February 8, 2005: Enfield Lock to Chigwell
A couple of old Coots
Over five months had to pass before the Lees and I were ready to inaugurate the 2005 hiking season with another walk on the London Outer Orbital Path. We were taking a chance with such a wintry start, but as the weather for this February Tuesday promised to be dry, mostly sunny and with temperatures as high as 50 – and since I had found a stretch that would involve only eight and half miles – we made the decision to go ahead. I left the house shortly after 9:00 and was soon aboard a Bakerloo Line train bound for Baker Street. It was rather a slow moving enterprise and so was the Hammersmith and City train headed for Liverpool Street; it stopped between most of the stations and I was worried that I would be late for my 9:45 rendezvous with the Lees. A young chap offered me a seat on the second train but I refused to admit that I was so old that I needed such a gesture and remained on my feet. I made it on time, but the Lees too were slowed by recalcitrant transportation and arrived ten minutes late. There was just time for Tosh to buy some coffee before we boarded the 10:03 Stansted train and began our journey. None of us paid anything for transportation today – as all our travel was within the remit of our freedom passes.
I began a long summary of our November trip to India, which the Lees had helped to plan, and we were still on this subject when, after 25 minutes or so, we left the train at Enfield Lock. Tosh had to borrow my baseball cap here – I usually wore my wool bobble hat and my leather jacket on this cool day – often with scarf. We crossed the railway line and turned right on shabby Bradley Road, retracing our September steps back to the Turkey Brook – here running in a trash-filled culvert. We turned east, our dominant direction for the day, and crossed a minor road, using a metaled path to reach a footbridge over a second highway. There was some weak sunshine about and ahead we could see some hills, a geographical feature not seen in some time on this walk.
On the other side of the road bridge we reached Enfield Lock itself and here, along the edges of a canal, were many reminders of the small arms industry that had produced the famous Lee Enfield rifle. We turned right along a towpath of the Lee Navigation, passed the litter-strewn Swan and Pike Pool on our left, and reached a car park where a chap was unloading three brown Dachshunds. We continued to follow channels and surmount bridges in a stretch where use of the guidebook text was a necessity – since it was hard to reconcile our progress with the yellow streak representing the route on the OS map in David Sharp’s book.
On our right was the grassy embankment of King George’s Reservoir and, leaving the canals behind, we entered the Sewardstone Marsh Nature Reserve and continued east – first on grassy paths, then on concrete. After a stretch on Godwin Close we turned right on the A112; Sharp says that the Royal Oak Pub has here turned mauve and become Freddies, but, in fact, the pub, which was derelict, was now cheek by jowl with a construction site. Across the road there were two stiles admitting us to a wet field; adorning the first of these was a supplication: “Please take your dogs excrement home with you.”
We headed toward our first encounter with the Sewardstone Hills as grayness returned to the skies and visibility receded – passing a hut and rising on a cinder track toward woodland. Tosh was here complaining about the shiny lipstick on the mouths of BBC news presenters but this rant did not prevent us from locating another stile (many of these today) leading the way into woods and then out to a grassy hilltop where we persevered against the woodland edge and obtained views of the reservoir and its even larger companion, the William Girling – together the two supply London with a quarter of its water supply.
I have to say that not every detail in the text seemed to conform to my expectations, but LOOP signage was pretty good (I’d give it a B+ for the day) and so once we had attained level ground we ploughed through more wet fields and into a boggy strip of the Sewardstone Green, an extension of Epping Forest itself. When we reached a roadway there was no waymark but I chose the correct direction, right, and we soon reached the pond of Carrols Farm, where the front door and its overhanging lintel failed to line up. I had a strong instinct to turn right here and it was only with reluctance that I followed the guidebook instruction and turned left – perhaps I would have been less discomfited had I been wearing my compass; it came out of my pack a few minutes later.
The return of the sun also helped in orienteering. We walked along the edge of a busy road and turned right at the entry to Gilwell Park, an international complex for the Boy Scout movement (more complaints from Tosh, this time about the Scouts’ homophobia). There were quite a few young men about with knapsacks and maps.
We made a left turn and headed down an old lane but where it turned west there was an inviting branch heading straight ahead and I had to call the Lees back to make a close study of my maps. There was no LOOP waymark at this parting of the ways, but I felt I could see that our way forward was on another path down a steep hillside and that to reach ours required us to follow the lane around the hilltop. Sure enough when this track began its descent there was a LOOP waymark inviting us to step into the sunshine and begin our own descent along a muddy ride.
It was lovely to be out in the country again and the sunshine certainly provided a cheering note. Although the atmosphere was still wintry there was much birdsong in the trees and the feathery friends were everywhere – especially the magpies. At the valley bottom we made our way through a quagmire and began another ascent along a grassy ride. We had Hawk Wood on our left as we made steady progress uphill (I was having no difficulties with these exertions, in spite of the long layoff, though my back was a little stiff and my right ankle a bit wonky).
We attained a crossing track as the sun again retreated from the skies and here we made a left turn, trying to find less muddy patches in the track while golfers dressed in red thwacked away on our right. In this fashion we reached Bury Road and turned south to head for Chingford. Tosh had been whining almost since the outset about the need for food and now we had the opportunity of seeing if we could find some.
