If we turned right out of our front door and walked to the end of Lodge Road, we came to a track which led down to the weir where the Chelmer river met the tidal Blackwater Estuary.
It was a super walk which took a couple of hours or so.
David and I began doing this walk every Sunday morning some time in or before 1984, while the girls went to sing in the choir and leaving Gill at home to enjoy some peace and quiet.
The walk took us through beautiful Essex countryside and past Beeleigh Abbey, the supposedly haunted Elizabethan house where Christina Foyle, of the bookshop family, lived.
With such a variety of habitats - woodland, thicket, small and large fields, riverside and estuarine - this was a perfect walk for spotting birds, so bird watching became a hobby which David and I shared. When we started, neither of us realised what a huge variety of species we would see.
As our sightings increased we began to keep a record of which birds we had seen where. To do this, I managed to get hold of a 1:10,000 OS map on which we marked the spot where we had first seen a species. We also named places, such as fields, for the animal or bird we associated with it.
Looking back, I am amazed at the variety of birds we managed to identify and record. I also have fond memories of particularly exciting moments, like when we saw the first kingfisher, from the bridge over the Beeleigh weir. Having spotted one, we went on to see many more.
Perhaps the most memorable event, which occurred when most of the family was on a Beeleigh walk, was leaning over the bridge handrail looking out across the muddy margins of the river below the weir and seeing a fox nip out from the reeds, cross the mud, grab a mallard, and disappear back into cover - without any of the mallard's friends noticing that anything had happened.
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