We had a wander around one of my favourite places - Fingringhoe Wick Nature Reserve, run by the very nice people at Essex Wildlife Trust.
Our visit didn't involve much in the way of exercise, just a bit of a stroll, a bit of half-hearted bird-watching (the tide was out, so there wasn't a great deal to see) and the immensely therapeutic pastime of blackberrying (I'm not sure if that's a real word).
Strangely enough, I'm not overly fond of blackberries taste-wise, but it's immensely satisfying to harvest a bit of free fruit from the hedgerows, and if it's possible to overdose on blackberry crumble, I've come close the past few days.
Another reason for visiting Fingringhoe, apart from the free soft fruit, is this small but perfectly formed little structure
Trig points are a rarity around these parts, and, having spent much of my adult life blundering around hill tops and summit ridges looking for them, it's a real pleasure to find one just loitering in an Essex field, at a massive height, by my reckoning, of all of sixty feet above sea level (I've heard rumours of Fenland trig points that are actually below sea level). The re-surveying of this country using a network of trig points took a quarter of a century, beginning in the 1930's, and was a stupendous achievement that gave us our wonderfully accurate, and quite beautiful, Ordance Survey maps.
I took a walk down the river from the Hythe to Wivenhoe. The Hythe remains as shabby as ever, the ghetto-like new flats (sold,of course, as "luxury apartments") doing little to mask the overriding sense of industrial decay. However, once beyond the disused and derelict warehouses, the graffiti, the mud and the sewage works outlet pipe, the river is home to an abundance of wildlife.
I'm a fairly incompetent birdwatcher, but within an hour I saw, in no particular order, Herring Gulls, Black Headed Gulls, Teal, Swans, Robin, Moorhen, Great Tit, Carrion Crow, Mallard, Redshank, Black-Tailed Godwit, Little Grebe, Little Egret and Magpies. Not bad for a dirty, polluted piece of river, and well worth a stroll on a rainy day
Another reason for visiting Fingringhoe, apart from the free soft fruit, is this small but perfectly formed little structure
Trig points are a rarity around these parts, and, having spent much of my adult life blundering around hill tops and summit ridges looking for them, it's a real pleasure to find one just loitering in an Essex field, at a massive height, by my reckoning, of all of sixty feet above sea level (I've heard rumours of Fenland trig points that are actually below sea level). The re-surveying of this country using a network of trig points took a quarter of a century, beginning in the 1930's, and was a stupendous achievement that gave us our wonderfully accurate, and quite beautiful, Ordance Survey maps.
I took a walk down the river from the Hythe to Wivenhoe. The Hythe remains as shabby as ever, the ghetto-like new flats (sold,of course, as "luxury apartments") doing little to mask the overriding sense of industrial decay. However, once beyond the disused and derelict warehouses, the graffiti, the mud and the sewage works outlet pipe, the river is home to an abundance of wildlife.
I'm a fairly incompetent birdwatcher, but within an hour I saw, in no particular order, Herring Gulls, Black Headed Gulls, Teal, Swans, Robin, Moorhen, Great Tit, Carrion Crow, Mallard, Redshank, Black-Tailed Godwit, Little Grebe, Little Egret and Magpies. Not bad for a dirty, polluted piece of river, and well worth a stroll on a rainy day
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