I am walking the Stour and Orwell Walk as a consequence of The Essex Way.
The River Stour had been my companion during the early stages of The Essex Way section walk. It was only normal to think about the far bank and what it would be like to walk it.
It is the way of things, how would the subtle differences reveal themselves, what would be the same. Crossing the river crosses a county boundary, I have left Essex and entered Suffolk. How different these are in public perception.
As luck would have it the Stour and Orwell walk runs along this coastline. Begins at Cattawade, finishes at Felixstowe some 40 odd miles later.
I very much like coastline, it is the edge of the map, essentially there is no more to walk beyond that line. Land meets water and there is a palpable tension between these most fundamental elements. It does not hurt that a good deal of map reading is done for you.
Walking a coastline is part of “The Ragged Edge” tour. I used to be associated with a business that transported rock’n’roll groups about the place, the equipment and sundry people needed to make it all work. It was here that a fondness for naming events took hold.
Walking a coastline, anyone can do, “The Ragged Edge Tour” now that is something else. The only downside was I can sometimes spend rather a long time berating myself for never becoming a rock-god. The odd thing being, I never wanted to be one. It is the sort of thing which happens when your mind slips into neutral.
After some deliberation I decided this was the right category. It might have gone into the “Trinity Tour”. These are walks with three similar/related subjects within them. On this occasion it was three churches with towers. The walk started and ended with such a church with a church in the middle.
I find it appealing to have some sort of framework within which to place a walk, or to plan one. Going from A to B with no sense of why, beyond, “that’s nice” is basically a dog walk. A trinity framework is often used, beginning, middle and end. Three is an important number.
Some web research to give me a sense of history when I got there and to make sure I was suitably impressed with something or other. Nothing worse than tripping over a stone, not giving it a second thought, coming home and discovering local legends about it being the devil’s bun loaf dropped by Lucifer himself as he fled the local Priest.
The day was set fair, not something to be missed.
As planned the walk was 21km long (there and back again) but turned out to be 24km due to the wiggly bits and the fact I parked about a km from the start of the walk in Brantham. These little “that’ll do” events take their toll.
Dog 2 and Dog 3 were in attendance. Brantham Bull is home to one of the lamest ghost tales around, misty grey man, voices in the cellar variety. This is a definite, “must try harder” in the end of term report, you are not getting on local news too often with this tourist attraction, not even on Halloween.
So dismissing Brantham Bull, the Church is the initial destination. The lychgate is my primary interest here. The internet says it was designed by E.S Prior (1857-1932), a primary mover in the Arts & Crafts movement, it is a bit special.
The interior of the lychgate is carved elaborately and traces of paintwork remains.
The church cannot compete with this. Medieval, the Victorian improved it.
An orderly graveyard presents itself as I walked down the lane towards the River Stour. Robert Brundell is the “grandfather stone” here as far as I can tell, died 1708 at the age of 69. You are a long time dead.
On another day with another agenda, Brantham would be all about the Xylonite Works, but thankfully the Stour Valley Walk will enable me to turn that over in my mind. It is on my list of things to do.
The River Stour is soon stretched out before us and the familiar site of the warehouses of Manningtree dock can be seen on the far bank, a church steeple poking out of the tree canopy a little further on.
The path is very close to the waters edge, the tide is going out and the day is hot. There is the smell of decaying matter you get in such circumstances. It is not unpleasant because it is familiar. It is just part of the ebb and flo of coastal margins.
Erosion has nibbled into the path in places. Along the route trees are struggling to maintain a grip on land.
The pink structure of Stutton Mill comes into view. A building of considerable age it commands lovely views of the river, sitting as it does on Newmill Creek.
You tend to know you are looking at something old when it has the prefix “New” on the OS Map. They have not built mills recently.
The owners dogs are in playful mood and bark and carry on attempting to chase my dogs off their land. It is all fun, but the size differential worries the mill’s owner, he wonders if I am going to kick up a fuss. His gardener pops out to see what the commotion is about.
The owner never quite gets his dogs under control and they lollop around with him in puffing pursuit. I have to stop so he can catch up, the exact opposite of the effect his dogs wish to have. I chat about the cricket to the gardener while this is going on. The gardener likes his sport, it is time well spent, the sort of conversation that only happens outside of towns. Within town this would have been far more confrontational probably involving raised voices and recrimination.
We walk behind some trees, the track sandwiched between a field of barley and the river. A gentle breeze ruffles the barley, it gives it more movement than the river appears to have. Thistles grow and in the warm still air butterflies dance and chase one another, breeding is on the agenda.
The scale of the Painted Lady explosion is evidenced here. Where-ever I look bushes hold three, four, five of them. Simply everywhere. Peacocks try to grab my attention, more strongly coloured, they glide past buzzing me closely. The Meadow Browns and Gatekeepers just cannot compete. I take a good many pictures, perhaps the Painted Lady will be back in such numbers again, but it would be foolhardy to expect it.
Sampling some blackberries, they have a considerable distance to go before they reach the edible stage, even the ones that look the part. The cherry plums on the other hand, simply delicious. The sloes I have the good sense to leave on the bushes.
Stutton Hall can be seen in the distance across the crop fields. The older OS maps suggest a good deal of park land or wooded area has been sacrificed to these crops, disjointed woodland remains. The hall I see in the distance now is the modern rebuild. A mere 500 years old. This is an ancient landscape which has managed to evade the heritage industry.
