London Loop 20/21: Chigwell - Havering-atte-Bower - Harold Wood

Wide views west from the edge of Havering Country Park, 100 m up.

Although it’s mainly within London, this walk includes some of the most rural stretches of the London Loop, along paths and tracks through rolling fields. On the way are two notable country parks: Hainault Forest, a surviving remnant of the old Forest of Essex; and Havering with its spectacular avenue of giant redwood trees. The walk continues past vanished royal estates via the pretty village of Havering-atte-Bower and through the fields to Harold Hill where the surroundings become more suburban as the trail begins its final journey back towards the river Thames.

Once again I’ve combined two shorter sections of the Loop to create a longer walk. Between Chigwell Row and the official break point at Havering-atte-Bower is on one of the longest stretches without a convenient transport option. Havering is one of the only three Loop start/end points at a bus stop rather than a station, but buses are sporadic, with no Sunday service. You may want to continue at least to Noak Hill Road, which has a much more frequent bus service, and combine the rest of this walk with the very short following section instead.

Update November 2017. Although I'd recommend first-time walkers follow the official London Loop route as described here, there is a slightly more roundabout alternative from Noak Hill via the Ingrebourne Way, which is fully accessible and includes some green spaces not on the Loop. Note this doesn't pass that close to Harold Wood though there are bus options.

You're fired: the Kings Head at Chigwell

Chigwell

As mentioned in the previous section, Chigwell is an example of a village that grew a second centre following its connection to the rail network. The stretch around the station is a more recent development on the lower ground favoured by the railway, while the historic village centre is on top of the hill, further north along the High Road. There has been a settlement of some kind in this commanding position beside the old road from London to Abridge and Epping, which closely follows an old Roman route, since at least Saxon times. The name likely indicates a well belonging to someone called Cicca, though the traditionally claimed site for the well itself is some way east, off Brocket Way near Grange Hill station.

The Loop climbs the hill, through what’s now a conservation area, passing several significant buildings. On the left is the drive to Chigwell Hall. This isn’t the original manor house, which was beside the river Roding on a site that later became an RAF base: the Loop passed close by in the last section. The old manor had fallen into disuse by the 17th century and the current Hall, an 1876 Grade II-listed red brick mansion by architect R Norman Shaw, is the second of two replacements. Since 1967 the site has been occupied by the Metropolitan Police sports and social club, though the house is rented out as an events venue and has a public restaurant.

Near the top of the hill, set back in its own grounds on the right, the elaborate but handsome neoclassical mansion known as Grange Court is the first of four listed buildings in the village meriting the superior Grade II* classification. It was first built in the 17th century, but its current appearance dates from a rebuild in 1774. After 1946 it was a boarding house for Chigwell School but has recently been sold for conversion to flats.

St Mary the Virgin Church, at the top of the hill on the left, is a pleasingly attractive building with its cement-rendered white walls, red roof tiles and timber-framed bell turret surmounted by an elegant spire. Much of the south aisle and chancel survives from the 12th century, with 15th century extensions including the turret and uncharacteristically sensitive and restrained Victorian additions.

The buildings of Chigwell School, just along from the church, include the original red brick school house, dating from 1619 when it was founded as a grammar school for ‘poor scholars’: it’s now an independent school for rather richer ones. Among its ex-pupils are William Penn (1644-1718), founder of the US state of Pennsylvania; native American ‘Prince George’, son of a chief of the Yamasee Confederation of South Carolina, who was sent here by missionaries to learn English in 1713; and the actor Ian Holm.

The fourth Grade II*, opposite the church, is the most celebrated building in the village. This is the Kings Head, a massive coaching inn with an exposed timber frame and a delightfully untidy array of overhanging jetties and angular gable ends. The oldest part, with a projecting oriel window on the second floor, dates from the 1620s, though there are numerous later additions, including the window itself which is a 19th century pastiche of Tudor style. The pub’s current appearance is the result of more recent intervention: photos from the early 20th century show the building was once fully rendered, and it appears the frame was only exposed in the late 1940s or early 1950s, presumably to increase its ‘olde worlde’ appeal.

Like the Leather Bottle at Cobham near Gravesend on the London Countryway, the Kings Head is one of several real-life pubs that feature in novels by Charles Dickens. It’s a major setting in Barnaby Rudge (1841), where it symbolises both the good and the bad of English tradition in a story that unfolds in Chigwell and London in the 1780s. Near the end of the novel, the pub is sacked by anti-Catholic rioters, but rises again. Dickens renames it the Maypole, but it’s still clearly recognisable:

The Maypole was an old building, with more gable ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there was a legend…that Queen Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay window…With its overhanging stories, drowsy little panes of glass, and front bulging out and projecting over the pathway, the old house looked as if it were nodding in its sleep. Indeed, it needed no great stretch of fancy to detect in it other resemblances to humanity.

It’s a sign of our own times that since 2009 the Kings Head has been owned by celebrity businessman Alan Sugar, and turned into an upmarket ‘smart dress only’ Turkish restaurant, entertainment venue and cocktail bar called Sheesh. Sugar is the most famous of the well-heeled Londoners and ‘Essex wives’ who have turned Chigwell into one point of the so-called ‘golden triangle’ in recent years, alongside Loughton and Buckhurst Hill.

Three Forests Way and London Loop
waymarks near Chigwell

Just past the pub, a footpath takes you almost immediately into meadows, emerging on Vicarage Lane. A short detour to the left here will bring you to the Dickens Tree, a wide-girthed veteran oak, perhaps 500 years old, sprouting improbably from the edge of a pavement.

The Loop takes to field paths and farm tracks on the other side of the lane, briefly joining the Three Forests Way. This sporadically signed 96 km circular trail connects the remaining patches of the Forest of Essex: Epping, Hainault and Hatfield Forests, the last to the north near Bishops Stortford and Stansted Airport. Like the Epping Forest Centenary Walk encountered in the previous section, it’s largely the work of the late Fred Matthews of Essex Ramblers, who originally devised it as the route of a walking event held in 1977 to mark the Queen’s silver jubilee. An annual challenge walk continues to this day, though now organised by the Long Distance Walkers Association using a revised route.

Chigwell Row

Round reservoir at Chigwell Water Works, glimpsed through a fence.

Chigwell Row has long been an outlying hamlet of Chigwell in an even loftier location, on a ridge to the southeast that rises to 86 m. Originally surrounded by thick forest, it began to grow from the end of the 18th century, first when medicinal springs were found in the area, and then when a new road suitable for coaches was opened to Romford, today’s A1112. The first of its landmarks encountered on the Loop is Chigwell Row waterworks, built in 1967 and now operated by Essex & Suffolk Water. The trail tracks part of the fence around this large site, with a view of a circular concrete reservoir; elsewhere, there are 18 filter beds and a bigger, kidney-shaped reservoir. Most of the water is pumped up from the Chingford reservoirs in the Lea Valley (encountered on the last section), before being distributed over a wide area of east London and southwest Essex.

Chigwell Row Chapel

Along Chapel Lane you pass the eponymous chapel, a spare but rather elegant building with neo-classical flourishes. It was built as an independent nonconformist chapel allied to the Essex Congregational Union in 1804 but shows signs of extensive alteration from later in that century. It’s now administered by the United Reform Church.

Opposite the chapel, the trail winds through Chigwell Row Recreation Ground. The land here was originally part of Hainault Forest, and allocated as common land following disafforestation in the 1850s. In 1863, much of this common was inclosed and awarded to various private landowners, but a 20 ha plot was subject to the condition it was kept as a public recreation ground. This has since passed to a charitable trust of which Epping Forest District Council is now the trustee. The trail rounds but doesn’t quite enter an area of woodland immediately to the southeast which is also part of the public space, though managed separately by the council as Chigwell Row Wood Local Nature Reserve (LNR). It’s one of the few surviving fragments of the Forest that still preserves its old wooded appearance.

