A week at the Wick

Tom and I did not have a break over the festive season, so we went away last week. With cold, bright weather all over the UK, it was a good week for a wee holiday, and we happened to have chosen a very good place to go to. We went to the Wick.

This is Tollesbury Wick, a fascinating area of the Essex marshes.

We had never been to Tollesbury, nor indeed to Essex, and did not really know what to expect.

We were completely blown away by – and fell in love with – this beautiful and intriguing landscape quite unlike the landscapes that we know and love in Scotland.

A saltmarsh is one of those definitively liminal places, continually hovering between earth and water, a little like the Doirlinn, perhaps, shifting with each tide.

On our daily walks around the sea wall, we saw marsh harriers hunting, and golden plovers pottering about in salty pools with their lapwing friends. I became foolishly excited by the sight of an egret (a bird that has not yet made it north to Scotland), was pleased to test my duck-identification-skills on a pochard, and enjoyed the gaggling rise and fall of many different types of geese.

The Wick is a carefully managed landscape, with channels of salt water both let in and kept at bay.

The sea provides this salty landscape’s energy and its lifeblood. And yet it is the force that threatens it as well.

Home to many important and rare species of birds, plants and insects, this is also a landscape to whose management domestic livestock are crucial. The marsh-grazing sheep of Mell and Wick farms thrive here.

Staying in a converted hexagonal radar tower (about which I’ll say more later) gave us an opportunity to really enjoy the Wick – from every possible angle!

Each day brought another marvellous sunrise and sunset across the wintery marsh . . .

And we loved the way the stark angles and shadows of Bradwell power station (decommissioned) shifted back and forth, telling the time of day.

Tramping for miles around the wick each day was an unexpected joy. Just turn to the left or to the right and you’ll find two different, equally fabulous circular walks!

Tollesbury itself is a great place, with lovely welcoming people, who made us feel quite at home.

A real place, a distinctive place, with a strong sense of itself.

We enjoyed our time in Tollesbury, around the Wick, and the wider Blackwater estuary very much indeed.

Of course we went there for a reason, about which I can say nothing just yet. . .

. . . but of which you’ll learn in time.

Thank you, Essex, for a great week of R&R