower dominates the views across land and sea for miles. The tower was put up by Trinity House, in 1722, to guide vessels entering and leaving the Walton backwaters and Harwich harbour. This tough old octagon, painted by Constable, once stood a kilometre back from the cliff. Listing prominently to north-east, it is now less than 40 metres from the edge. With its weather-awning, the caravan parked next to the Naze visitor centre must be one of the smallest museums in the country. Its purpose, and that of its bearded proprietor Mike Todd, is to draw attention to the perilous state of the headland. “The cliff has actually moved one kilometre in my lifetime,” says Mike; he has lived on the Naze on and off for 47 years. “Going back further, there’s evidence from maps that the Naze has eroded six kilometres since 1300. If they don’t do something soon we will lose the tower and the entire Naze.” But nobody seems to be able or willing to do anything about it. The fate of the Naze appears to be in the hands of well-intentioned organisations whose conflicting policies will destroy it.

The Naze cliffs are a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest or SSSI. This leaves English Nature in sole control of what happens to the cliffs, and they want them to remain natural and therefore to erode; and in the process of erosion, continue to expose the Red Crag which English Nature use as a date reference for younger geological deposits. But, ironically, if the erosion continues, there will be no Red Crag left. “English Nature seem to be a law unto themselves,” says Mike. “They won’t even listen to English Heritage, who are desperate to save the tower. “The biggest problem here, actually, isn’t sea erosion. Everyone keeps banging on about it; but on the Naze we’ve got sand on top of clay, in layers; and the real problem is drainage. If they could sort that out, the erosion would stop.” Mike’s researches show, nonetheless, that maintaining the sea defences helps in securing the natural camber of the cliffs. The Victorians built 30-odd timber groynes, which ensured that the mounds of debris were kept stacked at the base of the cliffs and not washed away. These groynes were looked after until 1950, and in the seventy years up to then significantly fewer cliff falls occurred, and little land was lost.

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The one option Mike, along with English Nature, regards with abhorrence is any form of exterior cladding. “I want to see it kept as cliff, not graded and concreted. We are the last natural piece of cliff in Essex.” Harris looked up from a fossilized shark’s tooth. “No, you’re not,” he said. “What about East Mersea?” Mike looked mildly surprised. He wasn’t used to being challenged over cliffs. “Fair do’s,” he replied, “but I’m talking about decent cliff.” And, not to be out-manoeuvred on the Essex shoreline, he added: “And you’ve got that bit at Maylandsea on the side of the Crouch, if you call that a cliff.” In the caravan-museum, Mike has trayfuls of fossils on display, a fraction of the collection he has amassed from falls from the 23-metre high cliffs. Some, from the deepest levels, go back fifty million years to when England was joined to continental Europe and had a sub-tropical climate. Mike fingers through some fossilised flowers and a few of the 230 species of birds that were preserved in the clay, and hands us a pre-historic but instantly recognisable human turd – “not quite what we show school children.” It’s as heavy as iron. The Sanctuary, pierhead and huts, Walton on the Naze

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One set of concrete steps down to the shore is taped-off, damaged beyond repair. On the beach the visible effects of erosion are dramatic. Two World War II blockhouses sit indignantly in the water 50 metres from the base of the cliff that once supported them. From the cliff face, water, the chief agent of destabilisation, is seeping out in several places. When it builds up, it causes the lower cliff to slide out, making cracks in the upper section, which falls and is swept away by the incoming tide. There are places where the cliff has been scalloped or bayed out by spectacular recent falls. The tide was right out, so we could walk the mile along the marshes to Stone Point, the sand spit at the tip of the Naze. An RSPB notice told us to avoid disturbing nesting terns. We walked around the tide-line and, beyond the point where we had spotted the masts of two barges, we found Steve Henderson, a local sculptor, rowing his children ashore from one of the two vessels. Interested in what we told him of our walk, Steve pointed out that we would be passing his house at Landermere Creek, on one of the far fingers of Hamford Water.

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“So why not drop in for afternoon tea?” he asked. I looked at my watch and Steve noted my surprise. It was just after one o’clock and, by sailing barge, Landermere was less than six miles away. “It will take you all of that time to get there,” he warned us. The old port of Walton lay at the back of the town, at the southern end of Walton Channel. Creeks and marshes make the channel impossible to follow on foot, so we retraced our steps down the beach to the slopes of the Naze and turned inland to Walton Hall. Whoever has set about restoring this sturdy ruin – the companion to the Tower on the summit – must believe the Naze has some future. In the low saddle between the two hills of Walton, we came on a length of seawall marking the southern end of Walton Channel. “If the port was this side,” I remarked, “that explains why they built the Martello tower back here, facing up Hamford Water.” We followed the Kirby-le-Soken road as far as the lane down to the Horsey Island causeway across the Wade. If the tide had been right, we would have crossed; but in any case, here was a seawall

path again. The first section, around Kirby Creek, proved pleasant walking; but as the afternoon grew hot, the grass banks turned into a tangled obstacle course, and we hacked our way along the landward side of the Wade through matted tall grass and red-stemmed sea-kale, that came out and grabbed our shins. At times we were forced to drop down to the ditches and fields below us. It was some of our toughest walking in Essex. “This is raw creek country,” I said. “And incredibly beautiful, too,” replied Harris. “I mean, look over there at that island. And look back at the Naze there, with the sun full on it. It would only take a few pairs of feet a week to make the paths around these creeks one of the treats of Essex.” We had a real sense of isolation among these gentle creeks. The only signs of human life were the occasional sailing boats snug in their lonely mudberths, and the solitary cabin on the Skipper Island reserve, with its solar panels and wind generators.

It was only when we turned the corner towards the White House and Beaumont Quay, approaching the furthest reach inland of Hamford Water, that we found civilised footpaths again. Steve lives halfway up this final creek. The barge-berths of the former port of Landermere are clearly imprinted in the marsh and the house, end-on to the water, was the former inn. This was a working port well into the 20th century, and barges once loaded grain here for the London mills. The iced water was most welcome. We admired Steve’s driftwood carvings of wading birds and dolphins before setting out for one last port, Beaumont Quay. At least the sturdy line of bargees’s cottages and the old inn survive at Landermere; at Beaumont there is just the one slate-roofed shed above ground, and a bit of quayside made, apparently, of big blocks of Georgian stone, legend has it from Old London Bridge. The single dock is marked by the stem and stern posts of a mighty sunken barge. We headed inland for Great Oakley, and from the rising ground, as the day ended, we could look back across the open water of Hamford and see all

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the islands and marshes from Skipper, over Horsey, to Stone Point, and all the paths covered in the last four hours – right back to the Naze Tower and the shining stucco backs of Walton’s East Terrace, facing out over the North Sea.

The Naze: cliff-edge and groynes

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The two ‘movable’ iron lighthouses on the beach, at Dovercourt

FOURTEEN Round Harwich

The café at Manningtree station, for which Paul the owner buys bacon by the half hundredweight, served as our operations base for the next two days. Jon, who had arrived from Cambridge by train, was tucking into a cooked breakfast when I showed up.

“You won’t even get out of the door with that lot inside you.”

the little promontory south of Oakley Creek, once a munitions site, is still a no-go area. Half an hour’s walk by lane and through harvest fields, took us to the gatehouse of the Exchem Organics plant, which produces diesel additives, highly flammable, out on the First World War navy site. The gates are guarded 24 hours a day; when we passed, Peter Raven was on duty. A large notice warns that Peter and his fellow guards are authorised by the 1875 Explosives Act (with minor modifications in 1923) to arrest and stop any person causing or tending to cause an explosion or fire, or pulling down or defacing this notice.

From the station, a taxi returned us to Great Oakley. North of Beaumont Quay, three miles of the Hamford Water marshes are inaccessible; and

“There’s lots of high-explosive stuff here,” says Peter. “I should know, because I used to work in Quality Control, that is, until they downsized” –

“This should keep me going until Harwich,” he said. I looked at the sausages and bacon on his plate.

