The oyster beds and sandy seashores of Britain’s most easterly inhabited island have been attracting guests for hundreds of years. Mersea is just some miles south of Colchester, as soon as Camulodunum – capital of Roman Britain – and there are Roman stays among the many island’s layers of historical past. Bus 86 arrives from Colchester each hour, crossing a causeway known as the Strood, which is usually lined by water for an hour or so at excessive tide. However Mersea feels much more like an island should you arrive by boat, so I’m ranging from Brightlingsea (bus 87 from Colchester), the place a summer time ferry crosses to wild East Mersea. Right here the River Colne and the large Blackwater estuary meet the tea-grey sea and unusual bones emerge from crumbling cliffs.
There’s an hour earlier than the following ferry so I stroll previous Brightlingsea’s lido, boating lake and seashore huts to Bateman’s Tower. It’s an octagonal late-Victorian folly, constructed as a lighthouse for a port that by no means adopted. I can see grazing marshes and wind-twisted woods throughout the water and, arriving on Mersea’s southern shore, I'm quickly strolling previous them. Large dragonflies are hovering in tall, flowering meadows as I detour round Cudmore Grove nation park, then keep it up alongside the seashore. Darkish burgundy-sailed Thames barges drift throughout the horizon.
Cudmore’s low purple cliffs are eroding quick, revealing fossilised sharks’ tooth and mammal bones. The picket youngsters’s playground consists of carved hippos, a nod to the hippopotamus bones which have emerged from the 300,000-year-old gravel close by, together with the stays of rodents, beavers, bears, wolves, monkeys and extinct, straight-tusked elephants. In 2021, Cudmore was one of many places for Apple TV+’s adaptation of Sarah Perry’s novel The Essex Serpent with Claire Danes as a fossil-hunting Victorian widow and Tom Hiddleston because the good-looking native vicar.
There are sand martins nesting in holes within the cliff, straggles of scented seashore rose, yellow stars of St John’s wort and silvery sea holly. Ruined second world struggle pillboxes are being reclaimed by sand and shingle. In the summertime of 1940, the Essex coast was fortified in opposition to doable German invasion and there are not less than a dozen of those brick-and-concrete guard posts on the island. Later, I cross the Two Sugars Cafe in a transformed West Mersea gun emplacement.
Coastal erosion means the route now heads inland, so far as the ethereal church at East Mersea, then again to the shore previous a thriving winery. One grave within the churchyard is protected by sturdy iron hoops, presumably to cease body-snatchers; a persistent hearsay that this cage is definitely there to cease the deceased climbing out has led to the church’s laminated data sheet insisting that Sarah Wrench “was not a witch”. There's a palm tree by the salt-fretted tower and roundels of Flemish stained glass in a number of the clear church home windows.
Essentially the most well-known vicar on the church of St Edmund, King & Martyr – which might date its recognized parsons again to Martin de Bockinge in round 1200 – was Sabine Baring-Gould, well-known for writing the hymns Onward, Christian Troopers and Now the Day is Over. He was a prolific author, and his 1870s stint in Mersea led to a novel known as Mehalah: A Story of the Salt Marshes, evoking this space “veined and freckled in each half with water”. As I trudge on alongside the pebbly shoreline, Baring-Gould’s description of it as desolate, however “not with out magnificence”, feels apt. He mentions summer time carpets of pink thrift and purple sea lavender and the winter marshes “alive and wakeful with numerous wild fowl”.
The lengthy seashore has banks of shells: cockles, mussels, sea snails and large, bleached oysters. Oysters have been grown since Roman occasions within the Mersea creeks, with their very best mixture of contemporary and salty water. Oyster shells are all over the place, trimming flowerbeds and threaded into beach-side festoons. Additional out on the low-tide mudflats, there are V-shaped traces of posts: a few of these are Saxon fish traps, whose timbers have survived 13 centuries.
A pastel prism of seashore huts traces the shingle close to West Mersea. The tide is slowly getting larger; by night, it is going to be good for swimming from the sandy strip on the high of the seashore. When the seafront homes lastly give approach to reedbeds with boats forward, I flip proper up Monkey Steps to the highway. Stepping contained in the packed museum subsequent door to the church, I can see weathered boards from a bronze-age walkway below glass within the ground.
Oysterman Daniel French, on the museum’s audio information, describes how he discovered these planks of oak buried within the East Mersea mudflats and seen the weird sq. holes. The method of courting, preserving and displaying the boards took 5 years, delayed by Covid, and this prize exhibit was opened in Might 2021. Close by is a jar of bones from a Roman barrow; different shows cowl seashore huts and barges, fishing, farming, a stuffed curlew, an outdated hoop internet, a penny farthing bike and a Seventeenth-century Burmese jar for crystallised fruit, dredged from a shipwreck by a Mersea fisherman.
The freshly opened White Hart is beckoning, simply over the highway, with its armchairs and native beers. Tomorrow, I’ll stroll previous West Mersea’s oyster sheds and again to the Brightlingsea ferry alongside the northern shore of the island, with its marshy saltings and winding creeks, favoured by centuries of smugglers. Tonight, there’s dinner on the pub’s brick-walled terrace and native oysters on the menu.
Google map of the route
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Begin Brightlingsea
Distance 8 miles plus a ferry journey
Time 4½ hours
Total ascent 60m
Problem reasonable
Route notes: This route depends on the seasonal foot ferry, which should be booked forward (£4 every approach, brightlingseaharbour.org). Alternatively, stroll proper around the island (about 12 miles), or go for considered one of Go to Colchester’s shorter West Mersea walks (visitcolchester.com).
The pub
When common supervisor Jack Tuck first noticed the White Hart, it had no roof, and had been closed and derelict for a decade. The pub’s trendy incarnation features a vaulted modern eating room and a vibrant lounge within the older, weatherboarded part that dates again to the sixteenth century. It’s solely been open two weeks after I arrive and is already in style. The menu features a “informal” part of connoisseur pub classics (soup, pasta, burgers, mussels with fries), alongside an upmarket collection of seafood, saltmarsh lamb and plant-based inventiveness. Within the bar, there’s a really drinkable amber Island Bitter and the malty Brewer’s Gold from close by Crouch Vale. The terrace, with its loops of lightbulbs and tasselled umbrellas, is stuffed with blissful summer time night drinkers, lingering over cocktails, Sussex fizz and pints of Adnams’ Ghost Ship.
The rooms
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