Walk For Little Legs - Walton Naze Tower Circular Walk

In which we take a short walk suitable for the Chap to toddle on (although we did have to carry him for a fair bit), I lose my week to reading The Hunger Games, and bemoan toys for girls.


Ordnance Survey Number: Explorer 184
Time: 40 mins. Little legs don't walk very fast, and we had to pick daisies too.
Distance: 1 mile


Rating: Easy Walk, suitable for small people.


Now, you will notice that some of my walks have been a bit shorter recently. This is not entirely due to my overriding desire for laziness, but more associated with the fact that the Chap is also walking now. With great enthusiasm. All over the place, although he was overcome by glee when he realised that if the right doors are open he can do a circuit round and round his Nana's house, roaring with glee every time he came through the living room door to 'surprise' us. We were shocked on each occasion, I can assure you.


So yes, this post has got a new title & tag on it - Walks For Little Legs. While I still like rambling through a woodland somewhere, and I like that bit of headspace you get when your child is in the sling and either zonked or peering about, I also like giving him occasions to do extended toddles in his weird toddler-goose-step. You could also manage this one if you had an off-road pram, or a less-high-tech pushchair and a child that doesn't mind being bobbled about a bit.

We started our walk at The Naze car park on Walton-on-the-Naze and headed towards the tower. The tower was built around 1720 and was a new and exciting innovation in the days before lighthouses, as it served as a marker for ships heading towards the port of Harwich. Standing 86ft tall with 111 steps inside, you can climb the octagonal tower to the viewing platform it between March 31st - November 4th for a small fee (or it's free if you just want to go to the tearooms inside and not to the top).

Erosion of the cliffs on the Naze

We passed the tower on the right hand side, walking along the cliffs so we could enjoy the views of the sea and spectacularly crumbling cliffs. Indeed, these cliffs are a real cause for concern, as they are eroding at a fearsome pace. As we walked along, we could make out the tops of the pill boxes left over from the Second World War that were built as defences along the coast, and that now lie on the beach. When they were built in 1940-41, they were on the cliffs. When we were there, they were covered over by the tide, although we could still see the tops poking out over the waves. With the coast eroding at such a speed, it's not surprising there's a society trying to protect the coastline, including a 'Save the Naze' charity shop in the town. All smacks a bit of the King Cnuts if you ask me, but hey ho. And while we're on the subject, did I ever tell you about the time my mother was teaching history and had to read an essay from a sweet little year 7 on the subject of King Cnut? Would have been fine had the dear little soul not been dyslexic...


Childish sniggering aside, we continued along beside the cliff, grateful that we had put reins on the Chap. He can move at quite a speed these days when he gets a run on, and it wouldn't take too much for him to get overenthusiatic near the edge and do himself a mischief.


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Spring blossom with Harwich cranes in the distance

This walk along the cliff gives you a lofty view of the sea and across to Harwich, where massive tankers arrive. It is to places such as this to which China delivers Christmas each year, and all our plastic tat is unloaded.

I avoided plastic and chocolately goodies this Easter break, but I lost most of my Easter week to downloading The Hunger Games trilogy on my Kindle. I paced myself on the first one because I was enjoying it too much and I wanted it to last, but by the second book I was struck by that sort of crazed fever that meant I had finished the whole series before the week was out.

Having seen and enjoyed Battle Royale on many occasions, I had not really bothered with the film or the book on the basis that this was ‘Battle Royale for children’. It was only after my husband mentioned that there was a twitstorm going on about the fact some of the characters in the film are black (indeed, as they are in the book) and this had surprised some people that I decided to get it because it was going cheap, what with the movie tie-in.

And thus I lost my week.

Addictive and compelling, I found it incredibly heartening for it to strike a chord with a teen market who have known their countries to be at war. I was also delighted to find that, once we encounter the rebel forces, it’s not all Ewok celebrations and perfect harmony that so let down the second two films of The Matrix trilogy. It is not black and white, there aren’t goodies and baddies, there are just people put in very difficult situations and forced to make choices. I liked it.

About 500 metres or so along this path, a grass path leads off to the left towards one of the pill boxes that still remains on the cliff and has yet to fall into the sea. You can go into it if you wish, but it appears the inside has mostly been treated as a bin and is full of rubbish. Katniss wouldn't approve, you know.

