Sunday 7th October

As a child we came to Walton-on-the-Naze a few times.  We used to park the car and head for the beach which almost everyone does.  It is lovely yellow sand that when the tide is out goes on for ages.  The tide comes right up to the promenade wall so the sand is washed clean twice a day.  Of course you do need the weather and far too often, especially this year it has been cloudy, overcast or just raining.  The town runs just behind the beach, but hidden from view and a complete secret are the backwaters.  The strange geography of Walton means that it is almost completely surrounded by water.  The Naze itself is a bit of land rising quite high and jutting out past the town.  There is an eighteenth century brick tower where a fire used to be kept lit as a shipping navigation light, guiding boats into the river Orwell and the port of Ipswich.  But behind the Naze the land is low-lying and the tidal backwaters fill square mile after square mile of with an everchanging watery landscape, reaching right back and almost into the centre of the town itself.

Cut through the shops and away from the sea and the houses soon peter out and you come to the Town Hard and Yacht Basin.  Here, tucked away from the day-trippers is the peaceful and beautiful Mere, which at low tide is mud and grass but when the sea comes in transforms into an inland lake of breathtaking beauty.  Here there are all manner of boats tied up, from luxury schooners to tiny fishing smacks, and a couple of repair yards where the yachts are hauled up and put on stilts to be re-bottomed or painted.  There are rarely more than a handful of people around and on sunny days it is the best place in the world to just sit and watch the occasional boat come in or out of the lock gates.  When I bought my house here I barely knew of its existence though it was only a couple of hundred yards away.  And all the day-trippers and away-day train excursion makers and even a lot of the beach hut owners have no idea that if they just turn their backs on the sea and walk in the opposite direction what a gem they are missing.