Rearing up ahead is All Saints Church, built on former Forest land to a design by J P Seddon in 1867, the year Chigwell Row became a separate ecclesiastical parish in response to its growing population. Though it’s not obvious from a distance, the tower is a separate building, added in 1903 – there were insufficient funds to include a tower in the original church. Developments on former forest and farmland continued apace into the 20th century, given a further boost by the 1903 Fairlop Loop railway, the same line that serves Chigwell and is now part of the London Underground Central Line – Grange Hill station is a little to the west here. Doubtless the housing would have spread over the fields along the Loop today but for the Green Belt.

The trail carefully tiptoes here around a major post-war infill development: just on the other side of Chigwell Row Wood, and now just inside London, is the vast Hainault Estate. This was one of the big post-war housing estates built outside its own territory by the London County Council, about which I’ll have a lot more to say later when we reach Harold Hill.

Hainault Forest

The Essex-London boundary runs left-right through Hainault Forest Country Park

The earliest vague reference to Hainault Forest as a separate section of the Forest of Essex dates from the year 1130, with more definite mentions in the 1220s and 1230s. Back then it was known as Henehout or Hyneholt, meaning ‘wood belonging to a religious community’ and referring to its attachment to Barking Abbey. The current spelling derives from a 17th century misapprehension that there was some connection to Edward III’s queen, Philippa of Hainault (1310?-1369), from the mediaeval county of Hainaut in the southern Low Countries, now part of both Belgium and France.

Following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the land passed to the Crown, and in 1544, a perambulation of its boundaries ordered by Henry found it encompassed 12 km2, stretching from Leytonstone to Havering-atte-Bower in the east, and from Aldborough Hatch to Theydon Bois in the north. Its main function was to provide venison for the royal household, but local people also exercised certain seasonal common rights such as grazing and lopping wood.

As usual with mediaeval forests, by no means all the land was wooded, with numerous open rough grassland areas punctuated by stands of trees. There were various unofficial and strictly speaking illegal encroachments over the succeeding centuries, and mounting pressure to put the remaining ‘waste’ to more productive use. Agriculture expert and campaigner Arthur Young suggested in his 1807 General View of Agriculture in Essex that the forest lands would be ten times more profitable if cleared and cultivated, echoing the opinions of the various local landowners he had spoken to, including the lord of the manor of Chigwell.

In 1851, Hainualt was disafforested by act of parliament and 90% of the woodland was cleared almost immediately. As we have seen, some sections were originally reserved as commons but it wasn’t long before these too were apportioned to private owners. The rapid near-complete destruction of the forest shocked the fledgling conservation movement of the day, and helped inform the successful campaign in the 1870s to preserve significant stretches of nearby Epping Forest, which the Loop traversed in the previous section.

A belated preservation campaign led by early environmentalist and Liberal MP Edward North Buxton resulted in 324 ha of the remaining forest land being bought for public use by the London County Council (LCC), with contributions from other local authorities, for £21,000. Parliament had to pass a further act enabling the land to be sold, with 213 ha of both woodland and grassland opened as a public green space in 1906. This land, plus some additional areas acquired since, now forms Hainault Forest Country Park.

The old forest spread over numerous parish boundaries, and one of these still runs northeast-southwest through today’s park. It separated Chigwell, in the ancient Essex hundred of Ongar, to the northwest, from Barking and later Ilford in Becontree Hundred, to the southeast. The original plan for the LCC’s replacement with a new and much bigger Greater London Council (GLC) in 1965 proposed to incorporate the whole of Chigwell into the capital, which met furious local resistance. So today the boundary has been preserved, with the northwest of the park in Essex, and the southeast in the London Borough of Redbridge.

Like its predecessor, the GLC managed the Country Park as a single unit, but when it was abolished in 1986, the ownership was split between Essex County Council and Redbridge borough. Since then, the county has leased its holding on a long-term basis to the Woodland Trust, and the Trust has bought several adjoining fields on its own account, including land that was cleared after 1851 and is gradually being restored to woodland again. Both sides work together to ensure a relatively seamless visitor experience.

Almost all the surviving ancient woodland is on the Essex side, and after crossing a rough meadow, the Loop plunges into it. This woodland area is now a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). With its traditionally pollarded hornbeams and oaks, it’s regarded as one of the best surviving examples of a mediaeval forest despite its much-reduced extent, giving, according to the current management plan, “a better impression of the structure and management of a forest than Epping…not having suffered so much from well-meaning attempts to turn it into ‘ordinary’ woodland.”

At a junction, well-marked with recently-installed fingerposts, the Loop crosses the prominent footpath which follows the old boundary, leaving the current county of Essex for the last time and returning to London not only for the rest of this section but for almost all the rest of the trail. You’re now in the London Borough of Redbridge, and the entire length of the Loop through this borough is within the forest land.

Canada geese love Hainault Forest lake, originally dug as a 1909 job creation scheme.

The trail soon emerges into the more open southern area of the country park, on the shores of the artificial lake dug in 1909 as part of a job creation scheme for unemployed men from the East End. Originally it was intended for boating and fishing and, while the latter activity still goes on, it’s also now much favoured by waterfowl. This is the best point to divert to the park café, just a little uphill on the other side of the lake. Climbing this way, there’s the sudden surprise of the view westwards towards London, a reminder of how high up we are. The multiplying high rises of Canary Wharf and the City, along with the Shard at London Bridge, now make central London seem much closer than it is in reality.

High rise London from Hainault Forest Country Park

Leaving the lakeside, the Loop runs alongside the woodland edge along the perimeter of a vast, gently sloping open green space. This is another area cleared of tree cover after 1851, and for many decades it was used for sports pitches, but these have been replaced with less rigorously managed grassland to encourage species diversity, and the space now does a good imitation of a traditional forest plain. The cluster of buildings to the south is Foxburrows Farm, part of the original 1906 purchase, and now a popular visitor centre and ‘community zoo’ where meerkats and llamas rub shoulders with rare breed sheep and chickens.

Beyond the plain, the Loop finds a woodland track uphill, almost rejoining the Three Forests Way, which has found a different route through the forest. But instead, our trail heads off east across Hainault Forest Golf Course. This land, too, is part of the public space bought in 1906, although the golf club, founded in 1912, now leases and manages it. Loop walkers will probably be pleased to know that this is the very last golf course the trail crosses.

Take care here: if you attempt to follow the route exactly as shown on the Ordnance Survey map you could easily get lost. What looks like a nice straight public right of way on the map turns out to be near-impossible to trace through the golf course landscaping, and the route that’s physically signed with often rather eroded waymarks is rather easier and safer. It runs through a strip of woodland known as the Mile Plantation which also marks an ancient boundary that now separates the London Boroughs of Redbridge and Hillingdon. When you finally leave the trees, at a point further south than the one shown on the OS map, you end your brief sojourn in the former and enter the latter, the very last London borough on the London Loop.

The Royal Liberty of Havering

The rollling fields of Havering, just east of Havering-atte-Bower

Havering is the third largest of the London boroughs, after Bromley and Hillingdon, and like these it includes extensive areas of green space. More than half the borough is parkland, with some genuine agricultural countryside. It’s the only London borough to extend beyond the M25, with a rough square of farmland and marsh around North Ockendon. As with the other more rural boroughs, this mixed complexion is the result of modern boundaries following much older divisions, in this case of considerable historic significance. For Havering once had a special status, with connections to royal privilege stretching back much further than any other London authority. Today, practically every trace of these connections has vanished.

The high ridge the Loop treads has been settled since at least Roman times, with archaeological evidence of a villa and industrial activities. In the later Saxon period, much of the current borough was covered by a large parish and manor known as Hornchurch, in the ancient hundred of Becontree. The parish stretched from the wooded northern heights, south through Romford and Hornchurch and all the way to the Thames at Hornchurch Marshes. Though Romford later developed into a major market town and is now the administrative centre, the original manorial nucleus was on the hilly ground in the north, by the village of Havering, its name derived from an Anglo-Saxon personal name, Hæfer.

There’s a strong tradition that the first English king to hold the manor was the penultimate Anglo-Saxon monarch Edward the Confessor or Ēadweard Andettere (reigned 1042-1066). He is commemorated as such in mediaeval stained glass at Hornchurch and Romford, though there’s no known confirmation of this from primary sources. What is known is that by Edward’s death, the manor was held by his successor, Harold Godwinson, Earl of East Anglia, who reigned briefly during 1066 before his death at the Battle of Hastings, which secured the Norman invasion of England.