Sharp promises a Willow Café on the roadside between two halves of the local golf course but this place had become a truck stop renamed the Tee Shop and it was not at all promising. On a hilltop to our left was a roadhouse of a pub and so, since our route seemed to pass behind it (no help from waymarks here) we decided to make a beeline for the establishment, again climbing a wet field to reach the parking lot of the Royal Forest pub. It was 1:00 and we had covered some four and half miles.
We found a table in the busy franchised roadhouse and Tosh went to the bar for some liquid (mine was a mineral water). While she and Harold were fetching the drinks a lady rushed up and asked if she could have the Nectar Points that such a purchase might have earned. Then we studied the extensive menus and made our choices. Tosh had a steak baguette, Harold fish and chips, and I had the liver and bacon. I was again laboring with the complexities of the Atkins Diet and this meant that my mashed potatoes went untasted. Still it was a pleasant enough meal and we used the time to talk about our Lakeland outing in June – Tosh had already created a potential problem by applying for Wimbledon tickets for the last day of this walk. Harold said that now that we had our dates straightened out he would reserve some days in Hammersmith Hospital in case he needed them – as he did last June.
After our meal we had coffee (I had a cappuccino), with Tosh now complaining about the little paper napkins that Brewer’s Fayre likes to insert between cup and saucer. The Nectar Points lady tried to insert her card here too. Tosh also gave a poor review to something purchased in the ladies room – a chewable object called a “fuzzy brush.” It came in a little plastic globe which I claimed in case I wanted any further Captain Queeg moments on this trip. Harold and I used the loos and we left at about 2:00.
Outside we had a look at the unusual building that once served as Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge. Then we crossed the busy A1069 and followed a muddy trackway that paralleled the highway as it headed east. There were lots of warning signs suggesting that the Ride was closed (Maximum fine £200) but we assumed that this was meant for horse people and persevered until it was time to continue uphill on a grassy path adjacent to the woodland on our left. At the top of this hill we reached the A104. Here we were directed to take a path to the right of a terrace of cottages. As we headed into woodland there were two ways forward and Tosh chose the road less muddied, but I had to call a halt to this because I felt we needed to be on the right. We climbed over a tree and rejoined the other path – which soon emerged at the edges of a cricket field.
We soon reached the A121 and turned left. I had the impression that our next landmark, the Roebuck Hotel, had disappeared in another construction site (luxury flats) but the red pillar box we were looking for was still visible and so, too, the bollards in front to a metaled track, and thus we were able to begin a descent amid back yards. Here Tosh was explaining that both of her children had been delighted by her latest present to them – plastic plants. Our route wound around to the east again and began a descent into the Rodding Valley. Suburbia was omnipresent now and we were losing any sense of remote countryside. All this time I was fumbling in my pockets for any sign of the pen I had used at lunch to note down the name of the pub. I couldn’t find it until, at a stile, Harold noted a pen lying at the foot of the far side of this structure. I had a hole in the right hand front pocket of my cords and the pen must have been working its way down my leg for the last two miles – for here it was at last, expelled by the lifting of my leg over the barrier.
We now passed over a branch of the Central Line and turned north on Thaxted Road. At the bottom of the hill there was a path through a little grassy park; our route crossed several roads and reached the Rodding Valley Open Space – where there was a large colony of Canada Geese grazing on the grass. At a distance they looked like small antelopes on the Serengeti. We reached the banks of a lake (a gravel pit excavated in the construction of the nearby M11). We turned right here and passed around the head of the lake (swans, mallards, coots) where fishermen had set up tents. “Nothing since Saturday,” one of them said when Tosh asked him how well he was doing.
We used a footbridge to cross over the swiftly moving Rodding River and emerged onto a track around a sports complex. I could see that we had just about exhausted the muddy surfaces that had dominated the day’s progress so I began to look for a stick with which to clean my boots – which had been growing alarming projections in all directions. We followed the access road for the sports complex out to the B170 and turned left on the latter to cross over the roaring motorway and head into Chigwell itself. The Lees were slowed here by their usual front garden inventories, but this gave me time to take several layers off my boots. An Asian chap in a UCLA sweatshirt was jogging up the pavement toward us and I think I rather startled him by saying, “All right, go Bruins!”
At Brook Parade we turned right and headed past apartment complexes and into the shopping precincts of Chigwell – it was just going 4:00; Harold could already see the tube station and Tosh was beginning to fret about the likelihood of a toilet here. They were reluctant at the station to part with the key to such a facility since the loos were undergoing refurbishment, but she persisted – they were unlocked anyway, it turned out. The need to return the key caused us to miss a train; we had to wait for another twelve minutes for a second one and it took us only as far as Woodford, where we waited another ten minutes for an Ealing Broadway train. The Lees left this at Holborn and I continued on to Oxford Circus before switching back to the Bakerloo Line – where I had to stand for several stops. I was quite stiff as I mounted the stairs at Maida Vale and yet I felt quite pleased with the day’s outing. There was still a bit of light in the sky as I returned at 5:30
Our next walk was:
Day 11: Hatton Cross to Uxbridge
To continue from Chigwell you need: