Adventures in East Anglia

I grew up and went to school in a medium-sized city in the west of Germany, located roughly halfway between Cologne and Frankfurt. When I was around 16, we went on a school trip to England. We did not go to London. We did not go to Oxford, Cambridge, or maybe Brighton. We did go to Clacton-on-Sea, on the Essex coast. More specifically, we went to a caravan park on the outskirts of Clacton.

This did not seem so strange at the time. Looking back, however, Clacton strikes as me as a very unusual destination for the school trip of a German school. Who decided on the Essex coast, and for what reason? Was the experiment repeated? In recent years I have often wondered about this, but doubt that I will ever know the answers.  The only clear connection between my hometown and Clacton I have been able to ascertain is related to a fried chicken restaurant which I will call FC. In Britain, FC can be found in many cities. In Germany, there is exactly one branch – which happens to be located where I grew up. It is legendary for being open until very late at night, thus providing food to partying teenagers. This striking fact raises questions of its own – why is there only this one branch, why is it here? – but it hardly answers the puzzle of how I ended up at a Clacton caravan park for a week.

I still have some distinct memories of the trip. We travelled by coach, taking the ferry to Harwich, and on arrival at the caravan park the coach stopped next to a football field. While waiting for the doors to open, we watched two boys involved in a fight rolling around on the ground outside. I remember plenty of tinned ravioli and creatively seasoned pasta. I do not recall any day trips for sightseeing, but I do remember a trip to a big Tesco supermarket.

Some years ago I identified the exact location of the caravan park from my youth, and had been meaning to go on a trip down the memory lane ever since. On a very fine day in early January 2023 I finally implanted this plan and headed to Essex’s sunshine coast, starting in Walton-on-the-Naze and heading south towards Clacton, Jaywick, and St Osyth.

Walton-on-the-Naze has a pier, but one’s attention is quickly drawn away from it by the large number of colourful beach huts. I have been on many coastal walks, but I had never seen this many beach huts of all shapes and varieties before.

While they exist in other countries, to me beach huts feel like a very British, or maybe even English, phenomenon. This feeling might have been influence by R. C. Sherriff’s 1931 novel The Fortnight in September. It follows the Stevens family from Dulwich in south London on their annual two-week holiday to Bognor Regis. There is little discernible action, but Sherriff excels at empathically describing the hopes, dreams, anxieties, and annoyances of everyday life. Among the various trials and tribulations the Stevenses face, one concerns the “the booking of the bathing hut” which “was always done on their first evening walk”. For a long time they are on the fence about which type of hut to rent: an ordinary, plain one or a more upscale – and hence more expensive – model with a small balcony. Finally the decision to indulge in the more luxurious hut is made – but then none of that type turns out to be available! Luckily the disappointment doesn’t last long, since they are able to rent one that becomes available on the following day. General contentment results:

It could not possibly have worked out better: they would not only save five shillings, but they would enjoy the hut much more through having to wait for it. It was theirs now, to all intents and purposes: they would stroll by and look at it tomorrow: they would picture themselves grouped round it—sitting on the balcony, hanging their bathing dresses over the rails—and then on Tuesday night they would unlock the door and go in: they would sit just inside and look out over the moonlit sea, and the soft music of the band would come to them faintly on the wind.

Beach huts are not popular in Germany. Instead, we have Strandkörbe – “beach baskets”, so-called because they are weaved, similarly to actual baskets. They are meant to provide shelter from sun and wind while sitting on the beach. Strandkörbe were invented in Rostock in the late 19th century, and to this day they are extremely popular on both the North Sea and the Baltic Sea coasts.

Outside of Germany, on the other hand, Strandkörbe are virtually non-existent, and hence there is not even an English term for it. One feels that their popularity must reveal something about the nature of Germanness. But it is hard to say what exactly. One salient stereotype is that Germans like to reserve spaces at the pool by putting down towels early in the morning, so a desire for securing a basecamp close to the water looks like a promising explanation. But this could arguably be fulfilled by beach huts rather than Strandkörbe as well, and so the German preference for the latter options remains mysterious to me. (A related but equally tricky question: If Austria had access to the sea, would Austrian beaches have Strandkörbe?)

To the south Walton is bordered by Frinton-on-Sea, which has no pier, and, until 2000 didn’t even have a pub. A large share of the population is retired, giving the place a quiet, conservative, and genteel character. Less flatteringly, a saying has it that while the aforementioned and nearby Harwich is for the continent, Frinton is for the incontinent.

