(and back again)
Looking back along the Essex Way:
Walking the Essex Way Part One Great Oakley to Bradfield
Looking forward to walking The Essex Way:
Walking the Essex Way Part 3. Dedham to Great Horkesly, coming soon.
Essex Way Route (kml download)
This is my initial kml routeplan. In essence it is the route I follow, in practice there can be small detours. However it allows you to follow my strolls pretty accurately.
Starting off in Bradfield I head west towards Dedham. Its a one dog stroll (Dog three), as the other (Dog Two) is still recovering from a bad back incurred during a game of tag.
There is a certain amount of "old soldier" going on, as he is running around hurling his toys around the house and playing up a storm, but get him outside for a walk and a pained expression passes across his face and it seems like he has one, maybe 3 tin legs.
So its going to be another week or so before that beast is back walking.
A third dog, my most faithful companion is heading towards 15 years of age (Known on this blog as Dog One). Fit as a fiddle but deaf as a post, so he remains at home for anything other than well worn routes. There is only so much hollering I am prepared to do at a 10lb dog five feet from you. It tends to draw attention from everyone but the dog.
This part of the walk takes me through Manningtree. The idea of a walk is to get away from it all, or at least have a pretence of doing so. Walking through anything larger than a quaint village is basically tedious.
If I want to walk to the shops, I can stay at home and do that. So I rebel somewhat and choose a different route on my map, to use a green way, rather than the "official" walk.
Manningtree itself has considerable age and parts of it are very nice. I think it has some sort of claim to being the smallest postal code in England and is one of the smallest parishes.
However there are a good many new developments with cheery names like Bluebell Walk and Meadow View.
Well perhaps before they built sodding great ugly housing on it, it was.
Manningtree, Mistley and Lawford are becoming joined at the hip, and it will just create the usual sprawling mess created by planning committees that will never see the place and vested interests selling the locality down the line in the name of progress.
Look at other villages that have enjoyed progress, there are plenty of examples of what eyesores are created. Generally stuff Manningtree and any other area of “overpopulation”, thru’ walkers might have to suffer these grey and dreary pavements, I don’t and as far as possible wont.
There is a time and a place for urban, this is not it.
The one noteworthy thing about Manningtree and surrounds is a number of relatively long distance walks start (or end) at this point.
Most certainly I will be exploring these walks from this jump off point, at the same time as walking along the Essex Way. There is no reason to be a serial hiker, its the pleasure of not thru' hiking, you gain a good deal of flexibility.
I am not a slave to someone else's idea of what a walk should be, this detour cut out quite a bit of pavement and added rather than took away from the walk.
This does not detract from the walk, or the sense of accomplishment, whatever that might be, when I have “completed” the Essex Way.
The Rover Stour remains my companion on this section, although somewhat more aloof than on the last bit of the walk.
I go through some interesting wooded area and some of the trees looked to be a ripe old age, they were good to see. Furze Hill on the map, not exactly the Amazon, but it does have a clearly marked Secret Bunker close to hand.
I often wonder if I am looking at "the grandfather" tree in any wooded area. Certainly the specimen with the split trunk most have been a contender. 
Given this is July in England, they provided useful cover as it rained on and off through the day and it was always threatening to rain during the whole walk.
We had to cross a "red road" Cox's hill, which I was not looking forward too. My dog is nervous and any traffic noise tends to upset him. It turned out to be nothing really and a quick look right and left and it was just a stroll across it, nothing to be concerned about at all.
I like the peace and quiet and I imagine any walker does really, its part of the reason to get out there.
Well today I was unlucky. There was one of those jolly hockey stick jimcarna things going on. A tannoy system broadcast a matronly voice of a certain age and pitch over a vast distance of countryside with what amounted to a running commentary that went on for hours.
Awful, and I was glad to eventually get out of earshot, but it certainly meant a lot of the walk that could have been done in relative peace was done with this woman filling my ears with her prattle.
Lawford Church sneaks into view, its patched walls speak of history and its squat somewhat formidable tower seems slightly out of keeping with the rest of the building.
This was not the time (but it was the place) to search out "the grandfather" stone.
An interesting way of spending a bit of time in an old country graveyard, looking for the first person to be buried there who still has a recognisable grave marker.
Old graveyards are fascinating places which take you back into country life with astonishing immediacy. I think most of us know the sorrow of standing by a grave, and if you don't, you will. Its a pain which is common to us all and throughout time.
Around it are some fine old houses which look much more interesting that the exterior exhibited by the church. All the things this little grouping has seen.
The next thing of note is a railway crossing, and its busy. In 30 minutes, 5 trains went past, which included a good sized freight train heading towards the Harwich/Felixstowe docks.
The reason I was there so long was it was a water stop and I happened to bump into another walker. This poor fellow was recovering from 1.5 hours of dentistry and it looked painful. A root filling and a wallet extraction had taken place. 500 quid.
Lets skip the politics of privatisation and exactly how history will treat the Thatcher years (I hope with a big bloody stick).
This encounter put me behind "schedule" whatever that might be, but if you don't have time to stop and stare or stop and chat then I hope your getting paid for walking coz it is beginning to sound like work.
To that end I basically just walked into Dedham along a tangle of footpaths which leave you wondering if you are actually in the right place at the right time. There are no shortages of footpath routes in some bits of the walk, but only one is going to get you where you should be going.
Having achieved that to my own satisfaction, although perhaps the stricter of judges would claim there is more than an element of "fudge" that went on, I turned for home.
Happy to have struck off another bit of the walk, reached a relatively civilised place from which to start the next assault and not got soaked through.
As ever the walk home underlined the places I had seen on the outward leg but always give a surprisingly different viewpoint. There is something to be said for walking like this rather than just following your nose for 130km.
There were a number of fields with livestock within them. A herd of cows were wandering about the place, fat and happy, near the aptly named Dairy House. A number of fields contained horses and some foals. The foals could be seen testing their legs and running about for the sheer joy of doing so. Most ran to their mothers and watched us go by from safe vantage but one insisted in running around us and involving us in the sheer fun of life. 
Butterflies were out in profusion as we walked through nettles. Perhaps there were more "when I was a nipper" but I don't really remember that being the case.
My little dog kept up with me all the way and seemed to rather enjoy reeling off another 20-22km on his paws.
This seems to be the sort of distance I am currently gravitated too, it fits into a walking schedule that means there is life before and after the walk during the day and it is not some sort of route march.
I anticipate the mileage walked will increase because of the nature of the walking ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment