Wide winter skies

The skies over Epping Forest this afternoon were beautiful. 

O and I walked.  C leaped over ditches and streams.  G ran.

Delighted that his wife is making him pose for a photo when he is sweaty and mad because he has just run A Very Long Way

Everybody happy.

Weekday walk #13

It has been nearly a month since our last walk, and today we were both really in the mood for a good yomp through the forest to blow the cobwebs away and give us back some energy. 

We started at the Epping Forest Visitor Centre, set off vaguely northwards, and immediately got lost.  Epping Forest is not well endowed with signposts and the OS map for this area does not have a great deal of detail.  But the lovely thing about Epping Forest is that it doesn't matter - there are always paths, and there is always something to see. 

When we found ourselves back at the Visitor Centre five minutes after we left it, we started again and managed much better second time around.  We headed north-east, towards Theydon Bois, and found plenty of hills, mud puddles, tall nettles and piles of horse poo to navigate our way around. 

At this time of year Epping Forest is gloriously lush, with waist-high drifts of ferns, winding brambles and general greenery everywhere.

I love all the old mutant-style beech and oak trees dotted around the forest.  They are this weird shape because many, many years ago they used to be pollarded to obtain a crop of wood.  The City of London, who manage Epping Forest, describe pollarding like this:

Pollarding is a traditional tree management technique that was common place in England and regularly carried out in Epping Forest until around 200 years ago. A crop of wood was obtained from the trees by removing branches but not felling the tree, but animals were able to graze underneath without damaging the branches. One consequence was that the trees cut regularly live longer than normal and it is their great age that makes them so important for biodiversity and heritage. Pollarding stopped when other fuels became more widely available but these ‘lapsed’ pollards, those not cut for many years, have many problems because the branches are now very heavy and the trees are splitting and falling over.

Some of these old trees look like they should have a starring role in a Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter film.

I love them, and whenever I walk amongst them I can't help but pat their fat trunks as I go past.   For centuries before us, other friends will have walked here, chatting amiably and enjoying the quiet sounds of the forest.

Finding Things Out

I realised today that one of the reasons I love walking so much is that I like Finding Things Out.  Walks almost always lead to Finding Things Out because whether you are in the city or the countryside there is so much to observe and absorb.

Today we went for a walk in North Essex, starting out at Saffron Walden and walking out to the Audley End estate and then on to the pretty little village of Wendens Ambo.  The walk is number 22 in this excellent book of Essex walks.

We saw these amazing plaster patterns on the walls of many of the houses in the villages we walked through.  I loved them. 

I had never seen anything like this before, and neither had any of the rest of the family.  When we got home I rummaged on the internet and discovered that this type of decoration is called pargeting, and is relatively common on old houses in East Anglia.  It used to be found on buildings in London too before the Great Fire in 1666.

The other thing I saw, which intruiged me greatly, was this pill box - slap bang in the middle of a field of wheat just outside Wenden's Ambo.

I didn't have to wait until I got home to find out what this was all about.  We were walking with my sister and her husband, and until a couple of years ago my brother-in-law  served in the army. 

The first thing to note was that he had spotted many more than this one - which I am sure was indicative of his honed observational skills picked up in his army training, although he modestly said not.  The second thing to note was that they are called pill boxes, and not bunkers or hideouts as I'd been calling them.

N told us that they were part of a huge network of defensive forts built across the UK during the phoney war of 1939 to 1940 in preparation for a German invasion.  In our part of the country they were built roughly in circles, radiating out from London across the South East. 

I find it amazing that they are not marked with a sign or a plaque or something to tell us about their history and why they're there.  When I think of World War II, because I know that in the end there was no German invasion, I tend to forget that it was even a possibility.  But walk past one of these pill boxes, and peer in, and suddenly it all seems frighteningly likely.  It must have been very unnerving for the people who lived in sleepy little villages like Wendens Ambo to see these fortifications springing up in their valleys and woods so soon after war was declared. 

If you want to find out more about the history of the UK pillboxes, and the ones that remain, there is a fantastic website here devoted to them.

And if you want to Find Things Out about other topics which you never even knew existed, my recommendation is to put on your boots, grab a kitkat, and go for a walk.  You never know what you will find when you set out.

Oh, there was one other small thing that I found out today...the couple who live in this house have a great sense of humour!