Again, a walk taken from the Time Out Book of Country Walks, walk 39, circular based on Manningtree in Essex (TM094322)
Although fairly flat, this area on the border of Essex and Suffolk (The Dedham Vale AONB) has some delightful views. Inevitably, given the geography and the time of year, parts of the walk were very wet, with a couple of detours around flooding needed and a fair amount of mud (on which I blame the rather disproportionate ache in my legs today!)
The area is most famous for the paintings of John Constable, born in East Bergholt. The walk passes the scenes of a number of his paintings, including
The Cornfield (TM069340) and The Hay Wain (TM077332).
Although you can see the impact of modern agriculture – even a couple of field boundaries shown on a 1998 map have disappeared – you can imagine that much of the area looks unchanged – in particular the view at Flatford Mill shown in The Hay Wain looks almost identical…
