R33: Peldon Rose to East Mersea – 4th February 2024

“When the 19th century art critic John Ruskin wrote that ‘mountains are the beginning and end of landscape’ he was, on this occasion, wrong. For some of us it is at the shore’s edge that landscape truly begins and ends, where the land meets and truly inter-penetrates with the sea and the sky.” (Warpole, 2005)

I read both essays by Ken Warpole in my room after the walk yesterday and found many a description of Essex and coastal liminality that I couldn’t resist adding into the posts from this weekend. In East of Eden, Warpole describes ‘this’ Essex coastline with a sea of phrases: “slack nature, post-industrial wilderness, unofficial countryside, working wild, drosscape, edge condition, terrain vague.” (p.65) which are all accurate but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of ‘drosscape’. I guess it’s that mixing of what many would consider worthless or rubbish onto the coast such as sewage works which I feel I’m now mentioning frequently.

We began the day with a small taste of the local road walking from the Peldon Rose down onto Mersea Island. Although I felt glad that I hadn’t had to grapple with the verges for 4 miles with a dodgy ankle, I am still fluctuating between radical acceptance of the ‘gap’ and ‘gap’ anxiety that may need to be rectified in the future. An alien feeling to relinquish the unbroken path.

There are numerous boats, houses and beach huts all called Mehalah around and on the island. This is in reference to a Victorian melodrama written by a local vicar Sabine Baring-Gould. According to Goodreads, the heroine of the same name is a ‘fiery gypsy-beauty’ and the novel is compared to more famous contemporaries such as Wuthering Heights. The story only came to our attention just before the walk and we’ve decided to put it aside as we generally prefer the modern take on the landscape and there has been just so much choice of reading material for Essex.

Crossing the Strood, the winter light reflected prettily onto the exposed mud at low tide.

We took the path to West Mersea so we could skirt the bottom of the island. The seawall footpath rises between yet another red hill (those romans liked collecting salt) and old disused oyster beds.

Some of the photos were taken by Matt who parked near East Mersea and walked the entire island starting with the north and nearly catching us up.

This means images of the same part of the island were taken at slightly different times of day so the light and tide may vary.

Passing our first caravan park for a while, we walked into West Mersea. Everything was suddenly small and cute.

Walking through the mini marina

it all started feeling familiar as I’d stayed in a layby with my husband Ben a few years back in order to ingest some of the fantastic local seafood. So with that thought we found ourselves a seafood shack and excitedly ordered a crab sandwich. There was only enough for one, being out of season for crab, so I handed that over to Barbara and ordered an extremely tasty mackerel sandwich. Stashing the sarnis safely in our bags we carried on to read of the death of a local oyster hero, from a long line of oyster heros.

Not far past this point is the layby I remember fondly; it seems that the locals don’t like visitors parking there so it is now all fenced off. We paused a moment for Barbara to pose in a tiny tiny chair. Bradwell still clear in the background.

At this point, the path meanders down onto the beach past a plaque to a well that was in constant use until not many years ago. Not sure I’ve ever noticed a well so close to the sea before – did it never get polluted by saltwater?

From here on it is beach of varying terrain: sometimes sandy, sometimes shingle and sometimes shell.

Boats in all types of condition are strewn about

and lines and lines of beach huts: sometimes layered back off the beach and sometimes in candy colours with Victorianesque balustrades.

When Matt walked through a little while later he noticed this juxtaposition of housing types. The wealthy nestled up against the almost derelict.

Around this stretch of the beach another caravan site (Waldegraves) is set back from the beach and then the human habitations fade away as does the seawall path; it literally became narrower and narrower and then peters out in a gentle descent back to the beach. We took the chance and used the lower eroded area to sit and eat our tasty crab/mackerel sandwiches.

Some people heading towards us said the beach was walkable at low tide, so we continued on the Mersea Flats. A while later we bumped into a woman walking her sister’s dog for the second time. This time she was heading back, unsure if she could make it all the way along the beach to the next caravan park. We stroked the dog and continued on but I did start wondering whether she might be right especially as the seawall by this stage was so ruined that it resembled some monolith out of an apocalyptical film like I am Legend or Planet of the Apes. As if giants had been having a fight with large slabs of concrete thick with emerald seaweed.

Matt was tempted by the WW11 pillbox and couldn’t resist climbing inside.

The abandonment ends with a concrete slipway up to another caravan park and a solid seawall path. After a short time the path leads up into Cudmore Grove Country Park. Matt must have walked the beach; the cliffs are where 300,000 year-old bones of hippos and monkeys have been found. It’s fascinating to think of our cold little isle being populated by larger and more tropical mammals.

We walked down to where the ferry crosses to Brightlingsea and Point Clear in summer and passed a partially submerged pillbox.

Walking back inland to the car park at Cudmore Grove the trees were adorned with mistletoe.

We’d barely sat down when Matt appeared having walked a further 4 miles than us!

Miles walked: 9.5

Since the beginning: 1270.4

Warpole, K & Orton, J. (2005) 350 Miles: An Essex Journey.

Warpole, K. (2010) East of Eden in Evans & Robson (eds) Towards Re-enchantment: Place and its Meanings. London: Artevents.