by Adams, Max;
At Chipping Ongar, soaked from walking through damp undergrowth and heartily wishing that the rain would give over, I stopped for supplies and more refreshment—tea and cake, fruit, oatcakes and cheese—and paused long enough to be enraptured by a barney between two aggressive men over a parking space, oblivious to onlookers as if they were performing some sort of street theatre. The church in Ongar is flint-walled; inside (out of the rain) is a sublime hammer-beam roof. I circled the small town centre looking for its motte-and-bailey castle and just managed to catch a glimpse through dense undergrowth of a ditch and bank, much neglected.
From the back end of Ongar I dodged around the edges of a couple of fields and a sports ground, cutting downslope across the natural grain of the land until I reached the banks of a small stream. Meadow and arable fields sloped up gently on either side. The waters were fringed with hawthorn, whose creamy blush had passed, and elder, whose champagne blossoms were just beginning to scent the air seductively. Both banks were lined with pollard osier willows, the withies of which were once such an important source of material for baskets, fish-traps, fencing and shelter. The stream was sinuous, slow-moving—sluggish almost, despite the rain. Flag irises abounded. This was the River Roding which, rising at Dunmow twenty miles to the north, emerges into the Thames as Barking Creek. Many, if not most, British rivers have pre-English, Brythonic names. The native predecessor of the Roding is lost; it was renamed for the numerous settlements in this modest valley which carry the moniker of the East Saxon progenitor Hrotha, whose descendants called themselves Hrothingas, or Rodings. There are still eight Roding parishes, very rare survivors of a single contiguous Dark Age landholding, later variously carved up between monasteries, kings and local magnates but still somehow retaining their historical identity through fifteen centuries or so. With no trace of irony, the path that runs along the west bank of the Roding is called the Essex Way.
It is tempting to imagine the entrepreneurial Saxon, sailing across the Frisian Sea from his homeland at the base of the Jutland peninsula, navigating with a small band of warriors up the Thames and along a promising creek until the dwindling draught of the stream brought him and his two or three keels to this small patch of paradise. Tempting, yes; but what we don’t know is whether these early Germanic settlers were invitees or invaders; whether they recolonised a land emptied by plague and civil war (as the British monk Gildas would have us believe); or if they came as a protection squad hired by the local British squire with his eligible daughter—and took it over by marriage rather than by force (or both), as the legends of the Kentish Chronicles suggest. Whatever the means and motives, it turned out to be a good gig. Such petty fiefdoms which historians suppose were forged in the chaos or lassitude of the fifth century merged with, or were subsumed by, larger polities during the sixth century. Many Roding equivalents made up the kingdom of the East Saxons which emerges in the pages of Bede. In Early Medieval Britain kingdoms came in all sizes, from the giants of the so-called heptarchy30—Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia, Sussex, East Anglia, Kent and Essex—down to much more Roding-like entities clinging to independence just long enough to be recorded in a list called the Tribal Hidage: the Arosaetna of the valley of the River Arrow in what is now Worcestershire; the East and West Wixna of the Fens; the unidentified Færpingas (a mere three hundred ‘hides’ or farms) and the Lindisfaran, the people of Lindsey.31
At Fyfield, a couple of miles upstream, drenched in that resigned, slightly warm, can’t-get-any-wetter kind of way that somehow comforts, I saw the river grow wider and deeper, as if its lower reaches were a disguise, a topographical sleight of hand. I found my way to the Black Bull Inn, there being no campsite within reach, and was glad to be able to dry some of my gear, eat a hot meal (like the vehicles hereabouts, the meal was supersized; I wondered what all the other punters had done that day to deserve theirs) and enjoy a pint of beer. The sun came out. I lanced a blistered toe and studied the map for my onward trail. Less than a month later, Fyfield and the Rodings were the object of a latter-day European invasion, the outrageous travelling circus that calls itself the Tour de France. The Tour passed through, wowed the twenty-first-century descendants of Hrotha, and rode on, in all likelihood never to return.