Much of Frinton lies between the sea and the railway line. There is only one access road, and when the barriers at the railway crossings close Frinton is thus temporarily isolated from the rest of Britain. Until 2009 the railway crossing was operated manually, with a person opening and closing the “Gates” when trains approached and left. Living “within the Gates” is a status symbol, and Frintonians are passionate about them. When a plan by Network Rail to replace the manually operated barriers with an automatic system became known, fierce opposition ensued. The thought that some “lunatic in Colchester” would remotely operate the Frinton barriers shocked many residents, and a representative of Network Rail was booed at a public meeting. At a rally, slogans like “What do we want? The Gates!” were shouted. Intimated by such a forceful showing, Network Rail resorted to sneakily removing the old gates in the “cover of darkness” at 2.00am in the morning, when everyone was asleep. The whole saga is recounted in an excellent BBC documentary, which features a several interesting Frinton personalities.

Clacton, on the other hand, is flashy, with a massive pier, a ferris wheel, amusement arcades, and an upside-down house.

I did not have much time to explore Clacton proper as I was still quite far away from the sought-after caravan park, but I spent some time playing on a penny pusher in one of the arcades. I wrote about my passion for these machines on two previous occasions, and it is now appropriate to elaborate on the origins of this fascination. On the last day of the Essex school trip, I had still around £20 in cash. Since I didn’t want to take them back to Germany I looked for ways to spend money, and stumbled across a tiny arcade that was part of the caravan park. It had a coin pushing machine, and I had plenty of fun with the approximately 1000 2p coins I threw into the machine.

Heading further south from the centre of Clacton I soon reached the coastal village of Jaywick. It is somewhat notorious for having been named the most deprived area in England several times. Until the 1930s this area was just marshland, but then developers started to encourage people to buy land at affordable rates in order to build holiday homes on it. Many made use of this opportunity, but the houses that resulted were often of poor quality and not very suitable for living in them all year round – which became more and more common nevertheless. Despite some redevelopment efforts many properties in Jaywick are in bad shape even today, and I walked past more than one boarded-up prefab along the seafront.

Given its remote location unemployment is also high, which together with the poor housing conditions leads to various other social problems. In recent years life in Jaywick has been covered in a number of documentaries, some better than others. Without such prior priming, to a casual visitor Jaywick will probably not appear more badly off than many other towns on the East coast though.

Past Jaywick the big moment has finally come: the caravan park I stayed at around 15 years ago.

When I visited my parents last Christmas I rummaged around the attic in order to see whether any picture taken on the school trip have been preserved. Sadly I did not find anything – it might well be that I had not taken a camera at all – and so I only have my vague memories to compare the current impression with. While the caravan park itself looks pretty much like any other, I do quite vividly recall the dark stone groynes from lonely walks along the sea wall.

Beyond the caravans the salt marshes begin, and my visit to the past ends under a wide and open sky.

In the autumn of 2022 I lived in Massachusetts for two months. I stayed in the city of Somerville, the northern neighbour of (the other) Cambridge, which is in turn separated from the city of Boston by the Charles River (see header). American cities, towns, and other municipalities tend to be small, and in order to simplify matters no harm is done by saying that I lived in Boston.

When I arrived in early September the weather was splendid and it remained so until I left in early November, so there were plenty of opportunities to go on walks. Since I like combining theory and practice I had hoped to use Henry David Thoreau’s writings as a guide to exploring Massachusetts. Thoreau lived in Concord, a small town roughly 15 miles to the west of Boston, which was also home to various other writers. Nowadays Concord is part of the Boston suburbs, but it has remained relatively quaint and idyllic. Thoreau occasionally suggested that everything of interest is contained in it, commenting that “most of the phenomena noted” in an account of an expedition to the Arctic “might be observed in Concord”. He thus saw no need to travel very far or very often. Thoreau was an enthusiastic walker, however, and wrote extensively about his ramblings around Concord and other parts of Massachusetts and New England.

On paper this seemed like a perfect fit. Just as Sebald, M. R. James, and Graham Swift provided inspiration to explore various parts of East Anglia, Thorau could lead me to interesting areas in Massachusetts. Or so I imagined. For when it came to actually reading Thoreau, I found the experience unenjoyable. I strategically avoided Walden because I was worried that its use in inspirational quotes would put me off, and instead started with the promising-sounding essay “Walking” from The Atlantic. But the writing style struck me as so annoying and pretentious that I didn’t manage to finish it. I tried Thorau’s Concord-neighbour Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Country Life” as well, with similar results.

