Snap and Scribble

These days, i seem to spend a fair amount of my time walking for hours along the seawalls on the edges of the various river estuaries around here. There are many dozens of miles of them in this part of Essex – and mostly, they’re out in wild and empty country.

A high proportion of the land in south eastern Essex has been reclaimed from the sea at one time or another over the last couple of thousand years. Pretty much all the reclaimed land was used for farming originally, but there are a few places where there are either houses or caravan parks. Building houses on land that’s below sea level has always seemed a bit silly to me – and i think a few other people are thinking that too now, after the disastrous floods in some parts of this country last year.

But almost all of it’s still farmland, which means a vast area of open fields lies on the inside of the seawall. On the other side, of course, is open water – so you can get a decent distance away from civilization, to places where you’ve got largely uncluttered views to the horizon all around.

That’s probably the main attraction of walking along the seawalls for me, but the walking itself is part of it. I’ve always liked walking and i really missed it in Kabul and Maningrida. Maningrida was worse than Kabul – because of the dogs, and because there wasn’t really anywhere much to walk to, apart from through forest. And you don’t get much of a view when you’re in a forest! If i go too long without being able to look into the distance, i start feeling very claustrophobic.

The weather’s been great recently, too. The temperature got up to 14° the other day, and i couldn’t help thinking about the times i’ve been in Melbourne at this time of year and it’s been 14°. In Melbourne, that’s the middle of summer, here it’s the middle of winter – so it can’t be too bad. And more or less every second day seems to be sunny – or at least there’s only scattered clouds.

So i’m enjoying most of my leisure time at the moment – but it’s definitely time to get a job

The seawall on the north shore of the River Crouch

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