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Exchem still employs eighty people here – “and made me a security officer.” The next lane was the footpath down to the water’s edge. Here, as a farewell to East Coast marshes, we walked out on the single-plank landing stage over the marsh facing Pewit Island, before turning the long corner towards the open North Sea. Over the southern skyline, the Naze tower stood out against the morning light; to the north, in a silver shimmer, we could just make out the derricks and cranes of Felixstowe Port. The hills of the Harwich peninsula closed the gap between land and sea, gradually squeezing out the marsh fields. Rounding a last fringe of tidal creeklets, we joined the Essex Way, the long distance footpath that crosses the county from the edge of London to this north-east cape. It was for footsore hikers, no doubt, that the finger-post on the concrete promenade approaching Dovercourt, pointed to Harwich; it was probably for us two that someone had daubed, on one of the pavilion-shelters: Win the rat race and you are still a rat. Below the Cliff Hotel at Dovercourt, Jon sketched the two iron lighthouses – the tall hexagonal one inshore, the stocky octagonal one with its legs in the waves. Their black and white livery seemed made for his pen; “bluntly beautiful engineering,” he called it.

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Map 14
Great Oakley to Harwich, and along the Stour to Manningtree

22 miles

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Coming up to the Leading Lights at Harwich

132-133

“Sort of movable feasts?” I asked. “Yes, when they were put here in 1864, they were meant to be moved as the harbour channel shifted; but they liked it and stayed,” Harris replied. Above Dovercourt Beach, at the corner of Fronks Road, stands the first of two Portland stone monuments. This one, with bronze dolphins on its compass points, commemorates the minesweeper crews of the First World War, the Harwich Force, who went trawling for mines to keep the sea lanes open. Whole crews are named. Many of the vessels were paddle steamers; some converted trawlers. ‘Twilight and evening star,’ reads the dignified bronze inscription below their names; ‘I hope to see my Pilot face to face, when I have crossed the bar’. Nearby, on safer soil than in Southend, and no longer waving out to sea, Queen Victoria looks north from her high plinth to the Stour estuary, immediately at Dovercourt’s back. A little park with an impressive grove of ilexes separates Dovercourt and Harwich. Here, where you can still see the round bases of naval guns,

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stood Dovercourt’s spa-pavilion. Its modest neighbours – and the only ones in Essex not made of timber – are a row of red-brick beach huts. “Harwich believes in building solid,” said Harris. “It must be the military again,” I replied. “They were probably designed to survive a direct hit from the sea.” The path runs round the fenced-off and overgrown Beacon Point fort; here, just as we had lunch in our sights, Harris had to head out to sea again. “You’re not swimming to Landguard Fort,” I appealed to him. We were right opposite Suffolk’s southern-most spit, the nature reserve below the Martello tower at Felixstowe. “I’m not, Brian,” he replied over his shoulder, “but you’ve got to see the view of the harbour mouth from out here.” Even at low water, walking the narrow mole – hewn ragstone fleeced with wet seaweed – was like balancing on a long, slippery tree trunk. From a quarter of a mile out, from where the flagstaff used to stand, the whole waterfront of Old Harwich, from the Redoubt Fort to the lifeboat house in the Navyard, was visible, along with the entire container-port of Felixstowe. Only now was

Harris’ breakfast fuel exhausted, and we took lunch (and refuge from the sun) under a garden awning at the New Bell inn. From the Halfpenny Pier, we turned finally away from the open sea, which had been at our side for ten days. Was it the beer or the extreme heat, or both? Within minutes of leaving the pier I started hallucinating. “My goodness, there’s another church in Harwich with an Italianate campanile,” I said. “No, it’s Dovercourt again,” Harris observed. “It’s the same church from the other side. Don’t you see, in going round the top of Harwich, we’ve done a 360 degree turn.” Passing Dovercourt station, we rounded the bay of Bath Side to the gates of Harwich’s expanding seaport at Parkeston. As usual, the white paintwork of a multi-storeyed cruise liner made a pygmy of the pier buildings. We picked up the first available footpath along the Stour estuary, sandwiched initially between the railway and an oil depot with gleaming storage tanks, then breaking out into open country. The rolling landscape of the Shotley peninsula formed the far shore. For the rest

of the day, our path followed the Stour estuary, except for two detours inland. One was at Wrabness. The first, though, was where we encountered the Essex Way again on the path down through Copperas Wood. The hornbeam may be Essex’s County Tree, but this was the first time since leaving Waltham Abbey that we had walked in a decent grove of them. From Jacques Bay onwards, the path marked along the foreshore became increasingly tentative. The Essex Way sends you inland, but we liked the look of the beach; and even if at times cherry trees and oaks, tumbled from the cliff among loose boulders of septaria, forced us to clamber over or squeeze under their trunks, our cautious progress, between mud and dry land, was rewarded with river views, beached wrecks and glimpses of sika deer bounding to safety from grazing the samphire flats below Nether Hall. The final mile into Mistley called for some tricky footwork between sand and hummocks of mud, and it was a relief to come ashore at Mistley Marina.

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“That, Brian, is the last time this trip you take me slithering on slurry.” Even as he spoke, an unchained Alsatian dog shot out from beneath a caravan. He sprang through the air and with gnashing teeth landed at my feet. I prepared myself for a nasty bite but Harris came to the rescue. He simply told it: “Sit.” And the beast obeyed. Sitting on the verandah at the Anchor pub at the head of the lane above the marina, overlooking Seafield Bay, we learned more about the dog. We had got into conversation about our walk. “It’s such a shame,” said our fellow customer, “that you can’t walk along the riverbank all the way to Mistley. It’s that Alsatian down in the marina. He’ll tear you apart.” “It wasn’t the dog that worried me,” said Harris, “I tell you what, once I got off that mud, I’d have tackled a crocodile.” There was a train to catch in Manningtree, at the head of the estuary. It helped that the afternoon heat had let up. Mistley and Manningtree town were raced through; the old hotel in Mistley, where the packet-boats put in, the stone swan in its pool and – beyond – Robert Adam’s twin towers, got only a nod. At the station, Harris just had time to buy a tea before the train pulled in on the far platform. Tea, map and notepad balancing in one hand, rucksack

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Mistley, the deep-water anchorage and maltings-turned-apartments

trailing from the other, he made a dash for the underpass. When he emerged, still trotting, on the other side of the train, he couldn’t see the big grin on the station manager’s face. “I told him not to run,” he said. “I wouldn’t blow the whistle until he was on board.”

The High Lighthouse at Harwich

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FIFTEEN Along the Stour

Back at Manningtree station café a few days later, Paul had just served 25 pounds of bacon and sausages to his early morning customers. Not to us. We had chosen a lighter breakfast: at not yet nine o’clock, it was already a seriously hot day. Our walk now took on a totally different hue. Since we had first smelt brine on the River Lea in London, for fourteen days we had followed the ebb and flow of salt water. As we stepped off the A137 at the south end of Cattawade Bridge onto the Stour path, we said goodbye to the sea and its tides. From now on, instead of industrial plant and concrete seawalls, resorts and harbours, fortifications and firing ranges, and the seamless seascapes and flat marshlands of estuary and creek, we had Suffolk and valley trees and a freshwater

stream by our side. In an instant, we had swapped the salt air and cry of estuary birds for the green smell of river and the rustle of meadow grassland. As the river meanders across the flood plain from Flatford Mill and Fen Bridge, the magnificent 130-foot tower of Dedham church comes into view. We had walked through Constable’s paintings at Hadleigh Castle and on the Naze; we were now entering the fields of his childhood, of which later in life he wrote: ‘I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. Those scenes made me a painter.’ Born on the Suffolk side of the river in East Bergholt in 1776, John Constable grew up there and crossed over the bridge into Essex each day to

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get to school in Dedham. His father was a miller and grain merchant in what must have been a hard working, though prosperous, environment. The barges at Golding Constable’s disposal plied between Mistley and Sudbury – the round trip took twenty-six hours – and the towpath crossed from side to side of the river so many times within a few miles of the Constable mills that the horses had to be trained to jump on and off the barges. “The miller’s son may have preferred painting horses and barges to working them,” said Harris, “but he knew both from inside.” “I know you artists get around, Harris, but have you ever been inside a horse?” The mill at Dedham has been rebuilt and made-over so consistently since Constable’s day that only the mill pond and weir leave anything to the imagination; downstream of the bridge, though, the Boathouse gives pleasure to the eye. You can sit down to a good meal and then take out one of the Mastrani family skiffs for a row down to Flatford Mill. It was too early for that; we had tea and scones opposite the pub at the crossroads in Dedham. The stop was a good excuse for us to visit St Mary’s Church and for Jon to inspect ‘his painting’; he was one of scores that had responded to the national appeal to save Constable’s Risen Christ, which now hangs over the south porch door.