I really liked The Hunger Games. I liked the social compulsion to get married and have children, I liked how Katniss felt uncomfortable with that choice. It was something I certainly felt uncomfortable with, and my husband very charitably bought me cups of tea and nodded in the right places when I had crises a) after we bought the engagement ring, b) after the pregnancy test came out positive c) for the vast majority of the first nine months when the Chap was with us, that I wasn’t somehow Letting The Side Down by capitulating to the cultural norms; I had been interpolated into the dominant ideology. Whilst I feel the Twilight trilogy mostly centres on the importance of having a boyfriend, I felt the element of coercion in The Hunger Games – pretend you’re in love with Peeta or die – made for a more compelling story.

And hurrah for Katniss, hurrah I say, because at least she’s not flapping round worrying about her hair. She just gets on with stuff and shoots people with arrows, which is a role model I far prefer than others that we’re offered as young women. I was interested when I saw that, in line with the films, Mattel have brought out a Katniss Everdeen Barbie doll. It is for the collector’s market only, of course. Only for grownups (and, as the Jezebel website noted "a Katniss doll is sooo Capitol. District 12 kids play with twigs"). It struck me as a sad thought that, while I was growing up in the 80s we all had She-Ra to wander round and kick arses (although, let’s face it, she was not ideal as a proto-feminist icon, agglomeration of the tropes of hotness that she was, all pseudo-porn atop a gigantic pink stallion-cum-unicorn (please, let me apologise to anyone who has come to this page in hope of whatever the phrase ‘cum-unicorn’ may bring. You must be terribly disappointed.)), but who do young girls have to look to now? Barbie tries to tick a box with the ‘I can be’ range, although you have to click around for a while on the while until you find it, and even then the careers are limited (and remember, girlies, if you’re black and want to be president you need to have a weave). Who else is there? Bratz? Inexplicable  musical toy hoovers that suggest that the best thing you can do is be a pampered Princess who does her own housework?


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The larger pillbox on the Naze

Well, I'd rather be up a tree with a bow and arrow, thank you. Continue along this path past the first pill box, and continue straight on to be led in a gentle arc round to the next pill box a little further on. This one appears to have been designed to hold a bigger gun as it has bigger openings than the little slits, and what could be used as the base for some sort of larger artillery beastie (the technical military term, so I am led to believe). As it's more open, it has just been subject to a quantity of marijuana-themed graffiti rather than the rubbish dump the more enclosed one has been.





When you reach the second pill box, follow the path past it back towards the Naze tower. As we did, we passed a fenced-off section of what seemed to be a section of unmowed grass that was being allowed to grow unchecked. "A haven for beneficial insects" I gestured to the ChapDad, who has long learnt that when I say this about sections of our garden it means "I'm leaving that whole area to go to seed and will deal with it when I'm good and bloody ready, thank you." It was therefore with some degree of amusement that it turned out to be exactly what I claimed it to be: or, more exactly, a haven for Fisher's Estuarine Moth.




Once you get to the end of the fenced-off area for the moths, bear left and head back to the base of the tower, where you can end your walk with a cup of tea & a cake.


Things I Learnt

• Fisher's Estuarine Moth! I shall continue with my 'havens for beneficial insects'.
• Barbie has a wider range of 'careers' on offer than I thought, but it's still mostly fashion/beauty/caring professions oriented. And she's too thin to menstruate, so nurr.
• Teen lit these days is not all Mormon sparkly vampires... I was mistaken...

Walton-On-The-Naze Pier to Frinton-On-Sea (Circular Walk)

In which I walk from Walton Pier to Frinton-on-Sea, am generally impressed by the British ability to pile onto the seaside at any given notice, and consider it high time to reclaim Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice.

Ordnance Survey Number: Explorer 184
Distance: 4 miles approx
Time: 1 hour 40  mins

Rating: Easy

Struck by an unseasonably warm October weekend, we did what a large section of the Great British public also appeared to do - we headed to the beach. The ability of the nation to drop everything, tear off their clothes and lie, gently perspiring, in even the mildest patch of sunshine is testament to how little we actually see any days of good-quality sun. Those of us on the Essex coast on the first week of October 2011 were not disappointed.

After the nappy debacle of The Aldbury Circuit last week, I was very keen on rebuilding my confidence with a walk with conveniently placed baby-change, which may in some way suggest why this walk takes you past not only a pretty part of the Essex coastline, but also a minimum of four public toilets.

The Chap is not amused.

Composure recovered.

The only downsides - if you are a baby - is that a) you can get too hot, and b) your parents insist on slathering you in sun cream. This is an enterprise that can take up to three full-grown adults - two to rub the cream in, and one to take the photos.

