Day 137 – Clacton-on-Sea to West Mersea: 16.0m: 5.4h

The first part of our walk today is to Point Clear on Brightlingsea Creek from where we’re planning to catch a ferry over the River Colne to East Mersea. Apparently, the ferry only runs every couple of hours and we’re aiming for one that leaves at 12:05. The walk to Point Clear is 9 miles or so which shouldn’t take much longer than 3 hours. However, this assumes that we’re able to use a path through a farm near St Osyth and, if this isn’t the case, a diversion will be required which will add at least a mile to the walk. We therefore want to be on our way by 8 o’clock and have booked breakfast for 6:45. Full English is duly available – with Mike incorporating beans in his order, having succumbed to their temptations over the weekend. The Premier Inn has served us well. Clean, comfortable and good value.

We get back down to the sea front and set off soon after 7:45. The weather forecast is for more favourable conditions than yesterday, but the rain is falling as we continue along the coast, past Clacton’s golf course which looks a lot more interesting than Frinton’s, and through Jaywick. We pass more beach huts, a holiday park and a Martello tower, before having to turn inland after about 90 minutes walking to avoid a network of creeks to the south of Point Clear. The rain has now stopped, and the smells as we get further around a long curving grass embankment confirm that the buildings which we can see ahead of us comprise the sewage plant on the approach to St Osyth. For some reason, our pace increases slightly as we walk alongside this, and then leave the embankment onto a narrow track which joins a road leading to the potential farm diversion. As it transpires, there is a path through the farm although, when we’ve walked along this, we see a sign stating that it’s for the use of people staying at the Lee Wick Farm Cottages and Glamping site. Not sure that we’d have been able to pass ourselves off as glampers, but too late now so we continue to the road between St Osyth and Point Clear.        

Not having been delayed by diversions, we’re going to reach Point Clear an hour before our ferry time, and a call to the ferry office confirms that there isn’t a service to East Mersea before 12:05. So on our arrival at Point Clear shortly after 11 o’clock, we while away 15 minutes of our time establishing exactly where to board the ferry (there’s no indication on the shoreline but it proves to be at the end of a narrow spit which stretches about 100 yards into the River Colne) and then finding an alternative refreshment provider to the Ferry Boat Inn which doesn’t open until noon. The only contender is a tea room run by the very friendly Tracy, which is perfectly acceptable to all – notwithstanding Ben’s aversion to the very concept of a tea room. He resolves this conundrum by eschewing toasted teacakes to accompany his pot of tea and eliciting from Tracy the offer of a sausage sandwich prepared from what remains of her earlier breakfast service. To be fair, if the rest of us had been aware of this off menu option, we probably wouldn’t have been so swift in ordering our toasted teacakes.

Duly revived, we return to the end of the spit, and the ferry comes over from Brightlingsea on schedule. It’s a small, flat bottomed vessel which doesn’t encounter the problems of the Harwich ferry in coming right up to the shingle to collect us, but the crossing to East Mersea is calm and takes not much more than 5 minutes. We now have just over 6 miles to walk along the south side of Mersea Island. We start by crossing some low lying dunes, then there’s a bit of beach action and paths through yet more beach huts, and we finish along a series of lanes (initially passing the Mersea Vineyard) to reach the Coast Inn at West Mersea at 2:15. We sit outside and, in the 45 minutes available before our cab is due to arrive, ease our way through just the one pint each and share an order of chips. And although the cab is delayed a few minutes, there’s still ample time to get to Colchester station where Mike collects his car and the rest of us await the 16:01 to Liverpool Street.