Wednesday was a long, hard slog, mostly on tarmac roads and then through chest-high fields of damp, sticky, stinky rape. Overgrown and unused public footpaths, ill-marked and clogged with bramble and nettle, slowed me down. More back lanes; more rain. Huge houses set in green acres, cars the size of sheds—all privilege and privacy—and no one to meet by chance or talk to; no walkers of any kind. I took a guilty bus ride through the sprawl of Chelmsford (at the slightly shabby bus station, bedraggled and tending to my sore feet, I did not feel out of place) and so gained a few necessary miles as I headed east towards estuarine Essex. Yet more back lanes, a moated manor, then a busy A-road with a diamond-tipped squall dead in my face; lines of suburban semis, the southern outskirts of Maldon and endless flat square fields. I found my path between two houses (abandoned children’s plastic buggies and bikes in scrappy front gardens; garage doors open to reveal more junk; cars half-parked on the pavement). More or less beyond caring, I zig-zagged through a farmyard and followed a track past a field of amiable bullocks. Ahead of me the horizon was truncated by the grey-green line of a levée, and beyond that, with a thrill that never diminishes, I caught sight of the masts of what turned out to be two Thames barges lying-to in the estuary of the River Blackwater. I breasted the levée—this was land inundated in the terrible storm of 1953—and came out onto Southey creek, with Northey Island before me connected to the mainland shore by a slim, crescent causeway. On either side, milky water mirrored a still-angry sky, although the rain seemed finally to be easing. Wading birds browsed at the water’s edge. Mudflat and saltmarsh oozed. Behind me a cuckoo called; the nosey bullocks in the field below nudged each other to get a better look at the stranger. Otherwise, it was as if the day, making terms with itself, had come to rest: all was silent and peaceful. The creeks and low islands, the expanse of the sky and the estuary, gave the scene a limitless quality; it was a tone-poem in grey-blue and sea green, from the palette of Turner.
Three weeks before Whitsun, in the year 991, this was the site of a great battle between the armies of King Æthelred II32 and a Norwegian warlord. A cursory note in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts that in this year Ipswich was harried, that Ealdorman Byrhtnoth was slain at Maldon and that it was decided, for the first time, to pay the Danes off with a fabulous treasure amounting to ten thousand pounds. The bulk of an epic poem describing the engagement on this spot has come down to us. A Viking fleet, it seems, had sailed up the Blackwater, then called the River Pant, some ten miles inland from the open waters of the North Sea. The king’s levies tracked its progress and came to meet it two miles south-east of Maldon—then, as now, a settlement of fishers, traders and salters. The Norwegians, under their chief Olaf Trygvasson (King of Norway 995–1000), landed on Northey Island, directly opposite the point where I now sat mesmerised by the timeless and ethereal magic common to those places where land, sea and sky meet in stratified perfection.
With the causeway evidently covered at high tide, Olaf called across the narrow strait—no more than a hundred and fifty paces wide—challenging the English, arrayed on the bank in their battle finery and bristling with spears in the close-press of a shield wall, to ‘send treasure quickly in return for peace’. The ealdorman’s reply was such as to stir the blood of his warriors.
Byrhtnoth lifted up his voice, grasped his shield and shook his supple spear, gave forth words, angry and resolute, and made him answer: ‘Hear you, sea-rover, what this folk say? For tribute they will give you spears, poisoned point and ancient sword…’33
The two armies faced each other, then, with slack water between them just as it seemed now: silent, perhaps, apart from the clank and chink of war-gear—straps, buckles, mail shirts and helmets; or hurling insults at each other, jeering, nerves at breakin
g strain and eager for battle, the smell of sweat and fear in the air. A warrior called Wulfstan was given the honour of going out to hold the passage single-handed; he it was who felled the first enemy to step onto the causeway as the tide fell, hurling his javelin and raising a cheer on the English side. Olaf then asked Byrhtnoth if he would not let his foes across, to fight in straight and fair battle. The ealdorman’s pride was pricked; he assented as the line of the causeway began to emerge from the ebbing tide clad in seaweed. The enemy did not wait to cross dry shod…
The wolves of slaughter pressed forward, they recked not for the water, that Viking host; west over Pante, over the gleaming water they came with their bucklers, the seamen came to land with their linden shields. There, ready to meet the foe, stood Byrhtnoth and his men. He bade them form the war-hedge with their shields, and hold their ranks stoutly against the foe. The battle was now at hand, and the glory that comes in strife. Now was the time when those who were doomed should fall. Clamour arose; ravens went circling, the eagle greedy for carrion. There was a cry upon earth.
