Today was one of those rare mornings when the sky is perfect: wide, pale blue, with a brilliant yellow-white sun undimmed by the slightest cloud cover, even at 8 am - the kind of morning that used to make my heart sink when I knew I would spend the entire day confined in an air-conditioned office with sealed windows. i felt doubly thankful for my new-found freedom to go out walking instead.
I wanted to see wide open vistas to go with such a morning, so decided on the Waldingfield loop, but to walk it in the opposite direction from the one I usually take, in order to get the long slog along the Edwardstone road out of the way at the beginning, before the August heat built up, leaving the footpath route across open fields for the later stages.
The path across the stubble field in Sand Hill is bone dry, despite the recent rain. The usually muddy track at the bottom (left to the centre of Boxford) is like rock, ridged with fossilised bootprints. The village was morning deserted, but at the last house towards Edwardstone, a young mother, summer-holiday fraught, was laying down the law at a couple of children, heard rather than seen, inside the house, threatening no school holiday action today unless they started co-operating with getting ready. Memories of Frinton beach when my children were that age, packing up picnics and rugs, cricket sets and beach tennis, then the familiar drive 'the back way' through the Essex countryside. I thought of the day I watched my children playing in the surf, oblivious to the fact that just behind them in the waves someone uninvited had joined in their game - a young grey seal.
I took the path left off the road, across the fields to Edwardstone church. Crows twittered to each other fretfully, a buzzard wheeling overhead. The great Scottish writer Nan Shepherd wrote in her classic work about the Cairngorms, 'The Living Mountain', that buzzards fly 'coil on coil', like a neatly stowed mooring line on a yacht. The shape is right, but not the rhythm of the flight - they slow as they come into the wind, like a sailing boat steered too high, then accelerate away round the 'coil', more as though they are riding up and down over ocean waves.
I followed the road past Edwardstone village hall (nowhere near Edwardstone village) and up to the Waldingfield road. I was glad to reach the tiny lane to Upsher Green, past the handful of thatched and similarly quaint cottages, and round the sharp right-hand corner to Great Waldingfield, where the church stands out among another scattering of thatch and timber frames. Apart from the parked cars and the tarmac road, the scene must have been the same three centuries ago. I took the track to the left, through a shady wood, where a field maple had dropped a thick carpet of winged, green seeds in one precise spot, like an installation artist.
At the end of the track, I followed the path to the right along the field, now ploughed, to the footbridge on the left over a narrow stream. This is the early stage of the River Box, the source of which is in Little Waldingfield, up on slightly higher ground. A new, wooden bridge sits next to a much older, brick structure, no longer used as it looks as though it just might take you with it into the river. The water was running freely, about six inches deep - it will become a welcome contribution to the depleted River Stour when it reaches Higham.
I followed the track through the woods and up the slight hill towards Archer's Farm, a fine view on my left across to Little Waldingfield. Crossing over the road, I continued down the small dead-end road and right on to the footpath across the fields towards Priory Green. A crop of fava beans stood blackened and shrivelled. It looked as though nothing useful could possibly come from it, but closer inspection shows the fat, ripe pods full of beans. There were three distinct stripes of colour, which an artist could have painted in as many brush-strokes: black, then pale green for the willows at the far side of the field, then the now intense blue of the sky. In the last but one field before Priory Green, I saw the first fully ripe, deep red haws on the hawthorn. In the last field, a solitary heron stood incongruously in the middle of a wide expanse of dry, blond barley stubble.
The path goes along the side of a meticulously tended garden. I stopped to admire the magnificently ordered rank of compost heaps, each with its own particular stage of decomposition, hiding prudishly behind a neat willow fence so as not to spoil the view from the immaculate patio, where the owners were enjoying a cup of coffee in the sun. I wondered where they found the time.
Back down the Priory Green road and on to the footpath directly ahead across a field towards Edwardstone. A few months ago, the field was full of oilseed rape, head height and impossibly tangled. I fought my way through it with a hiking pole (the rapeseed won - the end of my pole is still in the field somewhere). Today the path was smooth as lino, fringed by skeletal, bone-white stalks left behind by the harvester. Among them stood a carpet of new seedlings, astonishing in their vigour and the brilliance of their lime green colour, but destined only to be ploughed back into the soil.
Back down the road, then through the path on the right, along the side of several fields where I got hopelessly disorientated by the twists and turns the first time I walked this way. Now it is familiar and I emerged from between two cottages on the road through what would be the centre of Edwardstone, if Edwardstone actually had a centre (it sprawls in several directions and never really settles anywhere, even at the White Horse pub). As I took the road back down to Groton, then into Boxford via Swan Street, I realised how very hot it had become. I was glad of the shade along Stone Street. I walked here earlier this week and had a surprising wildlife encounter. Here it is:
The grass snake did not vanish in a heartbeat when I walked up to it , but defiantly stayed put, moving just its head to get a better look at me. I stepped gingerly over it, almost expecting to be attacked by sharp teeth (they might not be poisonous, but I'm sure they can still give a painful bite!). Neither the llamas grazing peacefully in the field next to the path, nor the holidaying chickens strutting in their luxury runs (yes, you really can put your hens into boarding kennels when you go on vacation) took any notice of me or the snake.
I took the path through the bottom field to see how the tunnel hedge there compared with the view of it I photographed back in the heavy snow in winter.
Just the same, but completely different. Like a walk done in reverse for a change.
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