The victor of Hastings, William of Normandy, who became the first Norman king, decided to keep the manor for himself. It became the Royal Liberty of Havering, a liberty being an autonomous area exempt from surrounding authorities, with its own laws and courts. For example, residents of Havering were exempt from many taxes, and the market at Romford was the direct result of royal privilege. The special status of the Liberty was confirmed in a charter of 1465.

Numerous royals stayed at the palace which developed on the site of the manor house. Henry III began a tradition of granting the property to the queen consort or dowager when he passed it to Queen Eleanor in 1262. The tradition was broken by Henry VIII, who kept it himself rather than passing it to his fourth wife Anne of Cleves. But by this time the palace was already deteriorating, and James I was the last king to use it regularly. In 1619, he granted it to Prince Charles, later Charles I, who became the last monarch to rest at the palace in 1638. During the Civil War period the building was abandoned and by 1816 there was no trace of it above ground.

By then, the manor had long since fragmented through a succession of tenants and the creation of sub-manors, and in 1652 these tenants clubbed together to buy out many of the manorial rights. Finally in 1828, the Crown sold out the remaining rights and property, including the site of the palace and its surrounding park, to a private buyer. Though no longer royal, Havering’s anomalous status as a liberty persisted until 1892 when it was finally reunited with Essex. Two years later it was split between Romford Rural and Romford Urban District Councils, with other areas originally outside the parish like Upminster included in the rural district. Later, Romford became a municipal borough and the rest became Hornchurch Urban District, which, with a few minor adjustments, combined again to form the London Borough of Havering in 1965.

The river Rom just east of Hainault Forest.

The fields beyond the golf course are under Havering council’s ownership. They were once part of the extensive park around the palace, thus the name of the farm you pass, Lower Park Farm. Just past here you cross the river Rom, which rises as Bourne Brook over the Essex boundary in Stapleford Abbots. Like several other river names encountered on the Loop, this is a back formation arising from the fact that the river flows through Romford, which originally simply meant ‘wide ford’. The lower section of the river is known as the Beam, which joins the Thames in the Dagenham Industrial Estate.

From the Rom, the path climbs along the edge of the woodlands of Havering Country Park to reveal another sudden and surprising view back towards the central London. Take your time to enjoy it, as it’s the last such view on the Loop. Then it’s into the trees of the country park and another encounter with history.

The new lord of Havering in 1828 was Hugh McIntosh, a successful building contractor responsible for several of the London docks. His family had a new house built, also later demolished, and gardens and pleasure grounds were laid out in what was left of the old estate. In 1909 the site included extensive gardens, four vineyards, orchards and glasshouses and conservatories with roses, carnations, ferns and palms. In 1924, following the death of Hugh’s daughter-in-law Charlotte McIntosh, the property was sold off. A few portions went for development but, in 1938, Essex County Council bought substantial amounts, including much of the farmland, to preserve as Green Belt. Some of the land was sold in tiny 1 acre (0.4 ha) portions to better-off East Enders as country retreats, known as plotlands.

When London expanded in 1965, the Greater London Council (GLC) inherited the publicly-owned land. Belatedly implementing proposals in Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1944, the council planned a new Country Park. From 1970, amid considerable local opposition, it began buying back the plotlands by compulsory purchase, gradually reassembling the estate, and Havering Country Park first opened in 1976. Following the GLC’s abolition in 1986, the site passed to Havering council, who developed it further into today’s 67 ha park.

Giant sequoias lining Wellingtonia Avenue, Havering

The Loop crosses the park along Wellingtonia Avenue, one of the most spectacular lengths of path on the whole trail. Lining it are around 100 giant sequoias or redwood trees, the second biggest such plantation in the UK, created in the 1860s when this conifer species, known scientifically as Sequoiadendron giganteum, had been brought to the European public’s attention during the California gold rush. The term ‘Wellingtonia’ was used in Britain in honour of the Duke of Wellington. The world’s tallest and some of its thickest and oldest trees are giant sequoias. They don’t get quite so big here as in their native Sierra Nevada, but they’re still awe-inspiring, with some of them approaching 50 m in height. The avenue is sometimes compared to a cathedral aisle, but no cathedral column towers quite this high, and the vivid colours of red bark contrasting with dark green foliage add to the effect.

Around two thirds of the way along the avenue is the junction known as Five Ways, a good place to set off exploring the rest of the park if you have time. There are pine plantations, more traditional broadleaved woodlands, grassy meadows with rolling views, and an easy access trail. Very little evidence of the site’s lengthy history survives except the various plantations, exotic specimen trees and fragments of boundary wall and terrace from the McIntosh period, and a plotlands bungalow now used as a park office. The site of the old palace, and the later McIntosh house, is under modern houses to the right, after the avenue passes a traffic barrier and becomes a roughly surfaced drive. A plan made in 1576 shows an extensive complex including guest apartments and a royal bathhouse, but a survey of Royal property in 1650, after the Civil War, found only “a confused heap of ruinous decayed buildings,” barely worth the costs of salvage.

Havering-atte-Bower

Water tower, Havering-atte-Bower

The avenue emerges on North Road, the main street of Havering-atte-Bower, right next to the village green. Havering today is that rarity in London, a genuine rural village surrounded by green space. Its curious suffix, pronounced locally ‘atty bower’, refers to the tradition of its being held by the queen or dowager. But though the village is picturesque enough, there are no mediaeval remnants left standing, and precious little from before Victorian times.

The green itself is part of the land acquired by local councils in the 1930s, and the row of horse chestnut trees across it was planted to mark the coronation in 1953. It’s said a depression on the green was formerly a pond used for ducking suspected witches, and on the south end there’s another reminder of less enlightened attitudes to crime and punishment in the form of a set of stocks and a whipping post. Although some of the metalwork on these is very old, the woodwork is from 1966: somewhat ironically, the originals were destroyed by vandals. The village sign was only added in 2010, unveiled by then Mayor of London Boris Johnson.

Across Orange Tree Hill from these relics is Blue Boar Hall, a former pub that could be the oldest building in the village, perhaps from the early 17th century, but its timber frame is now fronted by Victorian brickwork. Completing a pretty scene is the Church of St John the Evangelist, which overlooks the green. Its history goes back to the original palace chapel, which may well have stood on this site before the Norman conquest, but the present building with its flint facing was built in 1878 to a design by Basil Champneys in the popular Decorated style of the day.

All this rural charm has its downside: the 375 is the 10th least frequent bus route in London, and the only one to operate on a 90-minute cycle, except on Sundays when it doesn’t operate on any cycle at all. This is also one of only three official loop sections that ends at a bus stop rather than a rail station. If you just miss a bus, exploring the village could keep you occupied: the best pub recommendation is probably the Orange Tree a little down Orange Tree Hill on the other side of the green.

Otherwise you may decide to push on to Noak Hill where services are more frequent. The trail now turns along North Road to find a footpath right next to another pre-Victorian building, the Grade II-listed Rose Cottage, timber-framed and weatherboarded with an external brick chimney stack. It likely dates from before 1750, though was altered in the next century to create a now-closed shop front.

From the fields behind the cottage you should spot two of the village’s other remarkable buildings off to the right, although as both are round and white, they’re easily confused. The squatter, fatter one, just glimpsed through the trees, is the Round House, a three-storey villa built in 1794 for tea merchant William Sheldon. Its unusual elliptical shape, so it’s said, was designed to resemble a tea caddy. A little further along, taller, slenderer and much more prominent, is an elegant water tower that faintly resembles the tower of a Spanish castle. It was built in 1934, taking advantage of the elevation in ensuring sufficient water pressure for the householders of Romford. The base of the tower is 104 m above sea level, and on a good day you can see its tip from the London Eye, 27 km away.

Pyrgo Park

Decorative iron gatepost at Pyrgo Park

Across the fields from Havering, rusted and leaning precariously amid a strip of rough grass along the edge of a wood, is a curious decorative wrought iron 19th century gatepost. This is one of the few surviving reminders of the second great aristocratic park in Havering, Pyrgo Park. The place name probably means ‘triangle of land where pear trees grow’ and has been spelt in various ways over the centuries, including Pergore, Portegore and Pergo. The park here was created in 1536 by Brian Tuke, steward to Henry VIII, but, in typical style, the king took a liking to the site and claimed it for himself, developing it into an extension of Havering Park nearby.

Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I gave Pyrgo to a courtier, John Grey, uncle of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, and it passed through several subsequent aristocratic and, later, bourgeois hands. The old house was demolished in 1814, and a new one built in 1852 for stockbroker Robert Field, though this too was demolished in 1940, by which time the park had become part of Essex’s green belt holdings.

Most of the buildings you can see through a gap in the trees to the left as you round the site are recent, though an 18th century farmhouse still stands, and a stable block, garden terraces and two lodges remain from the Victorian period. Pyrgo is the fourth of Henry VIII’s palaces on or near the Loop, after Nonsuch (section 7), Hampton Court (section 9) and Forty Hall (section 17). All but Hampton Court have now completely vanished from sight.

Now in notably rustic surroundings, the Loop tracks the edges of fields. It’s easy to miss a footbridge along this stretch which skips across a field edge: often overgrown, it’s one of the more precarious pieces of infrastructure on the trail. But soon you’re on more solid ground, following a track lined by scattered housing, known as Paternoster Row.

It’s not immediately obvious, but the right turn along Paternoster Row is also a major turning point for the London Loop as it approaches its final stages. A stream, Carters Brook, rises just to the east of this junction, and the track turns south to parallel its valley. From now on, the Loop will follow the water south and southwest, first along the Carters Brook and Paines Brook, then along the river Ingrebourne to the Thames, continuing downstream alongside the main flow to its finishing point at Purfleet. I’d like to say it’s downhill all the way, but that’s not entirely true, as lack of waterside access sometimes forces the trail back of the side of the valley a little. Certainly, though, the walking is much easier from now on.

Where Paternoster Row ends at the gate of Widdrington Farm, and the Loop takes to field paths again, you enter the old chapelry of Romford, a historic subdivision of Havering Liberty. A small stream from a pond on the right feeds the brook. To the east, the land rises from the Carters Brook to the village of Noak Hill. To the south and immediately ahead lies the old estate of Harold Wood and a return to suburbia.

Harold Hill

The Loop reaches Noak Hill Road, which clearly marks the boundary between country and town. On its northwestern side you’ll see only scattered houses and other buildings, but the opposite side is intensively developed. At one point, of course, all this land was countryside. By the 14th century, there were two separate estates to the southeast of the road: Gooshayes, ‘goose enclosure’, to the west and Dagenhams or Dagnams to the east. The latter had itself originally been two estates, Dagenhams and Cockerels, named after former owners.

Richard Neave, a well-off merchant with the West India company, bought Dagnams in 1772, and his descendants extended it in 1829 by buying neighbouring Gooshayes too. The resulting estate remained intact until well in the 20th century, unthreatened by housing development thanks to its remote location, and was protected as Green Belt in the 1930s. Today’s swathes of housing are the work not of a private developer, but of the London County Council (LCC), in response to the housing crisis in London after World War II, when residential property in inner London, and particularly the East End, had been devastated by air raids.

Inspired by the ‘garden city’ movement of the 1920s and 1930s, the view adopted in Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan was that it was better in any case to shift populations out of the polluted and congested inner city to greener, more spacious and healthier surroundings on the periphery. As we now know, that approach ultimately brought its own problems of social and economic dislocation, but today’s reclamation of the inner city as a pleasant and desirable place to live must have seemed unthinkable to 1940s decision makers. The LCC was given special dispensation to build new housing on Green Belt outside its own territory, which at the time covered only Inner London.

The Loop has already encountered one of the resulting housing estates, at South Oxhey on section 14, and skirted around another at Hainault earlier in this section. The Neave family’s estate of Dagnams and Gooshayes was among the other sites chosen. It was not only of sufficient size, but had the advantage of being well-defined and integrated, which planners hoped would help give a sense of place to the new community.

In 1946 the LCC compulsorily purchased the main estate, plus some additional plots that had originally been part of it but had been sold off in 1919. The following year, 605 prefab houses were built as a temporary measure, and in 1948, construction commenced on 7,631 new homes. The work was finally completed in 1961. The name chosen for the new neighbourhood was Harold Hill, as it stood overlooking Harold Wood. Like several estates of this vintage, it’s now the subject of a long-term regeneration scheme, Harold Hill Ambitions.

The ‘garden city’ influence ensured that extensive areas of open space were preserved among the houses and flats, and the Loop makes good use of these as it crosses the area, particularly the green strips alongside the brook, which also provide a margin for flooding. Our first site of the brook itself is where it crosses Priory Road by its junction with Tees Drive. It runs here in a steeply cut channel surrounded by trees and shrubs, so attempting to reach the water’s edge is an uncomfortably twiggy experience. You’re better off walking on the grass above. Just before Whitchurch Road, another small stream joins from the left, rising from a series of ponds in Dagnam Park a little to the east. From here, the combined streams are known as Paines Brook, although the watercourse is often designated by the joint name Paines and Carters Brook.

The green strip continues to Dagnam Park Road, once a path linking Gooshayes and Dagnams but now one of the main roads through the housing estate. On the other side, the stream enters Central Park, one of two major public parks on former farmland and parkland built into the original design (the other is Dagnam Park to the east, around the former site of the now-demolished manor house). The mediaeval nucleus of Gooshayes once stood on the other side of the brook to the right here, and Gooshayes House itself stood until 1961 when it was demolished to make way for a community centre. It’s clear from old photographs and maps that the unusually angular kinks in the brook here were deliberate diversions to create more conveniently-shaped fields and farmyards.

Central Park became rather neglected, but received a boost in 2014 with funding from the Veolia North Thames Trust. Veolia is the big French-based utilities company which among other things operates a massive landfill site on Rainham Marshes, further along the Loop. The Trust, which has since been merged with another nationally-based trust, was a vehicle for ensuring that some of the profits from this were invested for public benefit. The cash paid for the state-of-the-art BMX track and skate park on the right as you enter the park, the play area further on, new plantings and other improvements.

The Portrait Bench in Central Park, Harold Hill.

Just past the play area is a roundabout of paths where the Ingrebourne Way, part of National Cycle Network route 136, joins from the left. We’ll be sharing much of the rest of the trail with this route, which has long been in the planning stages and was completed in 2014 as a partnership between Havering council and active travel charity Sustrans. It runs for 21 km from Noak Hill, not far from where the Loop met Noak Hill Road, to the Thames at Rainham Marshes, and indeed you could simply follow it all the way, as it’s more prominently signed than the Loop. But as it’s a multi-user route also suitable for cyclists, there are stretches along the valley where it’s forced to follow roads, while the Loop takes more interesting paths suitable only for walkers. More information about walking the Ingrebourne Way as an alternative to the Loop.

On the roundabout is a simple park bench surrounded by three shadow puppet-style metal sculptures, the Portrait Bench, installed in 2011 as part of the Ingrebourne Way improvements. You’ll surely recognise Henry VIII and appreciate his connection to the area, but the other two subjects, chosen following a public call for nominations, are rather more obscure. To Henry’s left, and maintaining a respectful distance, is Harry Norman Ecclestone, a Bank of England employee who lived locally, and designed the D series banknotes familiar from the 1970s to the 1990s. Next to him is Dick Bouchard, founder of the Romford Drum and Trumpet Corps, who was still alive when the sculptures were unveiled and attended the ceremony. The wood just off to the left, Long Wood, survives from the Gooshayes estate, as does another patch of woodland, Sale Wood, further along.

The Loop leaves Central Park past the ground of Ardleigh Green Cricket Club, founded in 1940, on the left, and continues along the brook through another green strip on the other side of Petersfield Avenue. It runs here between Paines Brook Way and Amersham Road, a street which has a tale to tell about housing policy over the decades.

As at South Oxhey, most of the properties at Harold Hill are now privately owned. The process of selling them to their occupiers began in the 1970s under the Greater London Council, but accelerated significantly under the Right to Buy policy for council tenants, introduced in 1980 as a flagship policy of the Conservative government of the day.

