I had a bit of unexpected free time on my hands at short notice and as usual instantly set about frittering it away in a series of prevarications. The next time I am in this situation and it is raining stair-rods I am going to set about the creation of a series of “Plan Bs”.
Plan Bs. Things to do when you have some unexpected free time at short notice and its nice outside and want to do something a little more constructive than what you did last time.
Plan B for short.
Without it though the day was shaping up to be like others, the Test match was looming large in my “things to do (if nothing more amusing springs to mind) list.
The weather site was predicting 7.5hours of sunshine with a 2% chance of rain. I had to do something quick if I was to not miss summer.
A short walk taking a long time became the plan, and the “dreaming fields” was the place.
As a child I was no day-dreamer, didn’t have time, far too worried about “getting on” having believed all the guff about working hard, bright future. Yeah right, scratch one childhood.
I did however have one chink in my studious demeanour. Physics. The lessons were dull and incomprehensible but was saved by the fact it was taught on the top floor and had views out across the fields, impossibly far away (a few miles maybe).
I just looked on those fields and imagined myself wandering in them (never did, they were dreaming fields).
About 5 years ago I took a drive out finally getting back to investigating this area and found the odd footpath plied its trade through these fields.
Usually it is part of a longer 20-24km circular (with detour) type walk, to make the drive worth the walk but today it was going to be an 8-10km walk with focus.
It starts at Thorpe-Le-Soken church. It has a lychgate, which is a plus in my book. This dates back to my childhood when our local church had a lychgate. It is all part and parcel of the church experience. This one is a plain functional affair, but better than nothing.
It also has the body of William Gull in the graveyard.
William Gull (wiki link)
Local lad made good but died bad. He had the misfortune of living at the same time as Jack the Ripper. Some would claim this was inevitable as he was Jack the Ripper.
He is notorious in a number of pulp melodrama’s and feebly researched books. By the time of the Ripper murders Gull was in his 70s had had a stroke. Not the most unlikely of Ripper suspects (there are some real non-starters on the list) but no need to mark the case as solved with him as Jack.
His grave is a broken and barely legible stump in the graveyard. I let him rest in peace not taking a picture of his grave.
I spent some time walking about the graveyard trying to find the “grandfather stone”. I might well have found it. A woman dying in her 62nd year in the year 1713.
An interesting spelling of “Margreat” as well.
There is something very unpleasant about Churches, not the institution, I dismissed that years ago. The physical nature of them. It is a shadow of something growing in my mind which needs a lot less thinking about.
I took some pictures of tombs and tombstones in various states of disrepair and decay. You die so many times in a churchyard. Once when buried, once when forgotten once when your gravestone becomes illegible and finally when it collapses. There are many stages to this death.
A nearby church has decimated its graveyard because heavy machinery was needed to restore the church, the graves got in the way, so they were removed and no sign of them being returned. Something does not seem right.
I like to try and preserve the last vestige of the physical, forgotten and crumbling before it is all too late. I might be the last person to care about these souls even in the most perfunctory way.
Leaving the dead behind, they aren’t going anywhere, Dog 2, 3 and I set out to a small wooded area, much loved by idle dog walkers past a few ancient houses and into open fields. Things are at their most golden and green right now, its a great time for your eyes to be assaulted by colour. It is close to visual overload.
Past a small, but well attended campsite where people seem to have brought enough of their townscape with them to not wish to venture further than 50 yards from the temporary homes. Kids shouting, radio blaring, fully stocked camper van, getting away from it all for a few days in the country.
Over a small footbridge, all blocks and tackles to stop two wheeled interlopers. Across a railway line, track maintenance in progress, strikes ahead. The stile has been repaired, it is firm underfoot.
Striding through another golden field, wheat to the left, barley to the right, neither reaching knee height. The miniaturisation of crops seems to be continual. I was smaller in the past, but I am sure the crops were taller also. In the distance can just be made out the broken roof of the Malthouse near the railway station.
It is a ruin of the working building I remember. The smell of the malting process seemed to consume the oxygen within the air. It annoyed me then, I’d love to smell it now. I should visit it before it is demolished but the memory of its past self stops me.
My actual destination is a favourite tree in another isolated but busy little church. Many of these country walks begin and end with churches, with churches in the middle, its the nature of ancient tracks I imagine.
I walk along an avenue of Poplar trees, on a well maintained track. It’s maintenance might have something to do with the strange building that sits in a field. This is to do with air traffic control and seems to be a pretty important part of getting people from A to B. It has more to do with the fact it is heading towards Weeley Hall.
Gravel crunches satisfyingly underfoot and I reach my destination. A tree which looks like it feeds on the dead, it is twisted and lumpy and huge. Goodness knows how old it is, but old enough that its bulk has not uprooted or harmed any of the graves around it. That suggests it has been the basic size it is now for a hundred and fifty and more years.
There is an example near it of a younger tree which has destroyed the careful order of the grave it was planted in 100 odd years ago. It is now destroying the headstone, long fissured cracks appearing in it, or perhaps it has something to do with the incongruously placed oil drum burner so beloved of flying pickets in the 1980’s but rather less appropriate 4 foot from a grave in a country churchyard .
The church has a pond in front of it. I imagine witch ducking going on in it. No foundation for such musings, but it is too good an image not to have. If it did not happen, it should of. The internet uncovers a local legend that says the noise of a coach crashing into the pond has been heard. More useful reports of a spectre at Weeley Manor house which tidies up kitchens and dusts shelves. If you are going to be haunted get one of them. All information courtesy of http://www.paranormaldatabase.com/
For the most part a pretty shabby collection of not a lot, but it can add another layer of interest to a walk and give you a few laughs (unless you do see the bouncing cloud of Thorpe-le-Soken, you will not be laughing so hard then.)
Already ideas of walks based on hauntings, witchcraft trials (Witchfinder General just up the road) and Medieval churches (Suffolk has hundreds of them) are springing into my mind. The internet makes even the most unlikely possibilities possible.
But I have hours to fill and a nearby wood is how that is going to be spent. Waiting for the sound of a coach crashing or a woman offering to clean my kitchen seems a tad optimistic.
Weeleyhall Wood is a nature reserve “managed” by Essex Wildlife Trust.
“Managed” because large parts of it are in fact left totally alone, “for the benefit of wildlife”. That’s nice but this tends to mean it gets hopelessly overgrown and any diversity is totally strangled by the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest, ferns as it turns out.
As you can just about make out there is a dog in the undergrowth, what is rather less clear is the one behind him and the fact they are both following me on the path.
There is 32 hectares of exploration to do and right now it is in full summer mode (overgrown fern infested tangle in which the few footpaths are near impassable). The blurb describes it as one of the finest surviving woods within Tendring. Looking at the map, its not much of a boast. Tendring, surviving and wood are not words you see in a sentence too often.
I wandered happily in this for a few hours, perfectly secluded and quiet, left to my own devices. Part is ancient woodland, so at least you are not bombarded with an endless array of living telegraph poles and a moonscape of dead needles to walk upon.
They have actually clear cut sections of the wood which were planted earlier last century for commercial purpose.
I was pleased to have had the opportunity to visit the wood as I had never seen it in full summer display having only had opportunities to visit it in winter for any length of time.
I even added the gatekeeper to my 2009 butterfly snaps collection.
No comments:
Post a Comment