It was a gorgeous day for a walk by water for sure - not too hot for the most part, and with a light breeze but also plenty of sunshine and beautiful blue skies.
There is a common misconception locally that the Stort is a canal - but in fact the stretch we were walking is a “navigation” - a river which has been canalised and made navigable by the addition of locks. There are a total of 15 locks on the 22km long Stort Navigation- today’s walk saw 5 of them. Another misconception is that the town of Bishop’s Stortford is named after the river - in fact this is not the case, the river was re-named in the 16th century and was previously called the Stour.
We parked the car in the centre of Sawbridgeworth a short walk from the river - which was easy to find as you simply head downhill! We realised pretty fast that we had actually joined the walk slightly too far north - but decided not to worry about that now the time being, we’d either walk it at the end or return another week and do it. In the end by the time we got back to where we joined the river we decided we’d been on our feet for long enough so another week it will be!
One lovely bird spot today - and one that it is surprising we had not seen previously when we’d been walking his particular river - a Kingfisher! We were watching dragonflies dancing across the water, heard a splash and MrEH looked across in time to see the distinctive bright blue flash. A few moments later we both saw it streak away up the river - a stunning sight!
A long weekend for us this week as MrEH has tomorrow off work. Nothing specific planned, just that he has holiday time to use and he fancied a day off really - we’ll decide what to do with it tomorrow!
Robyn
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