These disappointing encounters led me to set the theory of walking aside in favour of the actual activity. On an especially warm Sunday I thus took the train to Concord to explore the famous Walden Pond, home to Thoreau’s attempt to live in the woods. The site of this cabin is located conveniently close to the town centre, and it was pleasant to swim in the pond.

In “Walking” Thoreau makes the following observation about access to land:

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds.

This prediction has, sadly, become reality. Nowadays Eastern Massachusetts is very densely populated, and land to roam around in is sparse. Being the Bay State, I had for instance assumed that there would be plenty of coastal walks, but this turned out to be incorrect. For while there is not shortage of coast, there are no public rights of way as they exist in Britain, and so it is largely inaccessible for everyone apart from the owners of the relevant properties.

Finding good places to walk was thus a bigger challenge for me than for Thoreau, especially since they had to be reachable by public transport. One good option was the Skyline Trail in the Blue Hills to the south of Boston, since both its start and end point are reachable by bus. Sort of, at least. First I had to take the cute Mattapan Trolley which relies on streetcars that were originally built in the 1940s. When I wanted to tap my card to pay the fare after boarding, the driver kindly told me that this is unnecessary, since no one else ever pays either.

At Mattapan I then waited for the somewhat mysterious bus 716 that was supposed to bring me to the trailhead. This is the bus with the highest number in the whole system, and it is operated by an external contractor, not the MBTA (which runs most of the public transport in the Boston area). At the station there was a timetable, but no indication of where exactly the bus would depart. Close to the scheduled time a vehicle appeared that did not look much like a regular bus, but had a paper sign saying “716” on it. I was the only passenger. The fare was collected by putting cash into a box, and it was not necessary to have enough for the full fare. The in every way excellent Miles in Transit blog contains a more detailed review of this unusual route, though unlike the one described there my driver was very pleasant, and so I could soon start exploring the Blue Hills.

The Skyline Trail was scenic and interesting, with many rocky ascents and descents. My only complaint is that the official routing leads one to a point where Massachusetts Route 28 needs to be crossed without a traffic light or zebra crossing. When I arrived at this point the road was incredibly busy, with no gaps in the traffic in either direction. I did not feel like trying to get the cars to stop by boldly venturing ahead, and luckily managed to find a nearby crossing with traffic lights. There is an initiative to improve the routing of the trail already.

Eventually I decided that I should give Thoreau another chance. This time I approached his work in a more indirect way by buying Ben Shattuck’s recent book Six Walks. It starts with the author experiencing an existential crisis. In order to overcome it, he decides to retrace a walk by Thoreau along the eastern beaches of Cape Cod. This outing is a success, and he proceeds to go on a number of other Thoreau-inspired walks. By the end of the book the existential crisis is overcome, and one will be pleased to find that the Shattuck’s life is now going extraordinarily well.

Six Walks made me curious enough to pick up Thoreau’s Cape Cod, and I also booked the ferry from Boston to Provincetown for the last weekend before the season ended. Thoreau describes taking the ferry during his own time as follows:

Mild as it was on shore this morning, the wind was cold and piercing on the water. Though it be the hottest day in July on land, and the voyage is to last but four hours, take your thickest clothes with you, for you are about to float over melted icebergs. When I left Boston in the steamboat on the 25th of June the next year, it was a quite warm day on shore. The passengers were dressed in their thinnest clothes, and at first sat under their umbrellas, but when we were fairly out on the Bay, such as had only their coats were suffering with the cold, and sought the shelter of the pilot’s house and the warmth of the chimney.

I can confirm that this is still accurate. I had planned to stay on deck during the whole journey, which nowadays only takes 90 minutes, but it quickly became very cold, and contrary to Thoreau’s recommendations I had not brought warm clothes. I hoped that I could at least be resilient enough to be the last person to retreat to the cabin, but unfortunately did not manage that either.

Cape Cod was beautiful and reminded me of Denmark, which is a good thing. A connection to East Anglia is established by the following anecdote about beach peas Thoreau found in a scientific article about the plants on the Cape:

We read, under the head of Chatham, that “in 1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about Orford, in Sussex (England) were preserved from perishing by eating the seeds of this plant, which grew there in great abundance on the sea-coast. Cows, horses, sheep, and goats eat it.” But the writer who quoted this could not learn that they had ever been used in Barnstable County.

