going for a walk

We went for a walk after lunch, once the hailstorm had passed, to see the bluebells.  We can see two ancient woods from the sitting room windows, and a footpath lets you cut down between them, though there isn't public access into either of them.  Bluebells are an ancient woodland indicator in Essex (though not in all parts of the UK), and the woodland floor to either side of the path was thick with them.  In bright light they shine a vivid, luminous blue, while when the sun goes in they go dull, grey and half invisible.  We were lucky and as we got to that part of the walk the sun shone through, and the ground around us gleamed back at it.  The individual flowers of the native bluebell are narrow funnels, which hang down along one side of the stalk, whereas the Spanish bluebell is larger and coarser in all its parts, each flower is wider and more flared at the mouth, and they are carried all around the stalk.

The verges were thick with cow parsley, and a little white flowered thing I have known since childhood without ever learning its name.  It used to stud the hedges on the walk home from school at this time of year, back in the 1960s when infants were allowed to walk themselves a mile home from school.  At Cockaynes Wood, where what was until recently a working gravel pit has just been turned over to the Essex Wildlife Trust, we saw a lapwing.  The bluebells in Cockaynes seemed to be going over compared to those in Captains Wood and Fratinghall Wood, some already setting seed or partly obscured by the emerging bracken, though it may partly have been an optical effect because at that point the sun had gone in.  The Systems Administrator was slightly disappointed, having wanted to show them to me after tracking them as they came out, but I was quite happy, having already seen a generous display further back.

Many of the fallen trees still lie along the south-west, north-east axis, relics of the 1987 hurricane.  Some have successfully thrown up strong new trunks from the sides of their fallen original boles, the part of the root plate still in the soil being enough to support life, while the fallen trunk rooted where it touched.  Professional forestry managers will now admit that they were too quick to clean up the mess after 1987.  Wind-thrown broadleaf trees have a considerable ability to regenerate.

Skylarks were singing above the cornfields.  They seem to hold their own in this corner of Essex.  Whether the farmers clear patches for them to nest in the middle of the crop, which is a good place, relatively secluded from predators, or whether they manage in the field margins and headlands, I don't know.  We saw several hanging above the fields, and a couple dropped down into the middle of a field of some sort of grain.  We agreed that it was wonderful to see the larks, and that what we needed was an idiot's guide to the farmed countryside, since we couldn't tell wheat from barley, and don't know whether the stuff that looks like rye grass is a recently sown grain crop that just hasn't grown much yet, or whether it really is rye grass, and if so why.  It is a rather unbalanced state of knowledge to go for a walk, and be able to identify quite a few of the birds, flowers and trees, and recognise an old pollarded oak and understand why it looks like that now, without being able to identify the major economic crops growing on either side of you.

Outside Arlesford we turned a corner, and a view to the river Colne suddenly opened up.  It took me a couple of minutes to get my bearings, then the unfamiliar sights fell into place and became a landscape that I knew, with the barrier across the river at Wivenhoe, the quarry dock at Rowhedge, and the bulge of the Fingringhoe reserve.  The landscape around here is a patchwork of old quarry workings, with abrupt changes in level, and the grassed over bottoms of previous gravel pits providing thin grazing for horse paddocks.  The horses, wearing rugs in this weather, must all get supplementary feed, so the grazing is only to amuse them.  They are the lucky horses in this recession, the ones whose owners can still afford to keep them.

We met no other walkers until the home stretch, when we passed a cheerful spaniel and an old codger going in the opposite direction.  The SA and the codger exchanged courtesies about the weather, and the spaniel looked as if it would have liked to jump up at me, but its owner told it sternly that if it did he would bop it with his stick, and it desisted.  It was a nice walk, and I said that we should go again.  The SA often walks, and knows the paths around here far better than I do.  I have to be prised out of the garden, but I like it once I get going.

a short walk on the Orwell

I went to Pinmill this afternoon.  I hadn't been there for a long while.  It is a ridiculously pretty village on the river Orwell, reached down a narrow lane in a valley that feels more West Country than East Anglia.  Quaint cottages sit higgledy piggledy along the road, including Alma Cottage, setting of the start of Arthur Ransome's We didn't Mean to Go to Sea.  The hard is broad and wide, with wooden scrubbing posts, and assorted traditional boats, which were sitting upright on the mud as it was no more than half tide.  At high tide the water laps the walls of the famous pub, the Butt and Oyster.  It's an historic pub, full of beams and panelling, and also mentioned by Ransome, and is a pleasant place to sit, especially if you can get a window seat with a view out over the river, though I see it is not in the 2012 Camra guide.  However, I was not there for the pub, but for a Sunday afternoon walk with a friend.

