Hunting the Wild
LEE VALLEY COUNTRY PARK TO HAROLD'S PARK WILDLAND AND BACK TO BROXBOURNE STATION Not the most attractive route but ideal for the purpose of visiting a newish rewilding site. A little flavour of the Essex hinterland. A contemplation of land use and biodiversity from the time of Godwinson through to the present. This is the second leg of a convenient side-quest on my way to visit my mum in Suffolk. East Anglia was my childhood home and this was this journey's ultimate destination. The visual landscape of Ipswich and its environs is a topographical world away from the chalk anticline hills of Sussex but the county shares the familiar chalk and glacial clay sediment of the good old Weald. There are, of course, the special heaths and bird lands of the coast, common to the southeast but my old haunts were enclosed by industrial-scale farming. Pig houses, farm aromas and hayfeverish, gaudy rape expanses. The punctuation of ancient farmsteads, concrete barns, pylons, pheasants and unc...