This story is taken from John Stowe’s The Chronicles of England, in which we find that the Orford in question is actually the one in Suffolk, south of Aldburgh. According to Stowe the beach peas in question miraculously appeared when food in the region was scarce. Word about this apparent miracle reached the Bishop of Norwich, who came to investigate but only found rock. And this is not even the most unusual thing said to have happened in Orford. Stowe’s chronicle also contains the tale of a wild man that came from the sea, originally noted by Ralph of Coggeshall:

Near unto Orford in Suffolk, certain Fishers of the Sea took in their nets a Fish having the shape of a man in all points, which Fish was kept by Bartholomew de Glanville, Custos of the Castle of Orford, in the same Castle, by the space of six months and more for a wonder: he spoke not a word. All manner of meats he gladly did eat, but most greedily raw fish, after he had crushed out all the moisture. Oftentimes he was brought to the Church, where he shewed no tokens of adoration. At length when he was not well looked to, he stale away to the Sea, and never after appeared.

Orford and environs continued to attract excitement well into the 20th century. The Orford Ness peninsula was used for various military experiments and as a base for radar transmitting stations. Until 2020, when it had to be demolished due to erosion, there was also a lighthouse. While not unusual for coastal places, this particular lighthouse arguably played a role in what is known as the Rendlesham Forest Incident. In 1980 personnel of the US Air Force were stationed at the RAF base in Woodbridge, at the edge of Rendlesham Forest. One evening in December one of the Americans, a Colonel Halt, observed unusual lights which he took to be UFOs. The story took off and received plenty of coverage, with some going as far as calling it “Britain’s Roswell”. Supposing that there were no actual aliens involved, the Orfordness lighthouse is a likely candidate for being the source of the unusual lights of that December night.

This brings us back to Massachusetts. The western part of the state is more hilly and less densely populated than the east, and the Berkshires in the far west are a popular holiday destination both for New Englander and New Yorkers. It is there where, on September 1st 1969, a UFO incident took place which is famous enough to have made it into a Netflix mystery documentary. Supposedly over 250 people saw mysterious lights in the form of white orbs, and some even reported being abducted. The documentary remains neutral and does not aim to debunk the story, but it nevertheless left me unconvinced. 250 witnesses are a high number, but most of the coverage relies on a small number of especially vocal people. It is claimed that the local radio station received dozens of calls on the night of the indecent, but since there are no recordings this is impossible to verify. Newspapers from the following days and weeks, on the other hand, are still around, but no mention of the incident could be found in any of them. One explanation for this is a conspiracy to hide the true facts about UFOs, but is it the best one?

In late October headed to the Berkshires myself by taking the Amtrak from Boston to Pittsfield. Not to find aliens but rather to hike up Mount Greylock, which at 1,063m is the highest point in Massachusetts. Once again detailed stories about buses could be told, but I will spare readers and just note that I successfully made it to the top, enjoyed the view, and equally successfully descended back down into the valley.

Thoreau visited Mount Greylock as well, as did Shattuck, as did Bill Bryson. The most memorable literary representation of the Berkshires I have come across, however, is Edith Wharton’s short, bleak, and beautiful Ethan Frome. Its readers will likely avoid sleds for the rest of their lives. In sum, Massachusetts thus did not disappoint: It had plenty to offer for walkers both of the theoretical and the practical kind.

For the last few months I have been living in Vienna, which is my first extended stay in Austria. The first line of the country’s national anthem is “land of mountains”, and I have indeed gone for several walks in areas with, at least for me, impressive levels of elevation. It certainly has its own appeal, and I might actually miss mountains when I move back to flatter parts of the world. But of course I also wanted to investigate the flat parts of Austria itself.

As usual I did some thorough research on Vienna before moving there, which chiefly consisted in watching Austrian movies and tv shows. One of those movies immediately became one of my all-time favourites, and I have re-watched it several times: Indien with Josef Hader and Alfred Dorfer. It revolves around two employees of the federal state of Lower Austria, whose job it is to inspect hotels and restaurants around the state. In this role they check whether, as regulations demand, the Wiener Schnitzel is actually made of veal, and investigate the consistency of the bread rolls as well as the water pressure of the showers.

The two protagonists – Mr. Bösel and Mr. Fellner – have very different personalities, to say the least. Bösel drives recklessly while drinking beer, throwing the empty cans out of the window or into the back of the car. Fellner fancies himself an intellectual, carrying around Trivial Pursuit cards and theorising about the relationship between geography and local cuisine. The popularity of cakes and pastries in Austria, for instance, is allegedly explained by the mountainous landscape.