No other Early Medieval battle site has been identified with such precision; and apart from the levée and the draining of the fens the landscape cannot have changed much in the intervening eleven hundred years. It is still a place of small sailing boats, sucking mud, of lapping tides and the snake-rattle of breeze through sedge and reed, the indignant squawk of the oystercatcher and the sham pleading ‘peevit’ of the lapwing. This is an Essex where the East Saxon is still present in spirit. With not a single other living soul in sight, I contemplated the poetic thuggery of Anglo-Saxon warfare against this most unwarlike backdrop, picked up my pack and walked out onto the causeway. Northey Island belongs to the National Trust and you need permission to step on it; but I thought I might at least take to the causeway and cross far enough to look back at the battle site, imagining the slaughter as Byrhtnoth’s ranks began to fail, their leader cut down. The rampaging Vikings took the field and the glory that day.
To the north I could see the spire of a church on the skyline, and Maldon’s nestled houses looking down on its Hythe, a bristle of masts along the upper reaches of the River Chelmer. From behind me, on the island, came the diesel roar of a tractor towing a trailer loaded with hay bales for the bullocks. I stepped off the neck of the causeway to let the farmer pass, we exchanged a wave and he rumbled over the narrow road. I bent to scrutinise my map. Halfway across his tyres splashed through water and I suddenly realised that I had come here not at slack water or at the beginning of the ebb, as I had thought, but a little before spring high tide: the causeway was flooding as I watched. It was time to leg it before, like Olaf’s warband, I became trapped on the island, a desert castaway in a land of tides, mud and lowering sky.
Maldon was a delight. I enjoyed a coffee and a large slice of cake and eavesdropped on a fascinating conversation about someone’s son home from the wars in ‘the Afghan’. The quayside bustle, the jumble of traditional craft and the sheer three-dimensionality of the town, rising up from the water’s edge in an irresistible organic, muddled palimpsest of ages, restored the spirits, and I went looking for my campsite tired but satisfied.
MALDON MARSHES
On the following day I walked along the back lanes of another Essex; the genteel hedgerowed farmland of Margery Allingham’s fictional detective Albert Campion, a mid-twentieth-century parody of Lord Peter Wimsey. At Tolleshunt Major I passed her house, a splendid Georgian street-fronting townhouse. In the perfect, rustic hamlet of Salcott-cum-Virley—a reference to early salt production—I imagined myself in a 1930s mystery set in a vicarage. Missing my path and, perhaps, guilty of dreaming, I stopped in the churchyard for an oatcake and to consult the map. I had come too far: to a dead end, in fact. A small sign said ‘church wharf’; inadvertently I had reached another end of Essex, where the fingers of the small Salcott Channel reach deep inland. I rather liked the idea of a vicar having his own wharf, perhaps supplying complicit villagers with cross-Channel contraband or smuggling detectives out from the clutches of their pursuers.
At any rate, I had to turn back and make a large loop to achieve that day’s target. The Island of Mersea, with the sites of pre-Conquest churches at either end of its five-mile length, can only be reached by another Dark Age causeway still called, as it probably was when built, the Strood. This causeway was constructed in the late seventh century during the reign of King Sæbbi—a saintly monarch—using thousands of oak piles sunk into the mud of the Pyefleet channel. It is now hidden beneath a modern, busy concrete roadway with a narrow footpath alongside. Mersea might, like Maldon, have evoked the spirit of the Saxon seafarer. Instead, it was all blue-rinse teashops and static caravans—but it gave me a chance to get off tarmac roads and walk along its sand-and-shingle beach accompanied by mile after mile of bright-painted beach huts. The rain of the last two days had given way to sunshine and the sea sparkled. Shading my eyes and looking south I could see the monstrous form of Bradwell nuclear power station standing megalithic on the horizon. Bradwell makes no more electricity, having outlived the Magnox reactor that powered its turbines; but they say another will rise in its place. Given the way the world is going, nuclear power doesn’t seem quite so sinister these days as it did in my 1970s youth; not by comparison with environmental meltdown and rumbling Middle-East tribal conflict. Still, it’s hard to like the idea.