One of the earliest properties sold under this scheme was 39 Amersham Road. In an obligingly media-friendly photocall, prime minister Margaret Thatcher personally sealed the sale and handed over the keys to the Patterson family, who had lived there as tenants since 1962. They paid only £8,315 for the three-bedroomed house, but after the marriage broke up, Maureen Patterson struggled with mortgage repayments and ended up selling it and moving to a mobile home.

The house has since passed through several other hands and its value is now approaching £220,000. Today, the proportion of houses owned by their occupiers in the UK is 61%, exactly the same proportion as in the 1980s, as many of the people who exercised their right to buy ended up selling to private landlords who were buying to rent. Yet in the face of a major housing crisis in London, the current government is intent on extending the right to buy to housing association tenants.

The path along the brook continues through another, smaller, green area, St Neots Road Open Space, to arrive at the A12 Colchester Road close to where it crosses the watercourse at Paines Bridge. The road is the modern incarnation of Iter V, the old highway that linked London northeast with Colchester, the first capital of Roman Britain, via Mile End, Stratford, Ilford, Romford, Brentwood and Chelmsford. By the mid-17th century this road had been turnpiked and, as the A12, it was one of the first British trunk routes designated in 1922. West towards London, the A12 has subsequently been diverted along more recently built roads and the old route renumbered A118. But at this point, though widened to a dual carriageway in the 1940s, it’s likely close to the old Roman route.

This is another point where the Loop is severed by a busy main road, and the official option is to divert to the next light-controlled crossing west, which isn’t too far away though still annoyingly off the desire line. But here you also have the option of an uncontrolled crossing straight ahead, which makes use of the central reservation. As the road is straight with good visibility and the flow of traffic is often interrupted by nearby lights, you should have no trouble using this if you’re quick on your feet and take special care.

Harold Wood

Harold Wood station: before its time.

The A12 marks the southern boundary of Harold Hill: the neighbourhood on the other side is now known as Harold Wood, although the scope of that name has changed over the centuries. In mediaeval times, the area to the north of the Colchester Road, where Harold Hill now stands, was known as Harold Wood, and attached to the Romford chapelry. The area to the south was North End, attached to the Hornchurch chapelry. The Harold in question was Harold Godwinson, the ill-fated last Anglo-Saxon king of England, who as mentioned above once held all of Havering.

The area that’s now Harold Wood developed rather earlier than Harold Hill, although it was still rural in 1840 when the Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) cut through it. In 1866, a development company bought land at Gubbins Farm to turn into a new town, served by a new station to be opened by the ECR’s successor the Great Eastern Railway. Even though the site was technically in North End, the developers adopted the more picturesque name Harold Wood, also used as the name for the station when it opened in 1868.

Demand for housing in the area at first proved lower than expected: the planned new town never happened, and the development of Harold Wood didn’t take off until after World War I. Residential development avoided the watercourses, so once again the Loop has a green strip to follow into the area, although the waterside is soon blocked by an industrial estate. This is the site of Harold Wood Brickworks, established in 1878, which once had its own extensive railway sidings. It was closed in 1902 and the land used for grazing and light industry. The present Bates Industrial Estate was built in the late 1940s, and named after the building firm that developed it.

The trail runs along streets dating from the 1920s and 1930s, and then past the distinctive modernist building of Harold Wood Library, opened in 1960: the Christmas tree in front was planted to mark the 50th anniversary in 2010. The King Harold pub, in contrast, is an 1868 survivor of the aborted Victorian new town scheme. The main station building, perched above the tracks along Gubbins Lane, is from the same year.

This section of the Great Eastern Main Line originally linked the old Bishopsgate station on the edge of the City of London with Brentwood, extending in stages to Colchester and Ipswich and reaching Norwich by 1851. Its London terminal was superseded by Liverpool Street station in 1875, and in 1883 it became an international link to the Netherlands and northern Europe with the opening of a branch to a ferry terminal at Harwich. In 1932 the line was quadrupled, and today express services run non-stop through Harold Wood on the central pair of lines.

From 2019, the station will stand on only the second main line-sized railway to run through central London and out the other side. Services on the Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, will run from Shenfield through new underground tunnels linking Liverpool Street and Paddington, passing through Hayes and Harlington at the end of Loop section 10, on their way to Slough and Reading. Since 2015 the local stopping trains from Liverpool Street to Shenfield have been overseen by Transport for London under the brand name TfL Rail in preparation for the new service.

Meanwhile, hidden in the industrial estate, the Paines Brook has joined the main flow of the river Ingrebourne. In the next section, the London Loop meets this river for the first but by no means the last time as it continues its final journey back towards the river Thames.

• Download full route description (PDF)
• View Google map
• Official Transport for London page: Chigwell to Havering-atte-Bower
• Official Transport for London page: Havering-atte-Bower to Harold Wood

London Countryway 14/15a: Theydon Bois - Brentwood

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the London Underground’s Central Line at Theydon Bois station, we’re suddenly in a different world. In marked contrast to the London-centric character of the previous section, this one has the most rural atmosphere since leaving the Cotswolds. Belying the notion that Essex is a flat county, this is a traditional English ramble across rolling countryside of open fields, hedgerows, streams, winding lanes and woodland patches, linking a string of seemingly isolated hilltop churches. And more so than before it faces some of the traditional challenges of such walks: ploughing, mud, overgrown and unclear paths, dodgy stiles and mean and narrow field headlands on which you can barely put two feet side by side. For the last quarter of the route things change again as we walk through a country park into Brentwood, one of the biggest towns on the Countryway.

NOTE: Originally the London Countyway ran via Epping and this section started at Epping station rather than Theydon Bois, but was diverted in the early 1980s to avoid construction work on the M25. In July 2015 I posted a commentary and route descriptions restoring the original route, which I now regard as the recommended one. It rejoins the route described below soon after the start, at the subway under the M11 into Theydon Garnon. Read more here.

Blunts Farm

In the recent past, the very worst path problems on the London Countryway were at the beginning of this section, soon after you crossed the Central Line at Theydon Bois and set out alongside a stream which, like all of those we met in Epping Forest, eventually flows into the river Roding. What Keith Chesterton, the original deviser of the Countryway, describes as a pleasant walk in his 1981 guide had become an ugly trudge through the spoilt land of Blunts Farm. The situation has since improved and is much easier to walk, if still not quite the attractive waterside meadow it once was.

In the early 2000s this farmland was earmarked for the development of a golf course, but from 2003 the owners began illegally using it as landfill for construction waste, claiming this was a form of landscaping. Following local protests, the landfill was stopped but not before the land was seriously damaged. When I first visited in 2010, the site was a sea of mud dotted with dangerous pits, with thick layers of earth rucked up as if by some geological catastrophe, and the right of way was impossible to follow. By 2014 the surfaces were restored and vegetation was starting to re-establish itself, with some verdant wetland areas by the stream, but still had something of the blasted alien planet look about it. New and prominent yellow-topped waymarker poles sprouted in a clear line to mark the path.

The route crosses the M11 through a spooky subway, just south of its junction with the M25 (junction 6 on the M11, 27 on the M25). The motorway is now part of the main route from London to Stansted Airport and eastern England including major destinations like Cambridge and Norwich. It has its origins in proposals for an ‘Eastern Avenue’ dating back to 1915, but wasn’t actually built until the 1970s, with this section opening in 1977.

Theydon Garnon and Stapleford Tawney

On the other side, relatively well sheltered from the traffic, are the leafy surroundings of Garnish Hall, originally the manor house of Theydon Garnon. This is one of the three Theydons, a separate manor from Theydon Bois since Norman times which in the 13th century fell under the control of the Gernon family, hence the name. There’s a claim that Elizabeth I stayed here, and planted an oak in the grounds of nearby Coopersale Hall, now just northwest of the motorway junction. The current Garnish Hall is a Grade II 18th century red brick farmhouse, possibly with a 17th century core and with recycled timbers and panelling from an earlier moated manor on the site. Our first church of the day, All Saints Theydon Garnon, is visible from the M25 and something of a landmark for regular travellers. There are windows from the 13th and 15th centuries in the chancel, and a mainly red brick tower from 1520. Though it underwent much remodelling in the 1860s, it remains one of only three churches in Essex with wooden columns.

The even smaller hamlet just to the east of Theydon Garnon, Hobbs Cross, may once have been a more important place as in Roman times it straddled a road from London to a junction with Stane Street at Great Dunmow. Through farm buildings we pick up the alignment of this old highway and follow it for a good 1.5km as a dead straight green lane enclosed by thick hedges. Along the way it passes through a subway under the M25, the last time the Countryway crosses the orbital motorway – the rest of the route is now outside it. It’s somehow fitting that our last encounter with this icon of irrational contemporary transport is at its intersection with a Roman road. You wonder if the motorway will still be visible in 2,000 years time.

Reaching Mounts Road, the original route via Epping described by Countryway creator Keith Chesterton in the first edition of his book joins our second edition diversion for a slow climb along the road up Mounts Hill. The woodland on the right is known as the Rough Patch – it’s a shame it’s not open to the public as you could derive much amusement from telling your friends you’d been through it.

More genuinely diverting is the big house at the end of the drive further on your right, which you can just catch sight of by looking back from the path when you leave the road. This is Hill Hall, built between 1567-73 for Thomas Smith, a diplomat and advisor to Elizabeth I who was involved in a failed early attempt to ‘plant’ protestants in Ulster. Smith studied and worked in France and Italy, and you can see the influence on the house, which is an early example of Renaissance styling in England, and very different from a typical Tudor mansion. It was subsequently used as a World War II prisoner of war camp and later a women’s prison. Since then it’s fallen under the care of English Heritage, who restored it in the late 1990s. Most of it is now divided into private flats, but it’s accessible to the public by pre-booking a tour – the interior highlights include two surviving sets of 16th century wall paintings.

Up ahead is St Michael’s church at Theydon Mount, the third and last of the Theydons: the rebuilding of the church in 1612 following a fire that destroyed an earlier building was largely financed by Thomas Smith’s nephew William. But our route is now southeast across fields towards another church, at Stapleford Tawney. Just over halfway along this path, although it’s not signed on the ground, the route rejoins the Three Forests Way, which has reached here from where we last encountered it at Epping Forest via Hainault Forest and the London Loop.

At the end of the path is St Mary’s Stapleford Tawney, a neat building with a distinctive low wooden tower topped by a modest but elegant spire. The current building is 13th century, the tower from around 1500, but there was an older building on the site, and the brickwork of the current one recycles building materials from Roman structures. On opposite sides of the porch are two 12th century stone coffins discovered in the churchyard in the 1860s, when the church was undergoing restotation – many of the interior fittings date from this period. It’s hard to think how churches like this persist in such remote locations. Stapleford Tawney isn’t really a village but a scattered parish with no real centre apart from the cluster here around the church, and today the population is barely over 100.

This is also the only escape route for some 9 km and it’s not an especially convenient one: every 90 minutes or so, a bus from Romford works its way up to the roundabout on the A113 at Passingford Bridge, about half an hour’s walk away and just back inside the M25. It all seems surprisingly remote for a walk that starts at a Tube station. On the other side of Tawney Lane, the meadowland to the left of the path is actually a nature reserve, Hawksmere Spring, a fragment of ancient unimproved pasture managed by Essex Wildlife Trust, scattered with damp woodland, recalling the mediaeval landscape. It’s particularly rich in flowers and butterflies in the spring and early summer.

The route now runs on a clear and continuous though muddy bridleway past and through a couple of woodland patches to Berwick Lane, passing underneath the flight path from North Weald airfield to the north, so you’ll likely hear the buzz of light aircraft above you. At Berwick Lane, the Three Forests Way heads off for Hatfield Forest. For ambitious walkers there’s a connection via this route to two other notable longer paths in the region – the unofficial St Peter’s Way, another Fred Matthews project that ends on the coast at the isolated wooden church of St Peter at Burnham on Crouch, and the signed Essex Way to Harwich, passing close to Parkeston Quay with its ferries to Hoek van Holland and Esbjerg.

Across the river Roding

Past a woodland and pond at Tracey’s farm, where an object that appears to be an owl-shaped abstract sculpture stand incongruously on the lawn, the path runs down to the A113 from Leytonstone to Chipping Ongar, and follows it for a while past the attractive Woodman pub then along a lane that was clearly part of the main road before the latter was diverted to smooth out a bend. The big white house that stands here was once a second roadside pub, the White Bear at Stanford Rivers, dating from the 18th century or possibly earlier, and retaining early 19th century interior features until it was closed in 2001 and converted to residential use. It remains a Grade II listed building. A footpath leads through what must once have been a fantastic beer garden, a space that now appears to be used for clay pigeon shooting if the debris that crunches underfoot is anything to go by, to a footbridge over the river Roding.

The Roding is the next major tributary of the Thames on its north bank downstream from the river Lea. It rises near Dunmow and flows through the Essex Rodings, villages which are suffixed with the river’s name. It continues through the east London suburbs via Woodford Green, Redbridge, Ilford and Barking to join the Thames at Creekmouth (soon to be renamed Barking Thamesside and redeveloped into a “21st century garden city”) as tidal Barking Creek, a distance of 80 km. The London section of the valley is something of a green reserve, with open space along the riverside, though not on the same scale as the Lea – we’ll explore some of it in later London Underfoot walks. At this point it’s an country stream lined with reeds, surrounded by a relatively spacious valley. Like the Lea, it’s a traditional boundary, though of more local importance: on the other side of the bridge we’ve left Essex’s Epping Forest District and entered its Brentwood District.

Navestock

Our route continues as first as a narrow path through encroaching crops but finally becomes a broad track through fields to another attractive and rather isolated church, St Thomas the Apostle at Navestock – a place name meaning ‘the stump on the ridge’. Like Stapleford Tawney, Navestock is a dispersed parish with no obvious nucleus, which once stood on the edge of the Forest of Essex – there are old boundary stones in the area. Navestock Heath just to the south of here was once the most populated part, but now it’s Navestock Side, further along our walk. The fair-sized church with its squat weatherboarded tower set among trees is the most historic and I think the most attractive on this section of the route, and Grade I listed. Much of what can be seen today dates from rebuilding in the 13th and 14th centuries, including the tower, which was once thought to 15th century, but carbon dating of the four massive oak posts that hold it up places it around 1250. Even some of the window grilles are mediaeval, although the building was restored in the 1950s to repair damage from a World War II landmine explosion nearby.

There are signs of much earlier habitation in the area. A little further along our route, past the church and farm and the junction with Dudworth Road, the woodland visible across the field to the left is Fortification Wood, so called as it grows over an ancient defensive earthwork about 100m wide, of unknown origin but perhaps Saxon, and dotted in various places on the map are the remains of moats belonging to long vanished mediaeval manors.

The farmhouse next to the church is actually the former main manor house, Navestock Hall. Since perhaps even before the Norman conquest, the manor was held by the canons of St Paul’s cathedral in London but in the 1540s it was passed to the Crown. In 1554 Queen Mary sold it to Edward Waldegrave and it stayed in his family until 1898. The current Grade II listed building with its picturesque exposed timber frame likely dates from the last days of church ownership in the early 16th century, back when the bulk of the land in the parish was one big common. The Waldegraves were Catholics – Edward was later imprisoned by Elizabeth I for recusancy – and influenced local religious traditions, only converting to Anglicanism in 1722 when James Waldegrave took up his seat in the House of Lords. But an indigenous Roman Catholic community persisted in the area into the 1930s.

James clearly wanted to live like a Lord in other ways too. Sometime in the 1720s he enclosed part of the common and turned it into parkland, unusually leaving the existing house standing while he built an entirely new Navestock Hall some 400m to the northeast, commanding the new park. It would have been visible from the path we just walked, a two storey neoclassical mansion with nine bays across its southeast-facing façade, two wings and an imposing pedimented entrance. But the mansion only lasted until 1811 when it was demolished, and no trace of it remains, while the more modest earlier house has outlasted it. Meanwhile, the rest of the common was enclosed by 1770.

