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 unchanging backwaters. The Essex countryside is similarly best appreciated with this mediated level of romanticism. In recent times, this has been a landscape of practical livers and market garden growers to the city, evidenced by the giant nurseries and rubbish tips. Reaching back further, this was once upon a time, a rich man's hunting ground and deer park.

I woke at the Dobbs Weir Campsite to the unfamiliar sound of cuckoos and oyster catchers. From the entrance, cross the road and take the footpath through Dobbs Weir itself. This was once a fishing weir but became a major navigation turnpike after the 1500s. Rejoin the road at the pub and cross immediately over after the Dobbs Weir bridge to turn south on the tow path of the Lee Navigation. Follow the number 1 cycle route to leave the canal to walk between the lakes, south of Nazeing Mead. Join Meadgate Road and go south on Sedge Green. This continues on Pook's Hill. Turn left into Maplecroft and at Banes Down, turn left and take footpath at the cul de sac. You go over a footbridge and bear left. This was quite nettley. Descend east at the back of some nurseries and left from a track onto Hoe Lane. I think the map varies a little from real life, especially as I remember exiting onto a track via a wooden door.

At the corner, take the footpath with the trespassing warning and walk through the overgrown field to the back of another greenhouse. This lead into a very overgrown tree tunnel and eventually out to Back Lane. Turn left and very soon, right again on another footpath. You'll find yourself on the Stort Valley Way, going north on Betts Lane. Continue round to the right and cross Common Road. You'll be on the road to Lodge Farm on Nazeingwood Common. This is marked as access land but the farmer is unwilling to let you wander. It had some very ancient and unique Commons rights in the past and had been afforested since the 14th century. During WWII, it was a decoy airfield and since, what was largely marsh was ploughed up for pasture. Lodge Farm is from the 1600s and was the replacement for the lodge ordered to be built by Henry VIII.

At the farm building you find yourself on the Three Forests Way heading southeast. You'll hit Epping Long Green with a bridleway paralleling the footpath west. Apparently, this 800 year old track would have been a bustling ridgeway into London, the footpath through the marsh, a bit drier under foot than the bridleway. This manages to be the Forest Way, Three Forests Way and Stort Valley Way, all at the same time. Continue on the bridleway along the southern side of Copy Wood and further on to the barns at Harold's Park Wildland. The Harold in question was that of the last Saxon king and the area is the remains of a deer park.

The purchase of the farm has been by the company Nattergal, non-executively chaired by Charlie Burrell of Sussex's own Knepp rewilding fame. Some might wonder how money is to be made from a once not very profitable arable and Christmas Tree farm. It seems the model relies on investment by businesses looking to offset their development activities for the purposes of 'biodiversity net gain'. Rewilding at Knepp has been happening over the last 20 years on land owned by one family for hundreds of years.  While you can visit for free (without a car), you can also pay a premium to camp and eat. There is less pressure on this land to be anything else it might have been in the recent past.

It is interesting to see the positive changes just a couple of years have made for this Essex Farm but I admit some queasiness in regard to the business. Nature is to be made an 'investible asset class'. There was silly old me thinking saving, say, amphibians from extinction was a good thing. Just how successful for BNG has been and will be for actual nature is yet to be fully realised and is hotly debated. Rewilding is one way developers can gain credits and even the Wildlife Trusts are not averse in making a similar offering. I don't quite know how I feel about this but this kind of indirect gesture has the flavour of airlines buying carbon credits while chugging us into a climate catastrophe.

Developers will argue that the BNG scheme provides perverse barriers to development but time will tell where the perversity scores the most. Many point to calculations that appear to be hundreds of percentages of poorly-evidenced gain. Detractors from rewilding projects will bemoan conflict on rights of way for dog-walkers as free-roaming animals from the past attempt to restore and inhabit a place natural to 1000s of years ago. Not all locals are protective of the activities of Tamworth pigs, let alone beavers. Others will mourn the loss of prime agricultural land.

Maybe I'm wrong to be worried and I hope I am because it is clear, what was once one noble's hunting ground might be a future eagle's, just as once it was forest, was marsh, was farm, is scrub.

After a tour in the rain, return to Broxbourne was made by a general westerly way by road.