In the second half of the third century Bradwell was part of a great late-Roman project: here was built one of the forts of the Saxon Shore—known as Othona—constructed to deter Germanic pirates from harrying the east and south-east coasts of Britain and upsetting its solid citizens. St Cedd, one of four remarkable evangelising Northumbrian brothers and Lindisfarne-trained, founded a church within the walls in 654; it still stands, a reminder not only of the relationship between Roman fort and early church (the fabric contains reused Roman brick and stone), but also of my inevitable inability to get to all the places I would have liked to visit. Some other time, perhaps.
The only way off the east end of Mersea island, as my campsite-manager friend Jane informed me, was to call the ferryman at Brightlingsea on the far side of the River Colne, this being outside of the school holidays when he runs a regular service. So the next morning, at a leisurely ten o’clock, I sat on a shingle beach gulping in sunshine and fresh sea air, with dry clothes and feet, watching the boats go by and waiting for my ferryman to see me back to the mainland. I fell into conversation with two women who, having escaped their husbands by the simple expedient of stealing their campervan, were having a jolly time exploring the coastal villages of the county. Very Margery Allingham. They caught me scribbling in my diary and, thinking I might be an artist (if only), came to see what I was about. That I was a writer actually writing a book seemed to console them, and we spent a very lovely half-hour in chit-chat before I was whisked off the beach and carried over to Brightlingsea to continue my trek.
Inland again, following the south bank of St Osyth creek as far as the village of the same name. St Osyth is said to have been a granddaughter of Penda of Mercia, King Oswald’s slayer. She was forced into a political marriage with King Sighere of the East Saxons but chose, like many royal women of the era, to abdicate, found a monastery and take the veil before being killed during a pirate raid at the end of the seventh century. The priory, refounded in her name after the Conquest, still boasts a gatehouse whose magnificence testifies to the one-time wealth of its canons. More interesting for me was the boatyard that lay below the bridge across the creek. A jumble of mastless barges lay high and almost dry in the mud as if their owners had no intention of them sailing again. All sorts of improvised and bespoke structures adorned these half-earthbound dwellings: small pot-plant gardens; children’s swings on foredecks; miniature corrugated-iron extensions. There were ancient steam-driven cranes and winches; what looked like a conservatory clad in the vernacular style of the local houses with creosoted clapperboard, its windows shimmering in the hot sun; the chimneys of pot-
bellied stoves poking through painted decks: all jumble, chaos and individuality, an antidote to the prevailing cult of exclusivity and conformity followed by much of the rest of Essex. A community of perhaps thirty or forty people lives here in attractive, slightly eccentric denial of the over-wealthy, complacent county to whose salty margins they cling.
Leaving the village I had to compete with a main road and roadworks for a few hundred yards. The traffic spat freshly laid gravel at me. A man in a low-slung Corsa didn’t much like sharing the road and shouted abuse at me from his window. It was too hot for such irritations. I found my trail and crossed a prairie expanse of hedgeless fields; for once the paths were well marked, or at least visible, and some of them had been recently trodden. Out of a sea of cabbages three white monsters rose, soaring high into the deep blue sky. Built by a race of giants to tame the heavenly breath of the wind, their blades swished and thrummed through the air in an unstoppable, relentless rhythm and I wondered if some future ambulist, long after their blades had stopped turning, would attribute to them the spirits of ancient ancestors, frozen and trapped for ever like trolls turned to stone with the break of day. I felt a fleeting Don Quixote desire to tilt at these giants, but in the end we tolerated each other’s presence. They got on with the business of making electricity; I headed north-east for Harwich.