Like lists of Kings and Queens, it’s easy to take these dates and names of Lords of the Manor as banal recitations of facts, but behind them lies the life of whole rural communities through the centuries, including the many more ordinary people – commoners, farm labourers, craftspeople – whose names and deeds didn’t make it into the written records. These are the people that wrought the changes on the landscape, through long periods of “business as usual” and suffered the worst consequences through upheavals driven by changing economic and political circumstances, like the privatisation of the land under enclosure.

In the last section we saw the resistance to enclosure that saved Epping Forest, but this was an unusual and late example that was ultimately successful because of the support of influential people with more interest in the recreational amenity of the Forest than its economic life. By then most enclosures, like Navestock’s, had long been accomplished successfully. The assumption that it was in the common good of the rural community for local people to have at least some productive access to the land on their own behalf was swept away and instead they became workers in a great agrarian factory, with no property of their own and nothing to sell but their labour.

Rural workers also enjoyed far fewer opportunities for collective organisation to improve their lot than industrial workers, simply because they were more dispersed. In the 1960s, when my father collected dues for the National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers (since absorbed into Unite), they were among the worst paid, most exploited and deprived workers in the UK, faced with some of the poorest and most unsafe conditions. Following enclosure the countryside was certainly more productive, and for a while the increasing prosperity of the landowners trickled down to their workers to some extent.

You can see this in the population figures for Navestock, which increased from just over 600 at the beginning of the 19th century to almost 1,000 at its midpoint. But the 1870s brought the first of a series of agricultural depressions and it was down to just under 700 by 1901. The 20th century saw increasing mechanisation of agriculture, particularly after World War II, and the local population is now only 500. The demographics have changed in other ways too – most locals round here are now prosperous people who work in London, or from home, for whom the countryside is a lifestyle choice rather than an economic necessity. And indeed it’s these people that now protect that lifestyle choice so assiduously through village committees, rural protection societies and the like.

London Countryway walkers will undoubtedly feel they have much to thank these middle class rural conservationists for, including halting the destruction at Blunts Farm at the beginning of this walk. But there’s a misconception at the heart of efforts to preserve the natural environment of the countryside as if it’s a thing in itself that predates human agency and the only good is in keeping it as it is. In fact the countryside is not natural, except arguably in the case of genuinely remote and wild lands. It is just as much a built environment, a product of human intervention and management, as the city, perhaps more so as we’ve been managing it for longer.

And, just as in the city, the fascination is in the fact that the transformations are often only partial, leaving traces of former states for us to stumble across, as if the modern surface has rubbed away to reveal the layers beneath: the patch of forest, the stretch of Roman road, the fragment of unimproved grassland, the field boundaries inherited from enclosures. Perhaps our successors will regard relics of golf courses and luxury gated communities with equal fascination.

And here’s something else to ponder as you tightrope walk the narrow headland of the first field on the way to Navestock Side: if it had been left to market forces, which some people think are natural, it’s quite likely that all of this would long since have been swallowed by the metropolis. By the time London’s development was stopped in its tracks by World War II and the subsequent planning legislation, suburbia had already sprawled out for mile upon mile along the A12. As we shall see, Brentwood has its share of sprawl too. Without the Green Belt, housing estates, shopping centres and leisure parks would doubtless have swept away the stretch of countryside between them. Perhaps chocolate box pretty Navestock Side, with its old pub and 17th century cottages overlooking a village green, would have been spotted and conserved as a London ‘village’ with a carefully maintained patina of rustic character, like Barnes, Bexley or Hampstead.

As if these surroundings aren’t cutely English enough already, arrive at Navestock Side at the right time and you’ll hear the evocative smack of leather on willow. The green has been associated with cricket since at least 1784, and is thought to be one of the oldest grounds in England with a continuous history of matches. The West Essex Cricket Club, then one of the most successful and best known in the county, played at home here throughout the 19th century, and it was once also used for county matches. The local club is now simply known as the Navestock Cricket Club. The only thing that slightly spoils the scene is that the pub, the Green Man, has since been converted to a restaurant known by the decidedly unevocative name of Alec’s Bar and Grill.

Bentley

Across the other side of the green, a stretch of well-used field path leads on to Bentley, a hamlet at the junction of the Brentwood-Ongar road, now the A128, and Mores Lane to Coxtie Green. This was once the northern part of the large parish of South Weald, of which more later, and much of it was parish common land known as Bentley Common, though was largely enclosed in the early 19th century when the area began to enjoy some popularity with better off families seeking country houses near to the London road. The church, St Paul’s Bentley Common, just along Mores Lane, is a Victorian addition, in traditional Early English style but with an unusual round protrusion on the tower – it was designed by Ernest Lee and opened in 1880 as a chapel of ease of South Weald, to serve a growing population in the north of the parish. Scattered around, you can also see evidence of how development continued sporadically into the 20th century before being stopped short by the Green Belt.

Next to the church, with its entrance slightly further down the lane, is The Mores, a surviving part of the common now managed by the Woodland Trust. The section of woodland nearest us is ‘secondary woodland’, a good example of what happens when grazing and pasture land in this part of the world is left to its own devices. The wood isn’t shown in records from 1777, so must have developed as grazing on the common ceased in the early 19th century, perhaps accelerated when myxomatosis reduced the local rabbit population. The site also includes an area of ancient woodland further to the west.

In the original London Countryway guide, even though there’s no station nearby, Keith Chesterton opts to end this section at Bentley to keep to a roughly equal section length, directing walkers to catch a bus to Brentwood. But he also notes the option of continuing along the trail, which actually passes Brentwood station further along – Keith says it’s three miles, but it’s actually 6.25km so closer to four.

Even so I’m not comfortable with the idea of catching a bus from here to the station, and another one back the next day, only to walk past the station again later. It’s a bit like a circular walk that returns you to a parked car: it undermines one of the pleasures of walking longer trails, the sense of progressing from one place to another under your own steam, and feels instead like you’re simply using another means of transport to access static exercise, like catching the bus or, worse, driving to the gym. So I’ve chosen to press on instead, to leave a nice short next section. This disrupts a certain elegant thematic unity: today has been all about fields, hills and country churches, while tomorrow takes in two country parks bookending a major town, but we’ll live with that.

Weald Country Park

In some respects Weald Country Park is an appropriate inclusion in this walk as it’ll give you some idea, after all this talk of manors, parks, commons and farms, of what an aristocratic country seat developed from a mediaeval manor actually looked like, and what the people who privatised the countryside did with the land they enclosed for their personal use.

South Weald was a large parish which originally stretched as far south as Brentwood station, but the focus of it was the manorial estate that now largely forms the country park, with the manor house and church at the south end. The Country Park claims to include areas that have been parkland for 700 years, which would take it back to the times when the estate was controlled by the canons of Waltham Abbey – it was one of the original endowments granted to the abbey on its foundation by Harold Godwinson, later Harold II, as described in the previous section. Following dissolution the estate was granted to Sir Brian Tuke, and was sold on several times in the succeeding centuries.

It’s likely the manor house, Weald Hall, existed in monastic times. It was rebuilt in the 1550s by Anthony Browne, founder of Brentwood School, and surrounded by walled courts and gardens, including garden houses. One of these survives today, known as Queen Mary Chapel due to a probably spurious legend that Mary, a fanatic Catholic, worshipped there in secret before she became queen. Beyond this was a small park, progressively enlarged northwards to incorporate former common and woodland and landscaped through the 18th century in the style pioneered by landscape architect Capability Brown.

The estate passed into the Tower family, its last family owners, when Thomas Tower bought it in 1752. He added a deer park which by 1892 was home to red deer, fallow deer, Japanese sika deer and Kashmir goats. His grandnephew Christopher Tower expanded the estate to its fullest extent in the 1830s, encroaching further on the common and planting the new land with conifers; he also commissioned further work on the Hall, some of it by Robert Adam.

The Towers abandoned South Weald after another Christopher Tower was killed in World War I, installing caretakers and renting the grounds to a shooting syndicate. During World War II it was put to military use, with some destructive consequences, including a serious fire in the Hall. In 1944, troops assembling in the park made gaps in the fence for vehicle access and many of the deer (and perhaps also the goats) escaped into the surrounding countryside. After the war, the Towers broke up the estate, selling off much of it Metropolitan Railway who had it earmarked for housing development, but the Green Belt put a stop to that, and in 1953 most was bought by Essex County Council, with the help of Brentwood council and the London County Council, with a remit to develop it into a public park. The hall was considered so badly damaged it had to be demolished.

