Our exploration of the Essex Way continued this weekend as we strode out in Great Leighs.
Now it’s years since I’ve been through Great Leighs. Through, rather than to, you note. Before the fast road opened it was the best way from Chelmsford to Braintree, and in all honesty I’d probably been spending more time looking at the traffic ahead than I had the surroundings.
What a shame. Turns out Great Leighs is very nice. We parked up at the village hall and struck out across the fields, through some woods and a wood yard, along the backs of some cute smallholdings populated by chickens, bantams and guinea pigs and down to the river, which we followed for three or four miles.
We should have followed it further, unfortunately, but got ourselves mixed up (we were eating Creme Eggs at the time and it’s easy to be distracted) and turned right one road too soon, putting ourselves on a long loop up through the centre of our route.
In fairness that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing as we were starting to flag, and it means we can do the other half another time. We did find this dinky spring by the side of the road close to Great Leighs church, on Cole Lane. You can see where it is on Google Maps by following this link.
It’s a long, long time since I’ve been to Cressing. I went years ago, when I was a student and had no money on a day off college and turned around when I got to the barns and saw that you had to pay to get in.
Anyhow, today we headed back there. The sun was out for pretty much the first time since October and it felt like the first weekend of spring, so we dug out the walks book and opened on a random page. This is where it took us.
The walk, which started in White Notley, followed a short stretch of the Essex Way, an 80-odd mile footpath that stretches from Epping to Harwich through surprisingly unspoiled countryside.
White Notley itself is little more than a small town, with the dinkiest train station (one platform, one track, no car park) sat at the start of the walk. We quickly broke away from the road, past old farm buildings and across ploughed fields.
Eventually we found ourselves at the famed Templar barns, now coming up for 900 years old and in remarkable condition. If you’d told me they were replicas, build five years ago I could quite have believed you.
We didn’t go in. We got diverted by the tea shop and sat reading about what was inside them, but as soon as we discovered it was waxwork people and ‘display boards’ (yawn) we skipped the cultural bit and headed off across the fields again.
All in all, though, an excellent walk of four and a bit miles out in the middle of nowhere. Let’s hope this heralds the start of a good summer of walking. We could do with it after the winter we’ve just had.