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Map 15
From Manningtree to Sudbury up the Stour

24 miles

141

“I own a few of those brush strokes up there,” Harris whispered to the guide at the church entrance. Either she misheard or she had quickly concluded that Harris was off his head. “Would you like to buy one of our little booklets, dear?” she asked. The Essex border now conveniently follows the River Stour, but the riverside paths stray awkwardly into Suffolk. So, as Harris was determined to stick to his rule of keeping within the Essex boundaries, the rest of the day involved much zigzagging around country lanes. It was as if we still had creekfever and had forgotten how to walk in a straight line. We were leaving flat Essex behind. “A bit out of training, when it comes to hills like these,” said Harris as we walked up to Langham Church. “Now you know why I call this part of Essex the foothills of Suffolk,” I said. A poem inscribed on a cast-iron plate in the church porch again reminds foot-weary visitors that they are in hilly country: The dumb animals’ humble petition. ‘Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,’ it begins, and rest we did. We dropped down the hill to a path curving away from Stratford St Mary towards Higham, passing the open mouth of the Brett Valley; the Brett is the Stour’s first tributary,

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Approaching Dedham from the East

Fifteen Along the Stour

quickly followed by the Box. Langham Hall, framed by park trees and big woods at the top of rising turf, stood above us; southwards over a valley floor of nearly ripe barley. “That’s pure Constable,” says Jon. “Just like his painting of Wivenhoe Park.” As we approached Nayland, the white Deco bulk of High Lift Waterworks came into view. Since it was on our path, we couldn’t resist pressing the button of the security barrier. To our surprise, it raised itself and we walked by one of the large reservoirs to the pump room. Bob, the day controller, came out to greet us – they obviously don’t get many casual visitors. He let us into the building that had caught our eye – a cavernous engine-room with glass-panelled ceiling. It could have been the ballroom on the Île de France. Its quiet pumps send water from the Stour up to reservoirs on Tiptree Heath – hence the name. The exterior has strong echoes of the 1930s Hoover factory on the old A40, but with a proud conviction that goes with its being a purely engineering structure.

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A noisy chihuahua sent us packing past Boxted Mill – a bit out of place for this part of Essex, noted Harris – and on the hill up to Boxted village, a big thatched barn greeted us. We lingered a long time at Boxted Church, where Harris was taken with the power of its close-knit pebble walls and its huge primitive interior. “Artists again,” I said. “Did you see the list of World War II dead?” “Yes, Anthony Pissarro; must have been Camille’s grandson. His son Lucien became an Essex man.” A few fields beyond the church, Liz and Chas Bazeley are surrounded by the buzz of development. The barns next to their 15th century home, Boxted Hall, have been sold with the neighbouring farm for £2 million to a developer from south Essex. “We’re going to be ‘Essexed’”, says Liz, “street lamps down the farm track, electronic park gates, the lot.” This isn’t snobbery; it is simply a comment on the unwritten north-south divide between the urban and rural lifestyles that runs through the county –

the ever moving faultline between the traditional informality of North Essex and the thrusting modernity of the Thames corridor. Burnt Dick Hill took us back down to the valley, and out into rolling open countryside opposite the mighty brick tower of Stoke-by-Nayland church. Once again the footpaths keep this part of the valley as familiar as the fields round Dedham, and rightly so. The character changes from one mile to the next; the only constant is the river. From the site of Wormingford Mill, the Essex floor of the valley fills up with little rounded hills as if from a quite different landscape. Not knowing what comes next is to experience one of the treats of the East Anglian landscape, and this happens as you come up to the clump called the Fir Trees opposite Wormingford church. They are like the crest of a wave: through them, without warning, the path cascades into the bowl towards Bures. Equally unpredictable are the houses and other buildings: Lower Dairy House in Little Horkesley, or long, lanky Josselyns and its mansarded neighbour, a dolls-house of a Louis XVI château that’s leapt happily from an elegant wine label into an Essex orchard. Then there are the barns and watermills,

particularly the tall white-boarded mill, out in the fields, that leads you into Bures. The last section of the day’s walk would bring us to Sudbury. A curve of the river drove us briefly uphill to a farm with huge sarsen stones. Ahead of us, Lamarsh church had an ancient round tower, which someone had crowned with a pointy Gothic hat with four ear-holes: it reminded me of the Victorian waterworks we had glimpsed behind Three Mills on our second day’s walking. To our left, the shapes of the hills and the geology were changing. We passed between the Daws Hall Nature Reserve and the organic gardens of the Paradise Centre; we passed, with regret, the Henny Swan with its bench-tables overlooking the river. At Middleton we climbed a hollow lane where, for the first time, streaks of chalk appeared in the sandy embankments; and, turning towards Sudbury, we found the road hemmed in by giant chalk-pits which by now had, themselves, evolved into paradise gardens.

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SIXTEEN North Essex

Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t have been in Sudbury at all. The River Stour flows around the town in a broad south-westerly quadrant, and Suffolk bites a chunk out of Essex, pushing the border back behind a sweep of water meadow and rising valley. We headed out of Sudbury past the Quay Theatre, once the maltings at the head of the Stour Navigation, and walked back across the Kone Vale meadows to where we had left the border the evening before, at the side of Grove House and its quarry gardens. Each side of the A131 at Ballingdon, the Suffolk border cuts all the good paths; this forced us to make a deep clockwise loop, along sunken lanes, where the spire of Great Henny church would occasionally peep over the bank, and down earth-

floored byways, deep rutted cart tracks that are still canopied with hazel and hawthorn, until we broke out into open country at Bulmer Tye. The height we had gained since Middleton now gave us wide views to north and north-west, across the Belchamp Brook and up towards Cavendish. It was hot again, and by eight thirty, as we came down past Smeetham Hall, the tar of the lane was sticking to our boots. We rejoined the Stour Valley across fields below Borley Church, and here Harris discovered the cousin of our coastal friend salsify growing beside the hedge. The ‘clock’ of seeds was the same – but the flower was not slate-purple but yellow; and – he had to look this up – it’s called Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon.

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A bright red McCormick tractor was parked by fields near Liston, so new and shiny that rubber whiskers were still waving off the showroom-condition tyres. It was her first day out, and her owner, David Cutler, was about to start the harvest. David farms 400 hectares here on either side of the border. We told him we were walking round the county. “I wouldn’t bother to go any further,” he said. “This is the best bit of Essex. If you take the side-lane down to the ford there, that’s the loveliest stretch of the whole river.” From the side of the tractor you could almost reach over the valley and touch Melford church tower, and pick up the gleaming white cowls on the Rodbridge maltings and rearrange them. Between Liston and Liston Garden we should have been able to walk right down to the river; but, next to a barrier, a notice warned us that ‘all tobaccos, matches and lighters must be handed in at the gatehouse’. There was no one to take them. We were at the side of an abandoned jelly works – a sprawling complex that once produced (evidently explosive) food additives. Taken over by International Flavours and Fragrances of Haverhill, it no longer produces anything. How such a large enterprise, with no apparent military purpose, came to be built in this corner of quiet countryside mystified us both.

Map 16
From Sudbury to Haverhill along the Upper Stour

23 miles 148

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Here the Stour has become little more than an apprentice river. We crossed it by the bridge below Pentlow Mill, and sneaked into Suffolk for lunch at the Bull in Cavendish. The broad main street and ample green were reminders that all the prosperous places, Long Melford, Glemsford, Cavendish and Clare, lie on the north bank; besides, the Essex bank, as far as pubs are concerned, is dry – without a long detour to the hilltops. The Essex side of the border is more intimate and more remote, and seems to guard its secrets. One is the little church at Pentlow. You wouldn’t have known it was there unless you found the hole in a hedge, and walked down an overgrown alley of yew and hazel, to emerge into the open area of lawn beyond. The church sits on its own miniature mound above the river, backed by high poplars, and it has the double surprise of an apsed chancel and a round tower.

