I continue my Essex Way walk. The idea is to go from Dedham to Great Horkesley.
I am not sure why I feel the need to say Great Horkesley in a North Country accent and add “like” onto the end of it, but it is only significant efforts at restraint that stop me.
Don’t treat this blog as a guidebook, it’s not going to work like that. This is me, my impressions and recollections as I amble along.
Back on the walk with mixed emotions.
Dog Two is fit and well, so I am back to full walking compliment, Dog Two and Dog Three. It is a reason to be cheerful, even if they impose slight restrictions on events, they are part of the reason I get out of the house in the first place.
The second Ashes test is going on at Lords. England look capable of forcing the follow on and with it a very real chance of beating the Aus at Lords for the first time since 1934. Still it’s not going to happen today, they can go on without me.
The weathermen, overcautious since Michael Fish, were predicting dire things once again. The internet weather sites were predicting 60% chance of rain, it was called sitting on the fence/guessing in my day. I was heading to Dedham.
There is nothing wrong with Dedham but this is Saturday in the height of credit crunch summer, when everyone is holidaying at home.
Dedham is in the heart of “Constable Country”, Flatford Mill is just up the road (thankfully I don’t have to go there this time, I am not old enough to appreciate its gentle charms, I think you have to be frightened of anyone under the age of 60 before you can feel at home there).
Dedham Vale and the views he painted are all around you.
Actually this turns out to be not quite true, a few years ago someone tried to pinpoint the exact places Constable sat when painting. It turned out to be a good deal trickier than expected, the problem was the quantity and size of the trees we have now. Not the lack of them you understand, but the profusion and growth of them. To return to Constable original vision a lot of trees would have to go.
Any websearch of John Constable is worth the effort (here is a starter for ten)
Dedham is built on a small scale, its a village that was neither built for car or “improved” for car. The roads are so narrow the double yellow lines in the streets appear to be something done by school children with crayons. Actual size double yellow lines would turn the streets into a wizard of Oz set.
So parking was an issue looming in my mind.
I need not have worried, there was a sizeable and free parking area tucked just outside of the main village area.
What I was not expecting was Dedham sits on a personal mental fault line.
It started quickly, the pub had changed its name, this was a scandal. Nope it had not, this is a second multi-hundred year old edifice I had forgotten existed.
Then a jumble of memories started flooding in with no apparent order. I had visited Dedham a lot more times than imagined and with a whole cast of people. This movement of building was a common feature, but the fabric and tone of the village had not altered one jot.
The butcher was carrying the woman’s shopping to the car, just like he was last time I was here. The bookshop owner was still smiling at me just as she did 20 odd years ago when I walked in to sort out my original walking materials for the Essex Way.
Is this village an English Westworld, set in motion just for me as I got out of the car?
I scuttled through, head down, please dogs don’t defile these streets. It was genuinely unsettling for someone that usually has a grasp of most memory and in the correct order.
Past the church, bigger than I remember, but all churches around this part are bigger, the one in East Bergholt seems to have eaten the village.
Past a sign to the Munnings Museum (wiki link). I am not a fan, I like my art radical and the landscape reality “chocolate box.” Over-familiarity with Constable has caused me to sour on this chap as well but really it is just the endlessly reproduced middle-class art appreciation of “The Haywain” I rebel against.
The welcome sight of an old cement signpost with the trail blaze on it guides me out of this jumble of memory. Back on The Essex Way. My last sight in Dedham is a expensively dressed fatty in running shoes clearly soaking up culture as long as its within 100 yards of his parked car.
When is the govt going to ban the sale of "trainers” to anyone over the weight of 16stone?
No sooner had I started the trail than an unofficial official looking sign greeted me. You know the sort, red circle, diagonal slash from top left to bottom right cutting through an image of the thing being prohibited. This DIY signage is growing as people try to add their own level of pettiness on a growing obsession to nail a sign to every vertical plane in the UK.
There was a wind blowing, and it brought the noise of a fearsome future. In the not too distant future The Essex Way crosses over the A12. The noise of this much road traffic reminds me of the noise the wind makes as it rushes down of the tors of Dartmoor on its way to giving my shelter a beating. It is simultaneously comforting and un-nerving.
Just before the crossing of the A12 I say a final good-bye to the River Stour on this walk. Here the River is more clearly a river, everything at a more human scale. For some reason this feels more significant than it actually is. I will see the River again many times just not on this walk.
A little further on I make an odd discovery with regard the trail itself. It presupposes you walk in the “correct” direction and I am not. Therefore many of the signs tell me where I have come from, not where I am going too.
I step back onto the road, its busy without a lot of forward vision and cars travel along it at a rate of knots. I pick up my dogs, one under each arm, there is not a pavement. It is not a stretch but it does fray my nerves a bit. The dogs are content, but one person driving a little too fast can change this picture in a hurry.
Almost the instant the A12 is crossed the traffic noise has gone, there is not going to be any repetition of the noise pollution of the last stage.
I never like walking on tarmac and this section of the walk has its fair share, albeit single lane tracks, but they always have the potential of a car travelling too fast with a driver not paying quite the attention needed. My dogs are about the size of the roadkill we go past.
If you look carefully at the photo it has the disappearing figure of the one other non-farmer I met on this entire walk. It is the back of the same fellow I met last week (he of the dental work). You expect to see people on a walk in the densely populated England but so rarely do. To actually meet the same person seemed improbable.
The chances of seeing another human being falls exponentially as distance from a fast food outlet grows. It was good to see my friends face had returned to more human form. I call him my friend, I don’t know his name but in two weeks have shared more words with him than I have most people in my hometown for the last few years. Sad perhaps, but as I have no desire to sprawl drunkenly in the streets shouting expletives to passers-by I do not have a lot in common with most dwellers of my hometown. The other option of being a single-mother is denied me by having been born male.
The section of the walk between Dedham and Boxted is about the views. No surprise, we are in Constable Country in the Dedham Vale, it looks a lot like Constable country, only with industry.
Constable clouds were much in evidence during most of the walk. He liked the open skies and devoted plenty of canvas space to them. I might have something in common with John Constable but it is not immediately obvious what that might be.
There is evidence of harvest, huge rotund bails of hay fill fields in the distance. As tall as a person, they look capable of crushing you, not the picturesque wheatsheaf of yore and its more human scale.
I see two farmers on this section of the walk. They are wandering in their fields with view to harvest time. I am on the well defined footpaths they have kindly left me, in many places two or three people could walk arm in arm along them.
I wave cheerily to them, they wave back happy. We fall into as much conversation as the distance will allow. Crops not so good this year, rain at the wrong time. Surely it was ever thus. Dogs are praised for their good behaviour. So many people come out with dogs barely under control, causing mischief in the margins set aside so carefully for the use of wildlife. Commonsense prevails, sure I ignored the signs telling me to stick the dogs on a lead but only the most fastidious of jobsworths would wish them to be on leads when they never get more than a foot or two from my feet.
No farmer has ever requested it, it is nice to be in civilised company.
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