Parking in Pinmill was unexpectedly tight, for a winter's day, and the two cars ahead of us bagged the last two spaces in the town car park.  I thought I was going to have to squeeze in next to somebody's hedge on the lane, then got lucky as someone vacated a place in a little enclave just off the road, that had other cars parked in it and didn't seem to be a passing space or part of anyone's garden.  Life for car owners in Pinmill must be difficult, especially in the warmer weather when the tourists flock in.  It looks as though it would be a challenge for them to find spaces to park themselves, let alone for their guests if they want to hold a party.

We set off upstream, armed with a map the Systems Administrator had printed off the computer for me.  Normally the SA is in charge of walks, and I just tag along, so I felt a vague burden of responsibility, although as we were only going up the river and not venturing on to the high fells there wasn't that much that could go wrong.  We passed some cottages that seemed worrying close to sea level, though very quaint and boasting (do houses still boast in estate agents' details?) lovely river views.  The river was almost empty of boats, in contrast to the summer when nearly every mooring buoy is occupied, and a strong breeze was churning the water to a grey chop.  Birds sat out on the mud, and we gazed at them with vague benevolence.  A tidy houseboat, sitting so high on the marsh that it must have been floated on during a big spring tide, had a notice outside saying it was available as a holiday let.  It would be a beautiful and atmospheric place to stay, if you didn't mind carrying your luggage half a mile across fields.

The riverside path after a while seemed to lead us into the river, and we decided that the path lay further inland inside a little patch of woodland.  We soon came to the Cat House, a brick built grade II listed Gothick cottage near the riverfront at Woolverstone.  The name refers to the story that in smuggling days of old the owner used to put a cat in the window to show when the coast was clear of revenue men.  I always assumed it was a china cat, but according to Wikipedia it was his pet cat which he had stuffed when it died.  The view of the Cat House is rather obscured by Woolverstone Marina and the Royal Harwich Yacht Club, and their associated shore based litter of boat hoists, parked day boats and dinghy racks.

The marina enjoys (do houses still enjoy?) a highly scenic position, and rapid access to the open river, but offers limited protection, as the pontoons simply sit along the edge of the channel.  In today's wind they were bouncing up and down a lot, and the few boats still in the water were rolling with them.  Conditions on board would be uncomfortable, and there's always the risk that a boat will roll on to the edge of the pontoon and smash its stanchions.  There is the possibility of passing marine traffic ploughing into the outside pontoons.  We kept a boat there at one time, but not any more.

Despite the map I couldn't pick up the path that would have taken us back into the wooded environs of Woolverstone Park, and we walked up the road from the marina, until we came within sight of the church that lay on our return route.  Or at least, our return route assuming that we were turning round at that point.  The SA had printed off more map for me than that, and spoken encouragingly about how we could go up to Freston Tower.  This is a handsome sixteenth century six storey brick tower, whose original purpose is a complete mystery.  Nowadays it is owned by the Landmark Trust, so you could go on holiday there if you wanted a holiday on the banks of the Orwell and didn't fancy a houseboat with no road access.  We didn't make it that far, since the afternoon's walk was supposed to be a nice chat with added views, not a route march.  We did stop to look at the church of St Michael, Woolverstone, but it was locked, so we admired the clipped yews leading to the door, and the porch with its unusual chequerboard floor of slate laid on edge, but couldn't see inside.

Our route back took us along the edge of a field, and was clearly a popular local route for dog walkers.  One elderly and stout black labrador had got three good long sticks jammed into its jaws, and looked thoroughly pleased with itself, tail wagging wildly.  Black labs seem a favoured breed in this part of Suffolk.  We met lots, and most stopped to say hello.  Only a great grey curly coated lurcher type slunk past us, eyeing us shyly, and a jack russell was too excited running up and down to stop.

As we were about to drop down the side of a small wood back to the river, a buzzard appeared from the trees, and was soon joined by another.  They circled closer to us than buzzards usually come, and we watched for several minutes as they flapped lazily over the fields, until they dwindled to small distant dots.  My companion managed to get a proper look at them through binoculars.  I can never see anything through binoculars, so I didn't take up her offer to have a go.  It used to be the case that there weren't any buzzards in the Eastern counties, and if you thought you had seen one you had made a mistake, but they have been steadily re-establishing themselves on this side of the country, and are no longer a rare sighting.  They will take pheasant poults, so gamekeepers don't like them.

By the SA's standards it was rather a small walk.  I don't think it was nearly far enough to offset the piece of homemade fruit cake I ate afterwards, but it was a very nice afternoon.