This bit of The Essex Way walk takes in the River Colne. Having just said good-bye to the River Stour I was keen to walk along a river again.
I am getting into my stride now on this walk and they say pride comes before a fall.
Thankfully my latest efforts at changing my goal orientated mindset came not a moment too soon.
The reason?
Well I failed to start where I was meant too, I didn’t quite get to the finishing point and in the middle I became gloriously misplaced.
The intention was to get an early start. This was slightly hindered by failing to realise this meant getting out of bed.
Dog Two was my companion on this walk. Dog 3 had a prior engagement and so was missing out.
A brief look at the map told me Marks Tey was my start point.
Getting there was easy enough and on went the GPS, lets see how close I can park to where the trail begins.
It made no sense at all, it was miles away, something was amiss.
Long story short, Marks Tey was not where I was meant to be. The Essex Way does not get close to the place. A case of too much sleep and too little concentration.
Eventually with a bit of gps work and driving down country lanes that are rather less well signposted than a lot of footpaths I arrived at Fordham.
This was as close as I was likely to get to the actual start of my walk (as I no longer was sure where that was in terms of road navigation).
Fordham is an English village, pub (The Three Horseshoes) Manor House, Church, Village School, surrounded by green and pleasant land. I park up in a pretty modern looking housing estate, ugly but out of general view.
I found The Essex Way marker and debated going East towards my intended start point or going West towards my intended finish point.
I decided West and if there was time at the end of the day I would walk the bit I had just missed out.
In the event I never did get to the start of the walk, which has left a gap in my walk. Its about 8 kilometres as a round trip (4 there, 4 back). The intention is to return at a later point in the year and so can make a nice seasonal comparison with this bit of the walk. Also means not only am I not thru-hiking I am no longer a linear sectional hiker. That appeals to my sense of refusal to accept the order in which someone has arbitrarily created the walk.
This facet of the walk’s function became clearer. I am walking The Essex Way, “the wrong way”. Because I am section hiking it I simply miss out the ugly grey stuff of towns. Where The Official Essex Way looks less fun than other nearby footpaths I take those instead and now further muddling it the sections need not be done in linear fashion. It is liberating.
The downside of my decision was, today I missed out on a bit of the River Colne walk I had been looking forward too.
The weather was set fair (actual walk date 25 July) and my thermometer sat in the 20-30C range with a lot of emphasis on the 25+C region.
Soon the annoyance of failing to get quite the start I wanted fell from me. This was helped in no small part of getting a photo of a Brown Argus butterfly.
Photographing butterflies is my current micro-level walking focus and sometime near the end of August I will write more on this specifically.
A feature of this section of the walk had already become apparent, there were a lot of named walks and trails. There was a surplus of them in fact. A surplus of names that is because 3 or 4 at any given time seemed to be sharing The Essex Way path. It is not often you get to do 4 or 5 different walks with one stride but here you can achieve it. There are hundreds of footpaths that have to make do without a name and yet here we have names in profusion all claiming the same footpath.
This added somewhat navigational confusion (so I am going to claim) when there would be 4 or 5 trail markers on a post along with various double ended footpath arrows but no clear Essex Way marker. Again walking the trail the wrong way is not helping my cause.
I got my first glimpse of the River Colne, the water was gliding by at a very slow pace, it suited the weather. It was in a pub beer garden. All the best beer gardens have a river or stream running through them in my opinion.
The path sneaked past the boundary of “The Bridge House” and too the owners credit they did not seem to mind that and then back to walking along the River Colne. At times in close enough proximity that a mis-step would have seen me in the River.
Summer growth meant ducking below branches heavy with leaf and generally making my way through ebullient growth.
Sun dappled the water and you could see the bottom of the river quite clearly and some of its fishy inhabitants. An early childhood memory is fishing in a river like this. Maybe my Dad only took me a few times to such a place, but it is the acme of fishing. I am always very pleased to see fish in such locations, sometimes you get the impression we have destroyed our environment for good. We certainly could do better, but it seems we do strive to do better.
Butterflies in profusion but all too busy to let me take a photograph of them. They seem to have such busy lives. It is a bumper year for the painted lady butterfly (article about this), perhaps they are making up for a few poor summers which have seen butterfly populations falling.
Dotted along the river are various pillboxes designed to hold the line in the event we were invaded during World War 2. These structures deserve more consideration than they get.
I saw various River Colne Countryside Project markers and a quick internet search revealed they are attempting to use some of the pillboxes for novel purpose. To create habitat for bats.
While moving upstream and close to the river nothing could go wrong in terms of navigation.
The undergrowth had totally enveloped me and I was pleased too pop out onto open fields and big skies once again. Sky blue, clouds white, crops yellow, trees green. This was countryside as created by child’s painting.
In the middle of a large field was a lone tree with full green canopy and nice dark neat shadow below. It did not get there by accident, and it did not get there recently. I wondered if it was a last survivor of a line. It must have marked field boundaries now long since obliterated by progress. Nothing will replace it when it has gone, it is a relic from a bygone era. I do hope it has many more years ahead of it.
I have been drawn to these solitary trees in fields for the best part of 30 years now, they conjure all manner of conflicting thought within me.
Dog 2 and I wander on, sometimes nearer the river so we can see it, sometimes less so.
Just as the annoyance of failing to start where I intended too had receded to background murmur another problem came into being.
Near Bacon’s Farm, there is a small bridge over the river which is intersected by a profusion of path markers. None actually obviously concerning The Essex Way. The only one I found was not helpful and this, in no small part, is what lead me astray.
I walked this way and that for a time but none of it felt right. I was getting nowhere slowly. Dog 2 was not complaining as we walked through the same field of sheep at least 3 times. He has a strange fondness for sheep which I have documented before.
Some of you might be under the impression I am lost about now. Not a bit of it. I might not be sure of how to proceed, the details of exactly where I am in relation to other map features might be a little hazy, but I have a vice like grip on how to get back.
Being able to get back is usually the most important aspect, as they say in mountaineering, getting to the summit is optional, getting back down is vital.
The only time I have been truly lost is in a dept store at the age of four or so when I had wandered a few rows away from Mother. A floor walker collected me up and via tannoy the whole store was informed of my embarrassing situation. Most of the time I am just “misplaced”
In the end I threw up my hands and abandoned the idea of The Essex Way for the day. This re-opened old wounds. I had failed to get to my start point, now I was not going to get to my finishing point. I stalked off accumulating mud which had been created by the thunderstorms the previous night.
In part two, we see the viaduct close-up, discover some very familiar looking sheep and decide on trying just one last direction to see if The Essex Way lies on it.
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