However, all was quickly forgiven, and the chap was stowed in the sling for his trip along the coast. This walk starts at the glamorous location of Walton Pier, over the entrance of which is emblazoned the legend 'The Happiest Sound in All The World is That Of Children's Laughter'. I find the whole place oddly menacing.

Stand facing the classic beauty of the pier (the charm of which is certainly improved now the letter A has disappeared, possibly stolen by Nathaniel Hawthorne fans), and then turn right towards the promenade and the beach huts.

This is a nice, flat, easy walk route that is good for prams, although you may have to dodge the odd family sitting on plastic chairs below their beach hut. One of the interesting things about walking from Walton to Frinton is seeing the change in the huts - Walton is definitely more brightly coloured, gaudier, and often in multiple rows. Frinton, on the other hand, is more restrained - huts may be blue, white or unpainted, because That's Just The Way Things Are Done. It's Frinton, darling. It's a place where currently, and without irony, there is a restaurant calling itself The Last Viceroy Of British India. That sort of bear.

The beach and serried ranks of beach huts at Walton.

The first half of this walk is very simple - you walk from the Walton end of the prom to where it stops in Frinton. The weather was weirdly better than it had been when we were last here in July, where the chap ended the day wrapped up in all sorts of woolly goodies to keep him warm.

Today, however, was sunny and lovely, and the joy of the sling is that you have hands free to enjoy a rum & raisin icecream - always helpful to the thought processes, I find. I've recently been reading the 'Wild & Wanton' edition of Pride and Prejudice, which advertised itself as Austen's work with some added Hot Bennet Action, but has sadly turned out to be rubbish - Lydia getting occasionally frisky and a few desultory Mr Darcy masturbation scenes doesn't really classify as Wild & Wanton in my book, but then again it all depends on your viewpoint. If you want an alternative P & P, I'd advise you strongly to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which opens  with the sentence 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains', and only gets more pleasing as it goes along.

Heading towards Frinton

Anyway, what Michelle M Pillow's atrocious attempt at gilding Austen's lily has done is made me look at the original and really appreciate the restraint of the original prose. But also on this reading I have been drawn towards the character of Mrs Bennet. For me, Alison Steadman's performance in the 1996 BBC production (and Colin Firth's big break in his lovely wet shirt) really nailed Mrs Bennet - shrieky, ludicrous, overbearing. Indeed, Austen herself is not a fan of the character, going as far to describe her as 'a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper'; and that's when she's feeling generous. But now with one baby giving me cause to clutch at my nightgown and demand that someone takes interest in the protection of my nerves, I begin to feel that Mrs Bennet has maybe been unjustly dealt with.

The woman has had 5 babies, and as Lady Catherine de Bourgh stresses, had no governess or staff to help in the raising of them. I've only got one baby, and some days I feel like my grip on sanity is pretty wafer thin. Not only that, but the baby I have was conceived by choice when I felt I was ready for it (or as ready as I'd ever be) - I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be relentlessly pregnant with the only choice of guaranteed non-conception being to refuse sex, and in doing so risk your husband going out to prostitutes and coming home to infect you with something horrific. Combine that with high mortality rates, and it's a wonder any woman managed to stay sane.

Maybe she would have found her nerves more easily dealt with if they'd all taken a carriage to Frinton beach, where some impressive fort building can be got underway. The endeavour below had all been achieved by midday, and as you can see from the gentleman in the middle left of the picture, Phase 2 of this imposing enterprise appeared to involve tunnelling. All very impressive.

Sterling work, gentlemen.

However, Mr Bennet refuses to go to fashionable Brighton, much less Frinton, so there's no joy for Mrs Bennet on that front. Moreover, the five babies she has all turn out to be girls, leaving her in very real danger of being out on her ear when her husband dies. Jane Austen sets Mrs Bennet up to be ridiculed for her relentless banging on about the estate being entailed away to Mr Collins, but say Mr Bennet died in Chapter 27 - what would happen to the family then? If Mrs Bennet's brother Mr Gardiner was not kind to her, then she would be a gentlewoman with no house, no home, nowhere to go, no staff to look after her. It was very important if you were part of the gentry to uphold those ideals, so there's little likelihood of her knowing how to make her own cup of tea, let alone cook or earn a wage. The chances are that if Mr Bennet did die before one of her daughters married 'well', it's a long slow slide to poverty, prostitution and death. I rather think that would pray on your mind. When Lydia doesn't quite elope with Wickham, Mrs Bennet complains of 'such flutterings, all over me, such spasms in my side, and pains in my head, and beatings at heart, that I can get no rest by night or by day'. Knowing that your daughter eloping seriously affects the chances of your other daughters making 'good' marriages probably would  lead you to panic attacks, because you know what is coming to you is a pretty poor old age.