Rising land on the Essex-Cambridgeshire border

From Pentlow, through Ashen, to Baythorne End we followed a more or less consistent line of paths and lanes, which had one disadvantage: nearly always a high hedge to the right deprived us of seeing either our companion river, or what was on the Suffolk side of the valley. We caught only fleeting glimpses of Clare and its castle and Stoke-byClare, but plentiful views of the dry, mostly treeless, arable slopes to the south. It was only when we emerged by a little

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formal pond into the open grounds of Baythorne Park that we felt hemmed in no longer. With each mile, the temperature had risen and, finally, I could resist the water no more. “I’m going to plunge into the next brook,” I said. “Not a bad idea,” said Jon, “except for all that poisonous rat pee.” “They used to swim in rivers in the 19th century. What’s so special about rats’ pee today?” “The rats,” said Jon. I didn’t swim. Instead, we had sport of a far more deadly variety. We played Russian roulette with heavy trucks and white vans around blind corners along the A1017. The two miles through New England, from Baythorne End into Sturmer, are the point where the Stour flows in from the north. You don’t get to see it. Every sharp corner seems to have a high hedge; there are no pavements, and there is no alternative footpath – not even along the track beds of the two dismantled railways that run either side of the road. Even the normally placid Jon felt the strain. He swore at me when I mispronounced Haverhill as h’Avril.

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SEVENTEEN The Cambridge borders

With no river valley or seashore to follow, the Essex frontier beyond Haverhill begins to wander, acquiring snags and arbitrary elbows. From Sturmer, past Horseham Hall, to Drapers Green we followed interlocking footpaths that closely shadowed the border’s high, meandering course. Looking north, it was the silver tanks and topknots of Haverhill’s hilltop factories that caught the eye. To the south we were overlooking a completely pylon-free and pole-less pastoral landscape, pale arable fields set against dark woodlands. The fields may have changed their scale, and the elms are missing; even so – but for the unusually commanding radio mast on the high ground above Castle Camps – there is the sense of this being the landscape it always was. Apart from the mast, the only defining feature of the 21st century were the

distant planes approaching Stansted airport; for the first time since leaving London we were conscious of being under a flight path. The going got tougher after we went astray amid the young hornbeams in Great Bendysh Wood. “Don’t blame the map-reader, blame the name,” said Harris. Other map-defying obstacles presented themselves: most farmers will cut a path-width swathe across their fields; sometimes, when they don’t bother, you can follow the wheel tracks of their spraying tackle through the waist-high crop. But at Winsey Farm, the wheel tracks themselves were overgrown with the biggest crop of goosegrass in the county. We both emerged with ankles wreathed in the stuff, as if in Roman triumph, but in irritation with the seeds, hard little ball-bearings, that had dropped inside boots and socks. It was a

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genuine but lucky map error that sent us slightly askew of the frontier path, down to the main crossroads at Ashdon. Here, facing us, was the fine plaster frontage of the Rose and Crown. We climbed the steps from the street into a bar garlanded with hops. In the chamber to the right, its walls painted with religious texts and mock panelling, we were brought delicious lentil and bacon soup, which we ate under the gaze of Oliver Cromwell. “A very fine early 17th century room,” Jon told the landlord, after complimenting him on the soup, and the magnificent open fireplace. “No, actually it’s 1611,” said the landlord. Jon’s accuracy with dating was more appreciated at our next stop at the windmill on the top of the hill overlooking Ashdon. The local dentist Andrew Eyles was surveying the work being carried out to his pet project. Andrew is a trustee of the charity set up to restore this old soldier to its former splendour. Built in 1757 by William Haylock, its sails had turned to mill flour until 1900. With the side-girth snapped and one big beam to replace, there was a lot to do. Vincent Pargetter, a well-known East Anglian retired millwright, was in charge of the job. “Repairing windmills is just like dentistry,” said Andrew. “Structural carpentry, only on a larger scale.”

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Map 17
From Sturmer along the Cambridgeshire border to Great Chesterfield

21 miles

155

Harris was in his element. He is on the committee of a small semi-retired watermill, south of Cambridge, and he delights in drawing the insides of these sturdy and ancient machines. After he had inspected the machinery and clambered into the loft he and Andrew engaged in animated windmillspeak. The replacement timbers had been well scarfed-in, and the big shaft and two cogs which take the drive to the stone were in good condition, and only the sets of stones and their associated parts were missing. They are replaceable: the teeth will bite again. “For heaven’s sake,” said Harris. He was reading the placard at the side of the mill, detailing its history. “What have you found now?” I asked. “This is getting a bit close to home. It says here, in the second half of the 19th century, the Haylocks emigrated to New Zealand and built four mills in and around Akaroa. Goodness knows what their religious leanings were; but one thing’s for sure, they must have bumped into the Archdeacon of Akaroa, William Chambers Harris – my great-grandfather – who was there in the late 1870s.” Andrew asked about our walk.

Ashdon windmill under wraps, 2003

“Well you’re up in the mountains now, aren’t you? After all those estuaries, this is positively hill country.”

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We were indeed crossing some of Essex’s highest ground, round the 400-foot mark and, not content with the natural undulations around us, later in the day we slipped over the border to climb one of the most unusual hills in England. The Bartlow hills are Britain’s Pyramids, a group of conical chalk burial mounds, just inside Cambridgeshire. The highest of them has a ladder-stair up the side, which we ascended. It allows you to stand at treeheight and examine the hollowed-out top of the mound, the scar of an excavation in 1832, which unearthed amazing Romano-British artefacts, all carefully recorded and engraved. This was just as well: fifteen years later, the house where the treasures had been taken for safe keeping, Easton Lodge, went up in flames. After visiting this ancient burial ground, it seemed fitting to end the day on the Icknield Way Path. “This probably goes back three thousand years further,” said Jon. “That’s five thousand years of weary feet,” I said. “And hooves.” It took us from just above the zoo at Linton over and down the rim of the Cam valley. In the first

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half of the day, we had said goodbye to pylons. In the second half, we grew aware of a line of them crossing the western horizon ahead of us. After a long climb in the welcome shade of a greenway, with branches arching over our heads, we caught up with them; and soon afterwards we were at the head of a long lane, with views across to Strethall and the high land of the next day’s walk. In the valley, the traffic of the M11 crossed with commuter trains coming back from Liverpool Street. Two miles of gentle gradient brought four weary feet down to the flint walls, and big bunchy horse-chestnuts, of Great Chesterford. We rested them, sitting with a jug of beer on the bench outside the Crown and Thistle in the High Street, intent on a customer parking his wheel barrow by the pub entrance, lodging it with singular care in the corner. It was painted bright red and had a reflector light on its front. “Got to make sure it’s safe from vandals,” he said. “Vandals?” Jon enquired. “Oh yes, they’re everywhere. Someone had £2,000 nicked from his home the other day. Mind you, what he was doing with all that money, heaven

knows. I always said to my brother that you can’t take it with you. He’s gone of course. You’ve got to spend it when you’ve got it.” My taxi spun round the corner and I left Jon, with a bus to catch back to Cambridge, to learn more about the wisdom of spending money before you die, and about parking wheelbarrows outside pubs.

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EIGHTEEN South to the Stort Valley

Jon explained a bit about the man with the wheelbarrow when we met up at Great Chesterford, a few days later. They knew him in the Crown and Thistle as ‘Rocket Ron’; he had worked on the railways and retired early, ‘because of nerves’. We weren’t to know that the day would end with an even stranger encounter. Leaving the handsome flint village, in quick order we crossed the River Cam, the Cambridge railway and the M11, and began our climb towards the north-western tip of the county. Our boots crunched chalk and struck on flint. Down across the valley, cranes and a white chalk gash marked the new phase of building at the Genome Campus; Cambridge and the American Air Force hangar at

Duxford remained out of sight. Up here the traces were all ancient. Beyond the lane, the map marked strip lynchets, lines of primitive terrace farming round the steeper escarpments, abandoned and now overgrown with hawthorn. Above and below them, the fields were approaching harvest, the only indication of the 21st century being the short-stemmed corn. “This chalky soil would be a vineyard in southern Spain,” I said. “We could be sipping sherry here, rather than eating the local bread.” “If this heat continues, we soon will be.” Hot June had given way to scorching July.