The current park, which almost became a venue for the mountain biking events at the London 2012 Olympic Games but lost out to Hadleigh Park, occupies some 2 km2. The Countryway runs through it in an almost straight line from north to south, passing through a variety of environments recalling different periods of the site’s history. The first stretch, in the north, is through some of the most recent additions to the park, dating from Christopher Tower’s 19th century expansions. Some of the woodland is old common, but the conifer plantations were put there by Tower. All the conifers in the plantations were cut down after World War II to meet demand for timber for rebuilding, and replaced with new plantings, so what you see today has grown up since the late 1940s.

Further on you follow the deer park fence – deer can still be seen in the park – and reach a more open area of parkland. To your right are two lakes, the larger Weald Park Lake and beyond it the smaller Conservation Lake, both created in the 18th century landscaping project: the bigger lake is now popular with anglers and there’s a hide for watching bird life. This area is the most popular among park visitors but the Countyway runs within the deer park on the other side of the fence so you’re left with the curious impression that all the families out for weekend strolls by the lake have been fenced in. A detour along the south side of the lake leads to the visitor centre and Queen Mary’s Chapel nearby.

Continuing up the main path you can get an idea of the landscaping. The area to the right, south of the lakes, is known as Belvedere Field, after the small mound commanding the site which from the 1730s to 1950 was topped by an octagonal belvedere: traces of the formal paths that converged on this are still visible. You’ll have to imagine the Hall, which stood to the right of the mound. Next there’s the pretty enclosed picnic area and gardens around Bluebell Pond, an echo of the walled gardens that once surrounded the house. You might want to detour off the path to take in the prospect from the belvedere site before leaving the park past the second of today’s cricket grounds. St Peter’s church, to the right, which once stood next to the Hall, has 12th century remnants and a 16th century tower, but was radically rebuilt in 1868.

The next stretch of the route is along a road with the definite feel of being on the suburban edge, though it’s well wooded at first, and there are opportunities to escape from the traffic by threading along informal parallel paths within the trees. It began when I visited with an ugly clutter of signs aimed at deterring heavy goods vehicles from unheedingly following their satnavs along unsuitable country lanes, but you do wonder if the signs themselves are almost as environmentally undesirable. Eventually you’ll find yourself on a flyover above a busy dual carriageway, the next of the main radial roads that our route crosses.

This is the A12 from London to Colchester, Ipswich and Felixstowe, the modern incarnation of the Roman road listed in the Antonine Itinerary as Iter V or Route 5, linking Londinium with Camulodunum (Colchester), the first provincial capital of Britannia back in the days when London was still just a couple of little hills overlooking the Thames used by Belgic farmers for cattle grazing. Much of the road continued in use into the 18th century, when parts were turnpiked as the Great Essex Road, and even today great swathes of the route stick to the Roman alignment. Not here, though – the road ran through the centre of Brentwood until 1965 when the bypass beneath you was opened.

As with some previous unavoidable urban areas, Chesterton adopts the strategy of simply sticking to the main roads to get them over and done with as quickly and directly as possible. He probably would rather have avoided central Brentwood altogether, but as he points out, there’s no real alternative: to the west there are no useful paths, and bypassing it to the east would take us too far out of our way. I’d rather make more of a virtue of this contrasting urban environment by finding some more interesting ways through it, with the advantage that new paths and open spaces have opened since the last London Countryway guide was written. Chesterton’s route is straightforward and I’ve outlined it for you to follow if you choose. It will take you closer to the town centre, which has a few features worth seeing as well as its shops and services. Mine heads directly for the station, but the town centre isn’t much further away.

Brentwood

Just past the flyover is the relatively new open space of St Faith’s on the right. It’s a curious and rather attractive environment that feels half-finished and abandoned – parts are obviously former farmland, with old hedgerows, but much is rolling grassland crisscrossed by ditches and new footpaths and cycleways. The distinctive modern building rising up on the other side is a £30million office block with 30,000 m2 of floor space built in the early 2000s as a regional office for BT (British Telecom), the privatised successor to the Post Office telephone and telecommunications division. In 1854, an agricultural and industrial school was built here for workhouse children from London’s East End, with 300 children shipped from Shoreditch to Brentwood to learn a trade – it was later operated by the Hackney Union.

In 1915 it became an epileptic hospital for women, known from 1935 as St Faith’s, and remained in clinical use until 1985. The buildings were demolished in 1998 and replaced with the BT building, with its low energy design by Arup architects – not just an office block, apparently, but a “social hub for people to meet and exchange ideas.” The grounds, some of which had presumably been retained in agricultural use for teaching purposes in the days of the school, were taken over by Brentwood council as the park we now enjoy.

A cycleway leads past the BT offices to London Road, the original route of the London-Colchester road through the town. The name Brentwood is a reminder that we’re still in the territory of the Forest of Essex, and the Roman road would have been built through thick woodland. No evidence has been found of a Roman settlement along the road at this point, so it’s thought the founders of the town were Saxons – the name means ‘burnt wood’, referring either to the method used to clear the woodland for building or to charcoal burning in the area.

After the assassination of Thomas Becket, covered in the last section, and his subsequent canonisation, mediaeval Brentwood became a crossroads on a north-south pilgrimage route to Canterbury, thus the place name Pilgrim’s Hatch to the north of the town. Brentwood was one of the centres of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt when local people refused to pay taxes, almost killing the tax collector who tried to arrest them. In 1557 Brentwood School, now a minor public school, was founded by Antony Browne, mentioned above as the lord of the manor of South Weald. Later the Roman road became an important coaching route, and Brentwood the second ‘stage’ on coach journeys from London, with numerous inns to accommodate the traffic: according to Daniel Defoe, the town was “full of good inns”.

The railway arrived in 1840, prompting the growth of a major suburban and commuter centre, with the population count rising tenfold from almost 5,000 in the 1890s to 50,000 today. Another aspect of local life was the presence of the military, starting with the use of the old Brentwood common as an army camp from 1742. A century later the East India Company built facilities here to supplement its overcrowded barracks in Chatham, including, of all things, an elephant training school. Military used ceased in 1959; some buildings remain, but sadly no elephants. As can be clearly seen from the map, the town had by then sprawled to absorb many of the surrounding villages, and would itself certainly have been swallowed by London if the creation of the Green Belt hadn’t preserved the wedge of countryside between the two.

The smallish town centre is amply provided with shops, pubs and restaurants, including some new developments, but is short on heritage. The most notable old structure is ruined St Thomas’ chapel, with walls and foundations dating from at least 1222 that were originally built to service Canterbury-bound pilgrims. Reflecting the persistence of Roman Catholicism in the area, since 1917 Brentwood has also been a Catholic diocese with its own cathedral, though the present building, in blandly fake and nostalgic Renaissance style, only dates from 1991. The former cathedral, built as a parish church in Victorian Gothic style in 1861, still stands alongside it.

Brentwood station first opened by the Eastern Counties Railway as a temporary terminus for trains from Liverpool Street, but in 1843 the line was extended to Colchester, becoming the main line between London and East Anglia. Today there’s a rather dull street level entrance, though the facilities have been improved by a recent makeover. Londoners will be glad to know that Oyster Pay as you Go is valid from here, though "special fares apply."

One surprising discovery is that the Forest of Essex survives in hidden corners even close to the town centre. Just across London Road a fragment of woodland, now supported by the Forestry Commission, hides behind houses, with another fragment a little further on. It’s known, curiously, as La Plata, Castillian for ‘the silver’ and a relatively common place name in the Americas, perhaps most famously associated with the river known in English as Plate, running through Argentina and Uruguay. Some of the area seems to have been the garden of a big house, with conifers, rhododendrons and an ornamental pond, but there are some old trees too – an intriguing stretch to finish with, and a modest prelude to the woodland and parkland we’ll be exploring next.

Download a route description for this section.