Old blog - 2009

An Essex Walk; An old blog from 2009.  Essex in quick time news mode, is all Essex girls and probably gypsies encampment, with the added bonus of a slightly raucous London contingency.  But if you take to the back lanes it is a pretty county, old and new blending.  That same huddled together villages with their new houses infiltrating but the gems of the 18th century still there.

The following walk was a favourite of mine, we would park by the old bridge, where the wild hops grew in the hedge and just potter along.  Of course these walks would end in the little village pub further on.  Paul at his happiest, shortish walk with a pub at the end!

"We have walked beside this brook several times, its incredibly neglected and yet has that aura of a natural ecosystem getting on with its survival, unworried by human intervention. The brook flows through farmland, ploughed fields on either side, but the farmer is gentle with his use of the plough, and there seems to be bulwarks of unploughed grassland protecting the brook, as it finds its way through a choked waterway.

It curves in a sinuous fashion, a dark brown ribbon threading its way through watercress and tumbled branches, sometimes lost in vegetation, but bubble rising to the surface will indicate its flow. This is not a chalk stream, that flows crystal clear, yet stare into its shallow pools long enough and you will see clear water that the fish enjoy.

The old fallen willow sprawled across the banks, has flood debris caught up in its branches, showing that the brook must rise about five feet when in full flood. This part of Essex has a beautiful landscape of richly furrowed fields set amid rolling woodlands, a farmed landscape that is at home with its underlying fragments of wilderness that escape to the far corners of fields; trees die gracefully in old age, the silver leafed willow is predominate around the rivers and brooks, its fissured trunk often covered in lichen to reflect the clean air. The heavy weeds of nettle, cow parsley and field weeds are very much in evidence.

The fish, though being no expert, are probably graylings (Thymallus thymallus), because apparently they smell like thyme when taken out of the water."