The beautiful 81-mile walk through rolling Essex countryside to seaside town
Essex is home to vast amounts of beautiful countryside and a walk allows visitors to easily explore some of the best bits. The 81-mile long Essex Way guides walkers through woodlands, open farmland, river valleys and leafy greenery before reaching the coast.
It starts on the Essex and London border at Epping tube station, the final stop on the commuter's heartbeat Central Line. It then twists and turns through various landscapes before culminating at Harwich station on the Essex coast.
The walk offers a close-up look at some of the amazing scenery that Essex has to offer. Walkers will pass through where deer once stepped in woodland at Ongar Great Park as well as being close to one of England's earliest English settlements at Cressing Temple.
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The 12th century Bradwell Church is another attraction along the walk. At 81-miles long the route is to be more easily completed when broken down into sections.
The long-distance trek is well sign-posted and Essex County Council has produced a helpful guidebook with maps of the sections too. The route's journey through various historic towns and villages also allow for easy to stopping points for those wanting to take a momentary pause or stay in accommodation.
The walk stretches past the site of Willingale Airfield, used between June 1943 and July 1944 as a base for 2000 US Airforce personnel. In the village of Willingale there are curiously two churches in one graveyard.
The route is steeped in history and along the way there are windmills, a church with a round tower, a huge railway viaduct and lighthouses. The remarkable two towers at Mistley are another grand historical feature on the walk.
For those who make it into Harwich, it is more than just a port town and is full of history, including at Dovercourt Bay a pair of strange-looking iron lighthouses built in 1863. The Electric Palace Cinema is Britain’s oldest purpose-built cinema, while the Naval Redoubt is a circular fortification built during the Napoleonic Wars to protect the harbour against the French.
Half Penny Pier has a 19th century ticket office, which was a departure point for steamships to Europe. Harwich Beach is near the historic town on the estuary of the rivers Stour and Orwell.
It is not a bathing beach, but is an example of an emerging dune system, where the coast is predominately saltmarsh. It is ideal for a walk along the seashore in this underrated town, but if you have just completed the Essex Way, that is unlikely to be at the top of the to do list.