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On a tiny road near Elmdon, we were stirred from our sun-baked reverie when a car braked, hooted and backed up to us. What was this? We had been spotted by Jane Pearson, a Cambridge College bursar and an associate, with Jon, in town walks organised by the Victorian Society. Jane was not in the least surprised to see Jon in shorts rambling up a remote lane, at breakfast time, twenty miles from Cambridge. A few minutes later, from the high ground just to the north of Elmdon, we had a clear view of Cambridge; soon, a shaft of light revealed the faint outline of Ely Cathedral, twenty-six miles – a day’s walk – away on the Fens. It was a fitting sight from the highest point of the Essex-Cambridgeshire border – 400 feet above the Thames. “Who says there aren’t any good views in Essex?” I asked my Cambridge companion. “Ah,” Jon replied cryptically. “There used to be better ones.” After Ickleton Granges, a tiny hedged road conveniently follows the county border – although somewhat to Jon’s disapproval, because it is on the Cambridge side, and a ditch’s width outside Essex. At the junction just short of the big farm of

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Chrishall Grange, road and boundary turn due south. This is the extreme north-west corner of the county, a clean 90 degrees on the map, but unlike the other three corners of the old county borders – Leamouth, Shoeburyness and Harwich – utterly invisible from a space-station. In fact, most of the Essex’s north-western border with Cambridge and Hertfordshire is indiscernible; and until once again it falls into line again with water by the River Stort, south of Bishop’s Stortford, it meanders haphazardly along ancient parish boundaries across hidden country, through woodlands, valleys, and over open rounded hills. “How convenient for us that the border and road make this right angled turn,” I said. “Well, oddly enough, it wasn’t always such a neat cut here,” said Harris. “It happened when grey men in Whitehall were chopping up Black Africa.” “What happened?” “In 1895 they lopped off a piece of Essex; three whole parishes were transferred to Cambridgeshire – boundary readjustments after the two local government acts (of 1888 and 1894). The parishes

Map 18
From Chesterford round Chrishall, and south to Bishop’s Stortford

31 miles 163

were Great and Little Chishill and Heydon, and although the records are sketchy it seems the villagers went along with it, and Essex even encouraged it.” “Talk about Danzig or Alsace Lorraine. This was the butchering of Essex. You mean the county gave up all its highest ground without a fight?” “An act of charity, I guess, on Essex’s part: it gave the Fenland county its one Alp.” Turning towards Building End down the border, we walked within half a mile of the lost mountain – around 480 feet – at Great Chishill Hall. With trouble-free walking side by side, it was a day for easy-going talk. Having sorted out the dismemberment of Essex’s north-west frontier, we skipped lightly through modern English composers, with Harris displaying the full range of his enthusiasm and love of music. Britten, Elgar, Bridge, Holst, Tippett, Walton, Vaughan Williams – there wasn’t a note dropped, or detail of biography missing, along the Essex border that morning. We talked about walking, too. Strangely, it had taken us 18 days of pacing together to get round to why we were there or, rather, what had

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brought us there. We had both discovered the open countryside, and in a very real sense received its call, on bicycles in the 1950s and 1960s – in an age when children could take off alone and safely into a virtually traffic-free and empty land. “Cruel paradox,” says Jon. “The same children who cycled far and wide have denied their children that opportunity by taking to cars.” This must have set me thinking about the ghosts of the past, because when we sat down a few minutes later to take a drink along an old farm track, I asked Jon whether he had ever come across strange apparitions in woods. I recalled being startled by two men huddled over a fire in a very remote part of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the forested mountains north of Madrid. “They were probably just burning charcoal,” said Jon. “There’s nothing strange about that.” “But, you know, there was,” I said. I had long been haunted by those men in Spain. This was in the late ’sixties, and I always believed that they were former Republicans living in hiding. For some unaccountable reason I suddenly wanted to tell Jon that I felt we were about to meet another stranger

in woods. But I didn’t; and I instantly dismissed the notion as a passing fantasy; utterly absurd. You don’t come across strangers hidden in woods in southern England. The border snaked on. We dropped down to the hamlet of Langley Lower Green, and lunched at the Bull. The bar had festoons of hops, and, on the painted panel of an iron fireplace, a graceful Mucha lady was walking away through an oval wreath. We had already passed our own highest point of 460 feet, and were coming down to the first headwaters of the River Stort, which in time would re-establish the natural county boundary. We encountered the first of them and followed it downstream at Further Ford End; but soon the border returned us to the 400-foot contour, and a long boundary hedge that took us past Dewes Green bang into the Pelham Electricity Transfer Station, where it looked as if there had been a serious inter-county shoot-out. The border plunges down the middle of the station and two large signs – one announcing Hertfordshire and the other Essex – were bolted side by side to the steel slat fence. We took the Essex side, skirting the buzzing transformers through a newly planted orchard and

nature reserve, the grass paths and locally-famous pear and apple saplings dwarfed by the splayed legs of pylons. Four lines of them radiate from here, the one going south more or less marking the county boundary. Over distant woodlands to the south-east, Norman Foster’s greeny-white terminal at Stansted Airport came into view, the second time that his work has framed the landscape on our border walk. His Gherkin had been a leading mark as we walked into London on that first day. Like Sudbury, Bishop’s Stortford punches a hole in the borders of Essex, breaking the north-south line and creating a salient deep into the county. We got our first sight of the Hertfordshire town from a hilltop Essex village cricket ground. The pavilion had been opened by one of the club’s veteran players: the summer of 1995 was Bernard Ellis’ 50th consecutive season playing for Farnham. “Wow, that’s every season since demobilisation,” said Harris. It was sorely tempting to take a short cut and slice straight through the town. But sticking to Harris

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Rules, we walked almost to the western edge of Bishop’s Stortford, turning east towards Wickham Hall to follow the frontier-line, just above the A120 bypass. The track took us down to the Bourne brook, and to a road that would lead us back to Farnham, from where we had just come by a painfully circuitous route. But the border carried straight-on, over harvest fields. “Let’s cut across them,” I said. I was in no mood at this stage of the day to start going backwards. Harris looked worried, so we marched on on tarmac. At a dip in the lane, a woodland track – not on the map – gave us the direction we needed. Harris, who usually resists unmarked paths as dangerous traps, relented just this once. His aversion to short cuts was quickly proved right. The path petered out, leaving us to hack through increasingly thick brush and bramble. We stumbled on and were about to give up when I spotted a gap ahead. “There’s a path here,” I said, “and it seems to lead somewhere.”

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One had indeed quite unexpectedly appeared, leading up the slope, and the trees either side had been neatly cut and trimmed. I left Harris mapreading, and hurried on to see if it would provide us with a way out of the wood. At first it looked promising. Then it seemed to come to a dead-end at a semi-enclosed opening, where, sheltered under the boughs of two broad oak trees, stood a corrugated shack with a clothes-line. “There’s a hide here,” I called out. I peered through a slit at the top of the hut and in the gloomy half-light two eyes glared back at me. “You’re not supposed to be here,” roared a voice from inside. “This is private property. Get the hell out.” I recoiled and sped downhill. “Let’s move, Harris,” I shouted, “I’ll tell you what happened later.” In the absence of a path, we made our way out of the wood along the dry tunnel-bed of the Bourne Brook, emerged onto higher ground and crossed a few fields to a cottage at Hazel End. Robin Fletcher was watering flowers in his garden.

“Excuse my asking,” I said, “but is there anyone living in the woods back there?” “As a matter of fact, yes,” said Robin. “He’s called Ken Goddard, and he’s been there for 25 years.” I was astonished. Someone had been living rough in woods near Bishop’s Stortford for a quarter of a century. Robin told us more. Ken was effectively a squatter on land owned by a local farmer. His family had originally come from Norfolk and he was one of several brothers, one of whom had been killed on a motorbike just up the road. Ken had enlisted in the army and taken to the woods shortly after he returned. Was that where he had learned his woodcraft? “How does he live?” “Up until ten or twelve years ago when his mother died, he used to go home for a wash and to get some food, but since she died he has been very much on his own – apart from the help he must get from somewhere.One or two strangers have befriended him, and he obviously has enough money to buy food. I sometimes see him shopping in Waitrose.”