Turning sharply inland at the remains of a wharf, a reminder of industry which could not compete with the shifting moods of the Stour. Heading towards Stutton itself, but first past Creeping Hall. There is a schoolboy delight in this name, a name to conjure with.
Stutton Hall, Creeping Hall, Crowe Hall and they mean it, these are no faux-manors of the nouveau-riche, well not of the last few hundred years. These are buildings which stood when people understood the class system existed. Not this modern hash of “celebrity class” five minutes on ready-steady-cook will create.
Stutton is a delight. One road in, one road out, no pavements, buildings opening straight out onto the street. A small bowl with a water container next to it sits outside “Ancient House” the sign says it is for dogs to drink from. If that was not hint enough, a few yards further on a woman drops her gardening instruments and steps across the road to give the dogs a darn good tickle.
“Ohh they are lovely. How old are they?” etc.
We stop and chat in the middle of the road.
“Don’t you worry about the road?” She asks
There is less motorised traffic than on the pavements back home. The curse of the drug addled incontinent rushing to get home in their motorised wheelchairs has made walking on pavements a perilous business in recent years.
As we get nearer the church, we are in the area of the “big house”. Gates are the only hint of property, gravelled ways disappear, the houses not seen. Signs on the gate trumpet “Private property”. Is it the owners that are thick, or do they imagine their houses are somehow more private than other peoples, those of lesser wealth.
A laminated identikit dog snarls from the gateposts. “Dogs running loose in the grounds”. After passing the third sign, the effect is wearing off. Dog 2 wanders up to the gated property and with great show cocks his leg on the brickwork. Dog 3 is drawn like a magnet, he has to get in on this act of lower-class rebellion, the irony being they are better bred than the posters.
The final house has let the cat out of the bag, same sign, but the gates are open, have the hounds fled, are they about to burst upon us? Nothing happens, we wander past, the signs are the usual empty threat to ward off the easily impressed. I don’t like the implication I have any interest in their property. If they invited me in, it would be a polite chore to walk over the threshold. I want to talk to the people that leave a little bowl outside marked “dog water”, they are made of the right stuff.
Next door is reputedly the oldest house in the village, Quarhams, 15th Century, the same century as the church.
Stutton Church deserves some comment. As someone else has done the work for me, I’ve no intention of passing it off as my own.
The church is on the edge of the village, the footpath continues on.
The next bit of the walk is dominated by the Royal Hospital School. I mean dominate.
The oldest military school in UK, but the timeline is fractured by the fact it moved from Greenwich in 1933 to where I see it now. So although the history goes back to 1712, this is a modern growth.
The bells in the bell tower rarely seem to let up, announcing all manner of time fractions, 3 minutes late by my reckoning. The frontage of the thing is colossal. As I walk past the noise of privilege and class wash over my proletariat ears. A game of cricket is in progress, sight screens, pads, caps, gentle applause as Brown junior bowls his googlies. It’s great. The bum note, the unbroken voices of the sportsmen needing to encourage Brown junior every moment.
“Good bowling”
”Keep it up”
”That’s it”
So the rote goes, the pace determined by the claps from the encouraging fielder. All this because of stump microphones on TV coverage. Now only the absence of this blether is a concern, the moronic pronouncements just so much background noise to be ignored.
Lucky me to witness such things, even if the soundtrack is modern cliché, this is old school.
On we travel, peaking from behind the sight screen, the tree cover was weak, I was glad to be making my way behind the batsman, I would not wish to put him off his stroke. From what I saw the bowlers were going to have their work cut out.
Along the foreshore are reminders of the trade that ran up and down this river. Wharf timbers stick out of the sands, ghosts of past industry. There is a romance to the wood, its from the age of sail. It now stares accusingly at the ugly scar of success glimpsed on the horizon, the concrete and steel of Felxistowe. The scale of operations just got too big, the river here is too small to hold the profit ambition of the modern world.
This days coastal walk is coming to a close. I turn sharply inland once more following a stream which is eventually going to take me to Holbrook Mill. The remains of an old brickworks are hidden in the trees, google earth reveals the secret. A few yachts bob in the inlet.
Dragonflies zoom in the weedy margins of the small channel. It is my chance to take a picture I have been promising myself for most of the summer. Dragonfly lake (actually a carp fishing pond I used to enjoy) has been closed off to me since the death of the owner and I have missed those lazy days watching dragonflies.
Butterflies are tricky, dragonflies near impossible if you don’t intend to dedicate considerable time to the exercise of photographing them.
I make do with this, after nearly ending up in the water.
The journey ends with Holbrook Church. It has too for the “Trinity Tour” aspect of things and the third church.
Really though I could have done without it. The road was busy noisy and the pedestrian given very short thrift. The Mill was one side of the road, its vast pond the other, but there was not room or opportunity to take anything more than the most meagre of pictures and no opportunity to imagine a past when this building had relevance.
After such an enjoyable walk in an unspoilt countryside this was a charmless end.
For a moment I nearly got sidetracked by a very tempting footpath sign that said it was heading towards Alton Water, but it was time to head for home. I was looking forward to repeating the whole journey again, but in reverse.
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