Unsurprisingly spending days together on the road quickly leads to conflicts between Fellner and Bösel, to great comedic effect. In the end an unlikely but touching friendship emerges though, and the film then takes a sad turn I will stay silent about here. (There’s a DVD which apparently has English subtitles, and in German it is available to stream).

Through Indien I found what is, in effect, the East Anglia of Austria. One scene has the protagonists driving through a completely flat landscape composed of muddy fields and long straight roads, with the occasional railway line cutting through. There were even oil pumps, like in Texas. Where could this be? By freezing the frame and zooming in on the road signs it became clear that they were in the Marchfeld, an area to the northeast of Vienna dominated by agriculture.

Of course I now wanted to find out as much as possible about the Marchfeld region, but there seemed little to go on initially. Eventually I came across a novel set in the area though, which in my experience is always an excellent resource: Matthias Mander’s Wüstungen (Deserted Villages) from 1985. The book was long out of print, so I went to an antiquarian bookshop in Vienna to get a copy. The bookseller was curious to learn more about the author of the book, since apparently his novels sell quite well even though he is not a household name. I said that I didn’t really know any details either, since my interest in the book was for geographical reasons. It seemed unlikely to both of us that the other buyers share my passion for flat landscapes.

My expectations about the literary quality of the book were modest, since I feared that it would be a bit dated. But I was positively surprised. It is certainly no equivalent of Waterland, the Great Fenland Novel discussed on an earlier occasion, but I enjoyed reading it nevertheless. The plot is roughly as follows: the protagonist Zwigott is frustrated with his high-profile industry job in Vienna, and quits in order to work as a school teacher in the Marchfeld town of Gänserndorf. His life gets entangled with that of other inhabitants, such as the troubled bank director Siegl, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage and finds a tragic end. He also develops an interest in the history of the Marchfeld. Towards the end of the book he goes on a long, lonely walk to look for an abandoned village, even though it is an unusually hot summer. This walk leads to “character-forming insights”, so the chronological summary at the beginning of the book, and in the end Zwigott returns to his industry job.

Some aspects of the novel felt a bit gimmicky, such as that the teachers are using a computer to write something like an interactive history of the Marchfeld – although in some sense putting hypertext in a book from 1985 is of course quite original. But I did enjoy the detailed descriptions of travelling on commuter trains, and learned various interesting facts, such as that Ernst Mach grew up in the Marchfeld, or that the construction of the now existing canal through the Marchfeld was a controversial issue at the time. And the following remark, translated somewhat freely, certainly resonated with me:

The oppressive absence of the sea! We’re in the middle of a scorching hot continent, with a few shallow ponds as our only relief.

For while I like Austria’s mountains, I do not enjoy it’s lack of ocean access. All the land surrounding me does sometimes feel oppressive. But luckily the lakes and rivers are much more than mere ponds.

After all the cultural input I obviously wanted to experience the Marchfeld in real life. Unsurprisingly there were not many descriptions of walks in this area available online, as people usually head out of Vienna because they find it too flat already. But I found a promising route on, of all places, a mountaineering forum. I was a bit unlucky during this walk though. For one thing, I really wanted to take the most direct route to Marchegg, the starting point, since it features Austria’s longest stretch of completely straight railway tracks (~30 km). When I read about this I was reminded of the railway to Great Yarmouth parallel to the Acle Straight, only that at the end there is Slovakia rather than the sea. But it was not to be, as there are constructions works on the line all summer.

I made it to the starting point anyway, on a day that was definitely as hot as that on which Wüstungen’s hero Zwigott gained his life-changing insights. This would have been fine, as I was well equipped with a hat and lots of water. But part of the walk also lead to a jungle-like area with thick vegetation and lots of water, the perfect terrain for aggressive midges. The intended route right through the middle of this jungle was closed due to some unspecified “imminent danger”, which was maybe for the best. The alternative route around was less scenic, but also had fewer mosquitos.

Despite these setbacks and the heat I was happy with the walk. At the endpoint in Angern there was an inviting bench in the shade right at the river March. I sat down to recover, drink water, and watch a ferry operating between the Austrian and the Slovakian sides of the river.

The border between Austria and Slovakia along the March is 91km long. Until 1989 this was also the border between the Western and Eastern blocs, which explains why there are very few bridges over the river: three in total, and just a single one for cars, in the very north. There were plans to build a new road bridge in Angern, replacing the leisurely car ferry, but in 2014 a large majority of the population voted against the proposal. Not because of a general dislike of bridges, apparently, but out of a fear that too much traffic through the centre of town would result. Plans are now being drawn up for a bridge in a different, less central location, which might be built in a couple of years.