We left Robin in his garden. We still had to walk around the top of Bishop’s Stortford and the day was closing in. The road led up through Birchanger village and by the time we had reached the pub at Duck End, we were falling out over how to complete the last leg. The county border runs down the side of the M11. This meant that we had either to walk along the motorway’s slip road to get round to the south of Bishop’s Stortford, or cross the motorway and negotiate the perimeters of Stansted Airport and the new M11 junction that connects with it. Jon insisted that there were footpaths right round the airport’s western perimeter, but I was in no mood to find out that he was wrong. “I’m not going to walk through an airport,” I said. “And I’m not going to walk down a motorway,” replied Jon. We were still arguing the toss when we came to the Birchanger intersection. I was a yard ahead and stormed across the A120 onto the first big roundabout. At the far side, to my utter amazement, a mown path led up off the

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carriageway and all along the high bank that sheltered the services from the motorway. We’d stumbled by pure accident on an unofficial footpath that took us straight along the border, down the side of the M11. We had successfully circumnavigated Bishop’s Stortford; tomorrow we would complete our circumnavigation of Essex.

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NINETEEN Down the Stort and Lee

It was season-ticket holders only at Bishop’s Stortford station, so we left the car in the town centre car park, just over the canal bridge. Here the towpath beside the Stort Navigation led invitingly south towards Waltham Abbey, our destination for the day. But I should have known Harris by now: Hertfordshire encroaches onto the left bank of the Stort from a few miles south of Bishop’s Stortford, and he wasn’t deviating even by a few hundred metres from the Essex border. The mile of the A1060 that we walked to clear the town was quite enough. We dropped down to the river through a gravel works into Rushy Mead Nature Reserve, and our world was suddenly transformed into a lush watery haven of weeping willows and reed-beds. Apart from one further sweep inland around Great Hyde Hall at

Sawbridgeworth, the Essex border now followed the canal all the way to Waltham Abbey. The Stort Navigation is the northern branch of the Lea Navigation, which links Hertfordshire and north Essex by water to the Thames at Leamouth in east London. It was opened to Bishop’s Stortford in 1769. The two county-border rivers were transformed into the Lea and Stort Navigation, a 50-mile inland waterway which, although no longer commercially used, is one of the gems of Britain’s 2,500-mile canal network. From the bank, we talked to two people who still earn their living from travelling the length and breadth of the canal system. Margery and Bill Babb are hoteliers; and Dawn and Dusk, their pair of brightly-dressed 71-foot narrow boats, are their

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floating hotel. In keeping with the old ways of working barges, Dawn is motorised and Dusk is the ‘butty’, towed in line, or made fast alongside. “We offer holidays through some of the most beautiful landscape in the country,” says Bill. “And the scenery is constantly changing.” Bill had been pottering around on canal boats all of his life, but he had to wait until he had retired as a defence contractor before setting up his dream holiday business. “We’re earning a living from doing what we love.” Although barges can chug along at a steady five knots – a mile or two an hour faster than most walkers – in the end, canal locks ensure that walkers and barges move at the same pace. This is how we came to spend the morning the morning playing hare and tortoise with Dawn and Dusk, only parting company with them when Harris ordered a deviation just before Harlow. He wanted to show me a bit of the City of London. We walked over fields by the Pincey Brook, under a railway bridge, and onto a woodland path. From a lawn between tall poplars, and indistinguishable at first from their stems, grew two slender fluted Corinthian columns. They had been placed there at the bottom of his long garden by the architect who master-minded Harlow New Town –

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Map 19
The tow-path border from Bishop’s Stortford past Harlow to Waltham Abbey

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Sir Frederick Gibberd. The columns are, evidently, relics of Soane’s Bank of England, rejected in the 1920s improvements but rescued, and brought here by Gibberd in the 1950s, to set up as the chief accent of the landscape-garden he and his wife were creating in this dell, alongside the countrified New Town he was building for happy Londoners at Harlow. The Stort sweeps around Harlow; the background hum from its light industry, spiked by more immediately recognisable accents of car engines and hammer on metal, is filtered through willows and carried across to the towpath on the Hertfordshire bank. Most of the time, you see only the marshy riverbank and walk through an illusion of countryside, heightened for us when Jon pointed out a fellow traveller on the towpath, a two-and-a-half inch green caterpillar with a jaunty tail fin and white gill-stripes. We walked across the Town Station meadows and had lunch in the children’s domain, Bumpy’s Magic Kingdom – at the foot of the rather grand Moorhen pub – so as to keep the meal beer-free and quick.

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From the Moorhen the path steered out into the broadening valley, emphasising the strong slopes of the Essex hills and giving us our only clear glimpses of Harlow itself. These slopes are a prelude to the best hills of Essex’s western borderland: the wooded bluff of The Grove just below Harlow, and the escarpments of Galleyhill and Epping Forest beyond. Even when the immediate landscape round the waterway went dull on us, these hills formed a succession of gateways to steer us towards Waltham Abbey. Roydon is the last village before the Stort and Lea Navigations join. Of all the locks on the Stort, Roydon’s retains most of its brick masonry, as well as a pretty little storehouse to which the surveyor J. P. Davis put his name, and the date 1864: by which time the railway was running alongside, and the canal’s commercial days – though boosted by the big maltings at Sawbridgeworth and Stortford – were numbered. Roydon’s canalside offered two other unusual sights, the stilt-houses, and the concrete bridge over the river. The houses are pure 1960s and typical seaside architecture: everything is upstairs,

never mind the spring tides. But they are also thoroughly Essex in their white-painted clapboard siding. As for the bridge, we think of concrete as a 1930s material. This span, quite elaborately ornamented and good for many years more, is dated 1920; we would finish the day’s walk on its big sister, at Waltham, of the same date. Round the curve of The Grove the three silver funnels of Rye House power station swung into view. Turning south we joined the Lea Navigation. At once, everything was on a broader scale and the volume of water pouring over Feilde’s Weir was, for the first time, industrial. On the little spur at Broxbourne we left behind our last country church; soon after we came to signs announcing the Lea Valley Park. We were approaching London. The Park offers little to the towpath. We had only the hills to our left and the occasional lock and bridge to entertain us. Bored by now of walking down a dead straight towpath, I started clocking our speed against the mile posts.

“Well, you’re doing it now. Twelve minutes between each of the last mile posts. And, look, we’re into the home run. There’s the bridge.” The last boat moored on the far bank before Waltham Bridge was called Why Knot. Yes, that’s it, I thought, and held back a little to allow the old boy to streak under the bridge ahead of me. He climbed the steps to the Old English Gentleman, from where we had first turned south to begin our journey to London, and, at the top, I clasped him by the shoulder and shook his hand. “You have just become the first person to circumnavigate Essex on foot. Well, let’s say, the first person that we know of.” Jon beamed. In other circumstances, we would have had a pint at that very spot. But there was the Tuesday drawing session in Cambridge to help run; celebrations could come later, when the journey really was complete. We checked the trains to Cambridge and Bishop’s Stortford and contented ourselves with a take-away tea from Burger King.

“Five miles an hour,” I told Jon. “Impossible,” he replied. “Four’s my best, on my own, against the map. I can’t do five.”

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“I’m going back to the woods,” I told Jon as we parted on the platform. “You know where to find me if something goes wrong.” “Be careful, now.” I drove round a maze of country lanes before finding the entrance to the woodland; troubled, perhaps, about going there at all. But I was drawn back, compelled to talk with this man who had lived in the woods for twenty-five years, right on our frontier route. I switched on the mini-tape recorder in my shirt pocket and tramped up the half-hidden path; when I replayed it some time later, I was struck by the fast pace of my heart which seemed to be beating time with my feet, crunching through the undergrowth. Ken was standing at the side of a tree, looking into a cracked mirror perched on a branch in front of him. He had a pair of scissors in his hand with which he was clipping the few remaining hairs on his close cropped head. He was stark naked. “This is private property,” he screamed. “You’ve got no right to come up here: piss off.”

