• Get out of Debt!

    Back in the middle of the first decade of the C21st, Essex County Council briefly ran a website http://www.agreeneressex.net/ with a purpose to ‘take sustainability on’ in Essex. That link is dead, and many of the plans it presented are also lifeless now,  but some of the site remains preserved here at the Internet Archive for…

  • Beating the Bounds 4: Maldon to SWF via Purleigh

    Whoever escaped/ Kept a weather-eye open and moved away. Seamus Heaney (trans.) Beowulf A volte-face of an old favourite: the walk from South Woodham Ferrers to Maldon via Purleigh. The trick with this walk, in either direction, is to leave early enough to reach The Bell in Purleigh before they stop serving food. I got…

  • Greenhouse Britain

      The next report from the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due late in 2019. The lag time between data gathering and data publication, plus the need for an agreed consensus amidst the contributors have conspired in previous editions to present overly optimistic scenarios, it’s now widely recognised that they’ve routinely underestimated the rate of…

  • Desk Research: Dengie Woodland 2

    A rainy Easter Monday, but Burnham & District Museum reopened Good Friday for its 2018 season so I went there to renew my membership and review their library. The good selection of books there allowed me to do some more work researching the history of woodland cover on the Dengie. The Domesday Book period of…

  • Dengie: Biodiversity

    A new article in the British Naturalists’ Association Grades Newsletter, (Number 10 – April 2018) discusses how sea walls, like those familiar from walking the Dengie coastline, create a long corridor for the dispersal of fauna, especially for pollinators such as bumblebees.

  • Managed Retreat

    Managed Retreat

    My work on bioregional thinking for the Atlantic Archipelago began with Managed Retreat a magazine considering the English orient which includes work relating to the Dengie. You can read Issue 1 below: https://issuu.com/londonpermaculture/docs/managed_retreat-adobe_reduc A limited number of printed copies of the newspaper format edition are still available for £5 each. If you would like one…

  • Desk Research: Two Horseshoes

    When it comes to catastrophic flooding in Essex 1953 tends to get all the coverage, but the inundation of 1897 was equally noteworthy – after breaches in the sea walls 30-35,000 acres of farmland were underwater. Eventually most of that land was re-claimed, but a stretch of the north bank of the Crouch, near North…

  • Desk Research: Dengie Woodland

    Mixed-bag of weather today that made walking far undesirable, especially after yesterday’s puddlicious Southend trip. Burnham’s little library has a small local history/topography collection with enough in it to hold one’s attention quite a while – including a copy of the book of the great Chapman/André 1777 map of Essex. Another map has captured my…

  • Ultra Dengie: Southend-on-Sea

    A trip out to meet Graham Burnett at home in Westcliff-on-Sea. Travelled by train BoC to Wickford on the branch, then down the mainline to Southend Victoria. A little exploration around rainbound Southend before going on to Graham’s. I made the regular pilgrimage down the High Street to look out over the Thames Estuary from…

  • Beating the Bounds 3: Coastal Path at Battlesbridge

    From the cafe on the upper storey of the Antiques Centre in the old mill at Battlesbridge a view of the River Crouch. Battlesbridge is the head of the River Crouch navigation, the upper reach of the tidal zone and site of the most easterly bridge over the river. Geographically Battlesbridge sits at the south…