I was doing some idle googling along the lines of ‘What makes a good walk?’ ‘What do
people look for in a walk?’ and so on, because I’m not certain that I really know. Growth,
good mental healthy, inspiration, enlightenment, communion with nature, all seem to be in
the frame, and I’m not so crass as to belittle these things, but other people’s absolute
certainty about walking does worry me a bit. Isn’t there room for ambivalence and doubt?
In my googling I found a 2016 article by Kevin Rushby in the Guardian headlined ‘What makes a great walk.’ Kevin is not trouble by uncertainty. He writes, ‘What makes a great walk remains the gift of nature: the subtle alchemy of landscape, elements and path that is transformed into a dramatic stage for your pleasure and experience by the magical spell of your own tramping feet.’
Well, I dunno. What I currently look for in a walk, as I pursue two of my ongoing minor obsessions, are obelisks and bunkers. So imagine my delight when I discovered that Great Oakley in Essex has one of each. My amanuensis and I set off on a field trip.
The obelisk, as I discovered, is part of a war memorial right in the center of the village, in the middle of a very small car park. It’s solid and a bit stubby but it’s most definitely an obelisk. A plaque on it says it was originally dedicated in 1920, then restored and rededicate in 2009, which seems rather a long time. It was wet when I was there. It used to look like this, when it was dry:
I read on the Imperial War Museum site that it was designed by an architect name of Vincent Brown about whom I can find no information
The ‘bunker’ is in fact a World War 2 pillbox, a fortification against the possible invading German troops. According to a notice board on the side of the structure, there were steel cables running across the road from the pillbox to a couple of concrete posts (which must really have thrilled the local farmers), and there were also barrels of petrol buried in the ground nearby. The inside looks like this
But what makes this pillbox special, as you may have spotted, it’s in somebody's front garden. I think I’d like to have a pillbox or bunker in my garden. Think of the photo-shoots, the parties, the ‘sound experiments’ with Theremins and drone machines, the war reenactments, the Sadean high jinx.
You might have to put up with people staring into your garden but that’d be a small price to pay.
Of course any good walk contains a mystery. Walking east along the main road, past a new stretch of suburbia you come to a sign for The Soils. Again, my research has failed me. I don’t know is this refers to the earth, as in the Parable of the Soil, or whether it’s as in ‘I soiled myself’ and might be the site of a former dung heap of midden.
Nearby there is Soils Wood, so maybe it’s the name of a local grandee.
Back in the village, should you need an encounter with nature (and agriculture) there was a big field of rape, with mud that looked like it would have swallowed you up to the knees. That’s some subtle alchemy all right.