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He dived back into his cabin, and returned in a pair of shorts, still shouting abuse at me. Eventually I calmed him down and reassured him that I had no ill intentions. I explained how Jon and I had stumbled upon him quite by accident, and how I was intrigued and impressed that he had lived all this time in the woods. Slowly, he began to talk and from an extraordinary situation flowed a very ordinary, rather pathetic story. No, he didn’t live on berries. He picked up £50 a week social security and he shopped in Stortford for most of his supplies. Money didn’t bother him; strangers, however, did hassle him. “That’s why I get a bit, you know, when strangers come around. Some people come up and steal.” “What have you learned about living in the woods over all these years?” I asked. “Well, it’s better than mixing with people, most of the time.” “What do you do all day?”

“I get up, and can do anything, really. I do some sketching sometimes; and I can sing pretty good, and I’ve got some tapes.” I could hear an almost bird-like timbre in his voice. I could imagine his drawings; but I felt that I was invading a private, special world that was not any of my business. I dared not ask to see his sketches, nor hear him sing. Intrusion had gone far enough.

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Waltham Abbey: the truncated east end, the rose window and King Harold’s gravestone

TWENTY The New Frontier

I told Jon about my encounter with Ken Goddard a few days later, when we returned to Waltham Abbey to complete our walk, and follow Essex’s revised border to the Thames.

were there: that we had set out a few weeks earlier to beat the bounds of Essex, starting from the only standing abbey or great medieval church on our route – or in the whole of Essex.

“I think it goes to show that people who choose to live by themselves in woods are best left alone,” said Jon, his baritone echoing around the great pillars of the Abbey Church. “That’s why they are there.”

Canon Webster thought for a while about what we had done, and where we had been, and replied: “I think, on balance, there is none quite so beautiful as St Peter’s on the seawall at Bradwell.” We both nodded. It was hard to disagree with him.

I felt admonished, and was grateful when a tall clergyman advanced down the aisle towards us: the vicar, Canon Webster. Would we mind keeping quiet? Morning prayers were about to begin in the North Chapel. Jon explained sotto voce why we

“Was this some sort of holiday?” asked the vicar. “Absolutely,” I replied. “Well, sort of.” “Mad,” said Canon Webster, “But quite wonderful.”

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Once again, we set off west along Highbridge Street. Tracey was still offering her escort services in the window of Scott’s News. New to the area though she was, her card had faded in the summer sunlight. But the baby ferrets and the hamster cage had been taken pity on: their For Sale cards were no longer there. How had we changed? I wondered, as we descended the steps onto the towpath by the Old English Gentleman and headed south once more. I put it to Harris. “Don’t ask,” he replied. “Ten pounds lighter.” From the M11 viaduct down to Sewardstone, we were following our own recent footsteps, except along the dangerous half mile of A112, where a brand new pavement had miraculously appeared since we had first walked down there a few weeks before. At Chingford’s Lea valley outskirts, we found a path that climbed into Epping Forest through ancient tangled hawthorns. We were now following the 1965 Essex border, and part of the London Loop walk. It’s 125 years since Epping Forest was purchased by the Corporation of the City of London, to save it from enclosure and the depredations of developers, and to create a woodland garden for the polluted capital. Deer from the forest provide the kitchens at Guildhall with venison, but otherwise the ancient governing body of the City of London

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Map 20
Waltham Abbey to the new County boundary, and across the Roding Valley to south of Brentwood

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derives no benefits from owning this great swathe of woodland and grass. But the Corporation looks after it well. Along with the City itself, the forest is the most litterfree place in London. It is also kept as natural as possible, so there are no maps or finger posts, and you have to look hard for the concealed waymarks. After crossing several unmarked glades and rides, we were soon lost. Harris even called for a bearing from my compass – a serious admission from a man whose only aid to navigation is the sun! “It doesn’t shine through these hornbeams,” he said. But sun and compass in due course brought us out onto the high grassy plain in front of Chingford Green station. We were back on track. Here, on the rise above the town, stands Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge. When we reached it they were clearing up the previous day’s grand luncheon at which the Corporation had entertained the Ranger of Epping Forest, the Duke of Gloucester, in celebration of their 125 years of guardianship. The Lodge is a magnificent oak-framed structure, giving a grandstand view from its upper gallery, elaborately and skilfully crafted by Henry VIII’s carpenters. It’s also an example of a building, put together in a spirit of experiment, that has lasted. Harris had to be dragged away, pleading: “But, Brian, these are some of the finest doubletenon joints in the country.”

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The Royal Forest Coach House Hotel, Chingford (1883), and its satellite, Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge

Two miles of tracks through segments of forest, and behind the gardens of houses, brought us down Monkham Lane into the Roding Valley. The rhododendrons of Knighton Wood showed where Edward North Buxton, one of the campaigners for the Forest’s preservation, had had his Victorian domain. We were about to sneak into Chigwell by the back door. We went under a loop of the Central Line and over the tiny river Roding. Up Luxborough Lane, we caught a momentary whiff of Cleanaway: a very modest disposal site, this time, tucked in behind the M11, the high netting of Loughton Hockey Club, and Tottenham Hotspur’s astroturf practice pitch. We crossed the bridge over the motorway. The raw honesty of the Hunting Lodge was a fitting preparation for Forest Lane, Chigwell. In the spirit of its name, some good oak trees remain; while behind electronic gates, Tudor style vies with Palladian to mould the well-dressed Essex suburban mansion. Many of the houses had swollen to fit their sites. Taking a cue from East Coast America, the lawns come forward to the road’s edge. This is not a street where people are

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meant to be seen walking – certainly not in boots and shorts, and with backpacks. We crossed the B173 into safer suburbia, with pavements. On the green brow of Grange Hill, we had lunch on a bench, and took in the sublime panorama of East London and the River Thames, and the Kentish downs to the south. The low-rise flats below have had a zippy marzipan makeover, with saucy concrete eyebrows over the stairs, while round the shoulder to our right poked up the unmistakably institutional tower of Claybury Hospital, built as an asylum. Down river, in the far distance, the pylons of the QE II Bridge glowed in the noon sun like white strokes in an impressionist painting. We followed the B173 east to the edge of the countryside, recrossing the Central Line. To the north, our height opened up wide views across to the Rodings and, when we turned a little to the south, at Chigwell Row, we had a sense, from the mixture of soft red brick and white clapboard, of being at the gate of rural Essex. From here the new county border follows an easterly course through Hainault Forest: it begins as

a dull modern plantation, but, from the half-way point, we found ourselves once again among big hornbeams, while the land developed an animation of its own. The end of the forest, down in a stream valley, gave us views of Stapleford Abbots. We walked through the village into the surprisingly quiet countryside of Navestock Common, bisected, as it is, by the M25. The motorway announces itself in the distance, like the tremor of a rising tide. We crossed the orbital road at Watton’s Green, but it was not until we were downwind of it on the eastern side, by Waterhales farm, that we felt, and heard, its full blast. “How the hell do people live here?” I roared. Jon didn’t have to reply, but a friendly farmer in the fields below St Vincent’s Hamlet did give us some insight into what it’s like to share your sleep with the London Orbital. We had just brushed our way through a wellwaymarked stand of maize – it was like walking through a sugar cane plantation – and were heading off down a farm track when Mr Robert McTurk intercepted us on his farm buggy.

