I got up slowly and flexed my leg. My muscles ached and my feet felt like they had been whipped with bamboo. I could walk. I could carry on. I am not sure that I was pleased at the time.

The morning’s walk began pleasantly enough though. After a few photographs with the people we had been staying with, Pauline then led me slowly along a back route of alleyways to Colchester’s city centre park. I am glad we had this quiet time together as it made me question a number of prejudices I had about Colchester. Colchester- Squaddie Town. A drab military barracks that has been under the boot of one regiment or another since its foundation as Roman Camulodunum. The last time I had been here I had come in a minibus with fifteen other lads. The city centre that night had felt frightening. It had been filled full of blokes looking for a fight or a fuck and not really caring which they found. As I watched a toddler giving bread to the ducks I realised that it is a mistake to judge a place from the memories of one blurred stag night. It’s probably equally foolish to judge it from your brief impressions as a passing Sunday walker.

As Pauline’s route demonstrated, however, there is an art to walking in this kind of country; of shaping one’s impression of the place; of avoiding the main roads like the A12; of sniffing-out instead, the by-way, the back routes and the beauty spots. It’s an art based on local knowledge and certain way of looking at the map. It was an art that I had not yet perfected. For although I had enjoyed walking under the trees of High Woods Country Park as I headed north out of the town centre, the route I had selected that morning also took me through the commercial sector of Colchester. I was nearly run over by a truck as I plodded way through an industrial estate.

I don’t know why, but as I sat on my rucksack getting my breath back, the industrial setting I found myself in brought to mind a section in a book I had recently read by Daniel Defoe. In the bit I remembered he praises a manufactory. I think Defoe must have been about the last writer in English to find the sound of metal being beaten pleasing.

He was a curious fellow Defoe, a sort of John Harvey Jones of the 1720’s. For despite his fame now as the author of ‘Robinson Crusoe’, he was also a hard nosed businessman. My favourite book by Defoe is his ‘Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain’ which is an amalgam of the detailed observations he made over the many years he moved about the country. Defoe’s work is a mine of industrial and economic information and you can hear his excitement for business when he tells his readers about the weavers of Frome or the manufacture of gun-power at Battle. Old Daniel would not have been interested in prettiness of the English countryside. He would have been much more taken with this most unlikeable industrial estate.

I had told myself to model myself a little on Defoe. I decided I would try and get some idea of what England was like now, rather than banging on only about its natural beauty. Given my ignorance of the local economy I therefore embarked upon a short lived career in industrial espionage.

Frankly I had not got a clue as to what most of the companies did behind closed doors. Their names did not help much and I did not get much from the sounds of hammering and machinery which only let me know that someone was at work. I experimented by knocking on one of the shuttered doors but only managed to canvass one response of ‘fuck off’ from the occupants. I climbed up onto a dustbin to get a view into a yard and gave the whole thing up when I fell into the rubbish.

In Daniel’s day it would have been easier. He could have ascertained what was manufactured in a town by walking its streets and looking into the crowded workshops. Work was a thing that was visible to all then, and the workplace was a family affair. A son or daughter would have learnt with the apprentices working at their father’s bench. It strikes me that we have lost something by separating our working lives from our children, an important process for making an adult.

It has to be said that Defoe had one other advantage over me, that of the King’s purse. He was a royal sneak, as well as being a businessman. Many of his observations were bought in pubs from its unsuspecting clientele. I bet that Defoe never told his masters about the times when his enquiries were met with a flat rebuff or failure.

I got into better walking country when I reached the valley of the River Stour. I was off the road and onto the grass trickling through a water meadow of pollarded punk willows. As I skipped under the A12, heading for Dedham, I had this overwhelming sensation of deja vu. For this is Constable Country, here by the Stour. One moment I was walking beside a modest river and then suddenly I was strolling in an oil painting.

There are very few people in England who haven’t seen ‘The Haywain’ or ‘Flatford Mill’ at some time in their life. The images in these paintings are certainly etched into my brain by endless exposure from jigsaws, chocolate boxes and place mats. For many, it seems, the landscape which I was now walking is the quintessential image of England’s past.

This fact is something of an irony, as Constable, just like Daniel Defoe, had no intention of capturing ye olde Englande. He painted what he knew. In fact most of his most famous paintings show working scenes such as the ‘industrial’ image of a boat being built. Typically the images he captured were bang up-to-date, and equally typically, brought him little reward or no repute as a painter in an age that did not appreciate what he was painting.

It seems like it has always been difficult to value the present. Its always easier to hanker after Arcadia and romanticised views of the past. As I enjoyed an ice cream beside Flatford Mill (Image of Flatford Mill reproduced with kind permission of http://www.excelsiordirect.com/ ). I wondered whether any of the thousands of visitors to this place had ever been to a Clydeside shipyard, the modern equivalent of what Constable painted. I asked myself to try and meet the challenge of the present. I found it helped me understand my feelings about England.

This was the afternoon that I finally blew my top. I got angry with the dumping that I saw in the country. Nappies and sofas dumped in lay-bys, accompanied by the sight of syringes, condoms and endless empty fag packets. Perhaps the most bizarre thing that I saw dumped on footpaths and in woods were grass clippings. Any garden with a lawn must surely have room for a compost heap.

My anger was an insight. I cared and I was shocked. It helped to get my head out of books and guides. It helped me realise that I was pinning my hopes on enjoying the countryside. This was my country.

The afternoon sped by as I walked on into the shade of the woods around Bentley Old Park. I soon found myself heading towards the outskirts of Ipswich. I challenged myself to look at the town closely and to try for a joke, to see it from a Constable or a Defoe’s perspective.

"The approach to the town of Ipswich - a town of many thousand souls is first noted by the long tunnel under the fine modern port road that leads to Felixstowe, and thence to a set of electrical overhead cables which bring light and life to this town.

Then, the traveller comes to the dwellings of the estate of Stoke Park, which are affluent enough being of a good design from the Nineteen Hundred and Seventies. The wealth of this part of the town witnessed by the well kept lawns and garden ornamentation, and by ample examples of second cars being cleaned by the inhabitants.

The wealth of Ipswich is the business of government. For it is here we find County Hall."

In Ipswich I picked up my first hint of the sea. The salty smell and the plopping of tidal water against the hulls of the boats in the port. I wanted more. I wanted to be able to say, as an old man, that once, long ago I had walked from home all the way to the sea.

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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004