This weekend, a friend and I walked from Clacton-on-Sea to Walton-on-the-Naze. The tide being out, we could walk on the beach for the whole 20 km. With the sun out and mild temperature, it felt more like summer than autumn.
We started by walking through Clacton’s town centre, which is quite small. Once on the sandy beach, we headed northeast towards, first, Frinton-on-Sea then Walton-on-the-Naze. It’s not a walk that requires any navigation skills. You just need to keep the sea to your right!
For a sunny Saturday, there were surprisingly few people out on the beach. We saw a bunch of anglers. They’d propped their fishing rods up several metres from the sea. The fishing lines were almost invisible. We were almost decapitated by one! Thereafter, we went around any anglers.
One man was especially chatty. He asked me if the other anglers had caught anything. I asked him how he’d done. He said he had caught a shark earlier in the week! I might have looked sceptical, so he showed me a photo on his phone. The shark was about a metre long! More fish, apparently, were coming to the coast because of the warmer water. The angler also showed me a photo of a large skate he’d caught a couple of weeks ago. We could have continued talking much longer but it was time to move on.
The seafront of Walton-on-the-Naze is filled with colourful huts. On the pier, is a large warehouse-style building. It seemed to be the centre of town. Many people were on the gaming machines, having lunch, or playing tenpin bowling. Like many British piers, it had been destroyed several times.
The word “Naze” is strange. Someone told us that it means “nose”. Elsewhere, I read that it’s derived from “ness”, which is a bit of land sticking out (a promontory).
As we were looking at restaurant menus on the high street, a friendly man started talking to us. He’d married 14 years ago in Colchester and moved soon after to Walton-on-the-Naze. He told us where to go for coffee, steak, and the best chips! I got a potted history of the town. He asked if I’d wondered why there were so many mansions in the town. I hadn’t noticed them. It was, he continued, because wealthy people, including the royal family, used to come to the town in summer. That was also why there was a train line to London in this obscure town. As we parted, he warned us to stay “20 ft” from the cliff edge on our way to Naze Tower. The cliff is badly eroding, and you could easily fall off! The Naze Protection Society was formed to fight the erosion.
We decided to take the scenic route along the beach. Some stairs took us to the base of the tower. Naze Tower is about three hundred years old. Over the years, it has been a tea house, a lookout during the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, and a radar station during the Second World War. It’s now privately owned. You can walk to the top.
We didn’t have time to go to the nearby nature reserve. So, we settled in the friendly wildlife centre next to the tower. I had a coffee and cherry Bakewell cake before heading back to the town centre for our train back to London.
