This Week’s Walks
August 25th-31st 2024
Now my ankle’s back to normal, I’ve reached the point where my half marathon in Langdale is getting closer, so I do need to step up the training for that, which means there’ll likely be a lot more runs than walks for me over the next few weeks, so these posts will possibly be shorter for a while.
But they won’t be non-existent, as I’m still going to try to get in at least one decent long walk a week, because having that space to tune out, think and reflect is good for me — and also because my aging knees need some rest from running .
I’m writing this on a Saturday afternoon, but there may be one more walk this week, though just a short one. Being far too obsessed with statistics and the number of steps I do, I’m very close to a couple of landmarks for the month. First, getting to a total of 400,000 steps in the month, and second, getting to an average of 13,000 steps a day for the month (to save you from doing the maths, that’s 403,000). So I may pop out for half an hour or so just to bolster those numbers, but it will be more of a quick pootle round Abbey Fields type of walk rather than any major trek.
I’ve done four runs this week: a slow 5K on Sunday evening, a 10K out on footpaths and then back through the trails of Cymbeline Meadow and Charter Wood, a 5K social run with Running Colchester on Friday and then Harwich parkrun this morning. That’s the most I’ve run in a week for a good while, and my legs are feeling it now, especially as there was a long walk amidst all that as well.
Monday was a holiday here. It doesn’t mark any special event, not even having some vestigial religious purpose like a lot of our other holidays. It’s just a random day to make a long weekend in late August, usually a symbol that the school summer holidays are into their final week and that summer itself is fading into autumn. It’s also quite often a day of pretty poor weather or at least it feels like that, maybe because those days when we make big plans for something special only for them to be thwarted by grey clouds appearing overhead are the ones that lodge in the memory.
But this year’s forecast was for it to be mostly sunny, moderately warm and (most importantly) dry so I decided it was a day for a long walk. I thought about going on a Slow Way to Halstead I’d tried last year, but it felt a little too far, and was risking the vicissitudes of bank holiday bus timetables in getting back afterwards. Instead, after checking that the trains were running, I decided to head off to Bures, which I’ve walked to before:
I’ve been to see the dragon a couple of times walking with Blossome this year, so I decided on a different route this time, coming into Bures through the villages from the south, taking the Essex Way and Stour Valley Path for some of the journey.
It was an interesting morning’s walk. In some places everything is bursting with green because of this warm and wet summer, while other fields are bare and stubbled where they’ve already been harvested and sometimes ploughed ahead of winter crops going in. While it looks like it’s been a good summer for the farmers, everything else has been growing too, including all the nettles and bramble bushes that encroach upon footpaths.
I did learn the lesson from my slow progress through a thistle-filled field outside Sudbury a few weeks ago, and this time I set out wearing long trousers and carrying my trusty walking pole. They didn’t provide perfect protection, but my legs came out from it a lot better than they did before, and the pole was very useful for hacking back the most overgrown parts.
The vast majority of the walk was clear, though, and the Essex/Suffolk borders are generally easy walking country, especially compared to the mountains of Eryri I’d been in a week before. I headed out over a golf course, thinking of all the better uses it could be put to, then through my first bank of nettles (pictured above) to West Bergholt, then followed the Essex Way along the Colne for a while, until I turned off to head through Fordham and Fordham Hall Wood.
It was my first time in these woods, and I took a break in them for a drink and something to eat, as I’d been going for a couple of hours by this point. Further up the path a couple were picking blackberries and one of them shouted at me to ask if I was OK with Scottie dogs. I don’t have a problem with any dogs, and soon a very inquisitive black ball of fluff with long looping tufts for eyebrows was over to say hello and attempt to hunt down the sausage roll I’d been eating before her arrival. Her owners slowly walked down towards us, bags bulging with blackberries as she decided sitting on the bench beside me was more interesting than watching them. We chatted for a bit about how many blackberries there already were this year and their plans for them when they got home (I was tempted to follow them for some blackberry and apple compote, to be honest) before noting that I must be a nice person because their dog wouldn’t normally spend that much time comfortably with a stranger.
Then as I was about to get up and leave I caught a flash of white out of the corner of my eye, and stay seated as two women went past riding white horses. They might have been a mythical sign, but if they were then it seems the mythical realm is complying with modern health and safety standards as they weren’t clad in armour or flowing robes, but rather helmets and hi-vis tabards.
From there, there was another overgrown path to get out of the wood before emerging by Wormingford airfield which is now home to a gliding club and the Fairfields Farm crisp factory. A short time after that I reached the highest point of my walk, marked by a trig pillar:
After that, I took a slightly wrong direction and ended up picking up the Stour Valley Path at Wormingford Church, giving me one extra slope to walk up before dropping down to the river and following it towards Bures, crossing the river into Suffolk for a little while, then crossing back over it to get to the railway station and head home. I could have walked back the other way, but I’d already done 20km of walking that day and it felt like enough.
And that’s this week done, except for the quick stat-boosting stroll I’m about to head off . I’ll come back and post an addendum to this if I get accosted by any more symbols of mythical power demanding to view my risk assessment for this walk.
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