“Where are you trying to get to?” he enquired. Harris performed his usual trick, and buried himself in the map. “Well, if you keep along this way you’ll come to a nine-foot fence and the M25,” said Mr McTurk. He pointed us in the right direction and started to chat; clearly a man who took pleasure in helping people across his land. Robert McTurk, now aged 81, had been here since he was a child. Not a very Essex name, I said. “My grandfather came down from Scotland in the Scottish ‘invasion’ of 1889. We were from Paisley; and we always seem to upset people when we say we came down to Essex to show the Essex farmers how to produce milk.” “So you were here a long time before the motorway, as if in another era?” The farm was hemmed in by the M25; even here we were raising our voices against its insistent murmur. When it was proposed, explained Mr McTurk, all the affected farmers had been forced to sell their land at current agricultural prices – £1,862 an acre. I wondered how many motorists think about that when they drive through McTurk’s land – which they literally do. Ten of his acres lie on the

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other side, but there is no direct access from the main farm, so he has let that land go out of hand. “What’s it like living and farming beside one of the world’s busiest motorways?” I asked. “We’re double glazed and all that,” he replied. “But you can’t open the windows. You get to bed at night and it’s scorching hot and you do open them. It’s all right to start with, and you sleep once the traffic stops. But it all starts up again, after four, with the heavy lorries – and you think every flaming truck’s coming up the garden path.” There was, however, one advantage in farming next to the M25. Dogs and foxes don’t get on to the land any longer, to disturb the stock. “Since they built it, neither man nor beast can cross it.” The county border is now shadowed by the M25 until after the A127 intersection, where it switches back east along the Upminster to Basildon railway. The closest we could get to following it – and staying alive – was to walk up the high lanes to the west of Brentwood, from which, between holly trees, we looked back into the heart of London,

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trying to pick out the distant towers against the setting sun. Our destination for this penultimate day was West Horndon Station: it would serve us well for the final leg. We were half-way down the hill from Great Warley when Harris started pulling at the leash. He’d realised we were about to walk past one of his most revered buildings. “Just five minutes, if it’s open” he begged. “But I bet it’s locked.” It was; we were outside a pebbledashed Edwardian church with tiled buttresses. “This is buried treasure. You’ll have to bring Gail back here. What you’ve got inside is the only complete Art Nouveau church in Britain, copper, beaten lead, the lot.” Disappointed, but with the countryside we would cover tomorrow opening up below us, we walked on down to West Horndon.

TWENTY ONE End of the Road

The final day would be our shortest. We left the car at West Horndon and, walking west from the station, gave ourselves a treat – we didn’t follow the straightish southern lane nearest the frontier, but the even straighter field footpath a couple of hundred metres to its east, past Tillingham Hall and down to Blankets Farm. To our left, we had the wooded outline of the Langdon Hills, against a superb morning sky with high mackerel clouds: underfoot the first ploughed field of our walk. At Blankets, we turned to follow the banks of the Mar Dyke brook. It was instantly tempting to continue down the long green track beside it all the way to the Thames; but that wasn’t quite the way of the border.

Up at South Ockendon, on the spur beyond the Mar Dyke, the churchyard was as good a place as any for a crisis summit; maps out and fingers pointing. Inside the church, with its queerlypatched round flint tower, we had found the tomb of an Elizabethan Lord Mayor of the City of London. As a Common Councilman and a mere apprentice Lord Mayor, I found this presentiment of death disturbing. “You’re not seriously proposing that we walk across the M25?” “Well, there is a footpath,” insisted Harris. “It goes slap bang across. Look, it’s on the map. Here,” he pointed.

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“Yes, but there’s no bridge marked.” “OK, but we can still cross. We just watch and bide our time. We wait for a gap of ten seconds and make a dash for it. I’ve done this plenty of times on the M11.” “Yes, but the M11’s only got four lanes,” I attempted to reason. “This is a six-lane monster highway and you’d need a high speed camera to find any gap at all. The only time there’s ever an interval of more than a second between vehicles is when the whole thing grinds to a halt. Mind you, that could well happen – shriek afterwards! One of us could easily cause a major crash.” Still in heated discussion, we walked out of the village, past the station and up the road to where a forlorn green fingerpost once pointed to Baldwins Farm. The post was still there, the sign had gone, and brambles filled the gap in the hedge. A few metres to its west, six lanes of vehicles sped relentlessly north and south. Harris began to compute the intervals – the gaps between the cars, coaches and 55-tonne artics. I could see him making what would amount to life and death calculations. “Look, Jon,” I pleaded. “I’ve climbed the Matterhorn, and you could even get me up the north face of the Eiger in winter, but I’m not up for this.”

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Map 21
The new county boundary: West Horndon to Aveley and Purfleet

13.5 miles

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Harris mentally put down his stopwatch. For the first time in twenty-one days he was beaten. We walked on up the dull side-road to the bridge beneath the motorway. I’ve never been so grateful for an underpass in my life. Baldwins Farm turned out to be no less hazardous. It’s that expanse of scrubland strewn with torn bits of plastic sheeting that you see as you drive north on the M25 soon after emerging from the Dartford tunnel. A herd of cattle detached itself from the horses and made in our direction; and I noticed that the normally imperturbable Harris accelerated. Not trusting the broken stile, we scrambled up a ditch and over a barbed wire fence, exchanging the sad, spooky dustbowl and the roaring M25 for the calm of the old estate of Belhus. No sooner over the fence, we came face to face with a Pyrenean mountain dog. The dog was called Yogi, bounding along ahead of his owners, Ron and Doris, who were kitted out with boots and Leiki poles. The three of them had the air of being on patrol. “Funny,” I said. “We’ve walked nearly 500 miles around Essex and you are the first serious walkers we have met.” “We’re not the serious walkers,” said Doris. “That’s Yogi.” Journey’s end: the mouth of the Mar Dyke

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This huge dog needed endless exercise. But he had been forced to adapt to Essex. Belhus Woods Country Park, with its artificial gravel-pit lakes, I reflected, was not quite the same as the rugged Pyrenees; not really countryside at all: at one of the lakes, we watched a man being fined on the spot for catching a tiddler. The warden had appeared out of thin air on a bicycle. He took copious notes and then the whole scene, watched by a bemused child, ended with an undignified plop – the tiddler going home. The county boundary had one more trick in store, a little bulging appendix to the west of Belhus Woods. But there was no direct way through it, and instead we followed the country path south, between the new plantations laid out (with hay meadows) by the Woodlands Trust, to the edge of Aveley, turning right among 1950s houses to catch a fine new view. It would be our last landfill-site of the walk. The top is finished and laid to grass, and it’s named Kennington Park. The little hillock gave us a 250 degree panorama of the country we had walked – a startlingly complete view from Brentwood in the north-east, all the way round London’s skyline to the Kentish hills to the south.

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Frontier Country A mid-summer walk around the borders of Essex

We could also see over Wennington and Aveley Marshes to the Thames shore, where an invisible border line marked the end of our journey. Less than an hour later, we were facing the appalling fact – it was all over. We had walked down Sandy Lane, crossed our favourite A13 by some second-hand car compounds, passed over the new high-speed Eurostar railway and, skirting the field on the edge of the old firing ranges, crossed the bridge over the Mar Dyke. We were sitting in the bar at the Royal Hotel in Purfleet – a rewarding glass in hand, but both feeling thoroughly dejected. “That was such fun,” I said, to cheer things up. “I think we’ll have to do it all over again.” “No, I’ve got a better idea,” said Harris, unfurling a map. “Next summer, we’ll walk round Norfolk.”

THE END

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OTHER THOROGOOD TITLES POISON FARM – A MURDERER UNMASKED David Williams £8.99 paperback, published in 2004 A true crime story of a murder that scandalised the county of Suffolk and remained a mystery for 60 years. ‘At 8.30 am, May 17, 1938, after 56 years of life, Bill Murfitt lay dying in front of the wife he had both loved and cheated on.’ Who poisoned William Murfitt and why? A baffling mystery, solved at last.

IN SEARCH OF SECRET SUFFOLK Robert Leader £9.99 paperback, published in 2004 A book of discovery which explores the heritage and landscape of Suffolk. Uniquely, it follows the course of each of Suffolk’s rivers and looks at the towns, villages, stately homes and churches that grew up in their valleys. Robert Leader also charts the medieval history and tradition of the once great abbeys, castles and guildhalls.

A TASTE OF WARTIME BRITAIN Edited by Nicholas Webley £9.99 paperback, published in 2003 A vivid and evocative collection of eye-witness accounts, diaries, reportage and scraps of memory from people who lived through the dark days of World War II. Lavishly illustrated with many newspaper pictures and personal photos, the book shows what life was like for millions of ordinary people throughout the war – men, women, children, soldiers and civilians. It brilliantly captures the sights, the smells and sounds and the voices of a country at war.

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A LIFE OF JOHN HAMPDEN – THE PATRIOT John Adair £12.99 paperback, published in 2003 John Hampden, statesman and soldier, was a cousin to Oliver Cromwell and, had he not met an untimely death at the Battle of Chalgrove during the Civil World War in 1643, he might well have achieved similar fame in English history, both as a soldier and parliamentarian. This classic study of a great man has been out of print for some years and is now published in paperback for the first time.

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‘He delights our days and does so much for Norfolk.’ Malcolm Bradbury

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