The Greensward, Frinton-on-Sea

By now we had reached the end of the prom - you can choose either to go up a set of annoyingly shallow (and slightly uneven) steps or up a ramp to the Greensward and the Frinton public toilets - now is your time if the baby needs changing. The chap, of course, didn't; he likes to save his epic nappies for more awkward occasions.

Once you reach the Greensward, turn right and head back towards Walton Pier, visible in the distance (or, if you have had enough, you can head straight up Connaught Avenue in the direction of the station and a train back to Walton). Either route, you can feel a little unnerved when your son starts babbling at passers-by - it would be all very cute and lovely if the syllable he hadn't recently started on wasn't "Die! Die! Die! Die!".

So why does Austen set Mrs Bennet up as a character for ridicule? In many ways, she probably is a vain and silly woman. She doesn't seem to exist as a holy fool to make some noble pronouncement and redeem herself - she's silly at the start, and silly still by the end. The only thing she does achieve is that she atually does have three out of five daughters married before the year ends - she is, in fact, wholly succesful in her aims, and Jane and Mr Bingley's relationship does indeed 'throw the girls into the path of other rich men. '. Austen may set out to sneer at her, but Mrs Bennet is a wholly succesful product of her time - society says she must get daughters married off and protect her future, and so she does. Of course, you can argue that Jane and Elizabeth married despite Mrs Bennet's efforts, and poor old Lydia is probably going to die in penury or from syphilis due to her husband's gaming and whoring - if childbirth doesn't get her, of course. But whatever the argument, in the end it's all semantics: society says she needs to marry her daughters 'well', and she does it. She is, in that respect, made of win.

The beach and Walton Pier from the Greensward

My suspicion is that Jane Austen saw these women in real life and despised them, despised their witterings and their attacks of nerves. However, she herself never married, never had to deal with the inevitability of a pregnancy that could lead to her own death in childbirth, and, if you survived, having to worry about the death of your own child. Doing that five times, combined with the threat of having your entire life being taken away from you upon the death of your husband, I think would leave you somewhat stressed. Before I had a child I was completely on the side of the team that claims the woman is a fool. Now, however, I think there is space for Mrs Bennet to be reclaimed. She is loud and overdramatic, but is this not a coping strategy she has developed in a house where there are five children all clamouring for her time, and a husband who disappears off to his library every chance he gets? Is it so far to imagine that all her attacks of nerves she has are symptoms of a genuine distress - the fear of being left to fend for herself and five daughters when you have little ot no money or means to support yourselves? I still wouldn't want to find myself trapped in the kitchen with her at a party, but I think that Mrs Bennet may not be as unreasonable and ridiculous as Austen appears to want us to think.

Keep going past the marker for fallen policeman Brian 'Bill' Bishop until you reach the end of the Greensward. It finishes in a little dirt path that leads you onto a tarmaced walk. You can turn left up this walk and take the pavements of Woodbury Way, and then take the first left down Southview Drive (good if it's hot and you would like some shade for a little bit), or you can turn right and head down the walk and then take the first left that will lead to a grassier route past the caravan park. Either way, you will appear back on the front, and take a paved path past the backs of some houses. You will shortly come to a gate - pass through this onto Southcliffe, straight on to Woodbery Way for a hundred metres of so, then bear right all the way down The Parade until you find yourself back where you started.

It's all very pretty, really. I love Frinton and its excessive primness - indeed, I urge you to pick up a copy of The Frinton and Walton Gazette, which is a publication that fills me with inexplicable joy. It is cover to cover mutterings over goings-on in Clacton and Jaywick, the people of Walton wagging fingers at Frinton's nimbyism and Frinton hissing back 'but not INSIDE the gates!'. I have a great fondness for it. And everything looks a bit better when the sun is shining - except, perhaps, Walton Pier.


Things I Learnt

• As noted, babywearing leaves you free to enjoy a seaside icecream as you walk - a previously unconsidered advantage over prams, which I just can't steer one handed.
• Despite a reputation for restraint, the Great British public need only a mild glimmer of a nice day before we all run to the beach and strip off.
• My son is like a canary - wide awake one minute, but cover him over with his hood and he'll be asleep in seconds.