West Mersea Walk

Today was our wedding anniversary and I had taken the day off and we decided to go on one of our walks and the next one was West Mersea it was a foggy morning and it stayed foggy for most of the day especially on the Island. It was quite strange looking out to sea but not being able to see very far in fact it was quite spooky.

Details of Walk

• Date of Walk: 15/11/2012

• Distance: 6.34 Miles

• Level of Difficulty: A Easy Walk

• Car Park: High Street Car Park beside Library CO5 8QA

• Refreshments: Various places to eat, on route there is a Vineyard restaurant

• Photos Taken on Walk

We managed to get over before the tide came in and when we parked up somebody was coming back to their car with fresh pies from the butcher so we decided to go into the butchers and have a look what they had. Well they must of had every kind of pie you could think of savory and sweet. We decided on a chicken and ham pie and asked if they could keep it till we got back of the walk.

West Mersea has a very long history. The Romans built a 65 foot watchtower here to help help guard access to the Blackwater.The Island has seen other invaders in AD895 the Danes tried to launch an attack on London from here. The Island is sometimes cut off at high tides at the strood, the Roman causeway.

The walk starts from the car park and goes down past the church on to the beach in the book it said that at a point you had good views of Bradwell I reckon they meant when there was no fog as we could not see anything. After walking along the beach passing a long row of beautifully painted beach huts you come to the youth centre, walking through this and up the hill you pass a vineyard where they had a coffee job which was ideal for our 11:00 coffee break. At this point we realized that we had gone wrong as we could not pick up the right footpath so we carried on the road till we picked up the path again. We went wrong again but this was deliberate as we had to walk across a field that had recently been ploughed and as we had quite a lot of rain lately we did not fancy growing higher with the mud gathering on our boots. The detour took us down to the causeway and there was a lot of flashing lights as the tide was in and a car had got stuck in the middle and had to be towed out by the police.

When we finished the walk we went into Colchester to the restaurant we often go to when in the town and had lunch. We had parked up the top of the multistory and you could just see the Church lit up through the fog and it looked really eerie.