Thursday, 5 May, 2022
May was a month for travel. Some of this was because British Rail had a big ticket sale, 50% off for a million tickets. This, plus our 30% rail discount, made travelling very tempting. We had two stays away – Norwich, and coming up soon, Nottingham, and one day trip to Colchester.
I’m not keen on day trips since my knee has been so painful. The overnight trips have lots of rest and relaxation built into them, but when you have a day trip you have nowhere to go to rest comfortably. However, with a bit of planning and a lot of cooperation, it can be done.
The truth is that I’d not thought much about Colchester. From time to time I’d read about it, that was the UK’s oldest town and that it was a market town. During the pandemic, a local cake shop Victoria Yum moved there. The owner, Kiersten, put Instagram posts up regularly. So I had a plan to go to Colchester, check it out and go say hi to Kiersten. We’d tried to go there as a stop after Norwich – it’s on the same line – but the fare was too high. The sale made it much more reasonable.
I did a bit of research on interesting things to do and we set off for our train. It’s about 45-50 minutes to Colchester from Stratford. It seemed to go quickly.
When you get to Colchester by train, you aren’t actually in the town of Colchester. That’s reached by another train that makes an 8-minute journey to Colchester Town. Luckily our ticket got us all the way there. It felt funny to be on the Norwich train again.
Colchester looked small and quiet and we started to walk. We found one of our places of interest right away. It was just behind the station, St Botolph’s Priory. It was founded between 1093 and 1100. In the Colchester siege of 1648 the early Norman church was largely destroyed by cannon fire and has never been repaired. The church had been built of flint rubble with arches and dressings in brick, mostly reused from Roman buildings at nearby Colchester. This was a lovely ruin. We sat and admired it for a while.
We left the priory and headed into the centre of town. Although Colchester lacked much in the way of energy or urbanity, it was visually interesting a lot of the time and I took many photos. It’s already hard to decide which ones to use and I’ve only just started.
Colchester has the accustomed lanes all leading to a more modern shopping area. We wanted to get the lay of the land, see what we were in for in terms of architecture and scope, and of course where to eat. Krish had booked a place already but we then decided it was better for dinner. After a heavy lunch, who wanted to walk around so much?
The lanes were full of small cafes and shops. We poked around a bit before looking for our lunch choice of restaurants.
We somehow hit Red Lion Yard, where Kiersten has her shop, without trying. And a lovely yard it is too! Festooned with union jacks and the site of the fantastic old Red Lion Inn. It felt festive and very English. I popped in to say hello to Kiersten and we had a glimpse of the inside of the inn as we walked by towards the high street.
Colchester’s main high street has a grand building. the Town Hall. Very impressive! We continued along, then back into the lanes area looking for a place called Timbers.
Timbers sounded like it would be a nice old Tudor style pub, but instead was a café. My assumptions led me to walk by it a few times. Perhaps I should have kept walking, but such is life when you care what you eat! Krish decided he would get a breakfast and I’m not keen so ordered my own thing, the daily suet pudding (steak and mushroom) and it arrived as an enormous plate in front of me. Right then! You won’t be surprised to hear that I ate almost half of it. ) It was the same for Krish, whose breakfast was aptly named Mega. Did I mention we didn’t want anything heavy? )
If we’d been at home, a nap would be in order even though we hadn’t eaten even one whole lunch between us. However, we had about six hours to go, so we walked on.
We found our next two targets quite easily and accidentally. The first was the Jumbo Water Tower. It’s very hard to miss! It was completed in 1883 and was nicknamed ’Jumbo’ after the London Zoo elephant as a term of derision in 1882 by Reverend John Irvine who was annoyed that the tower dwarfed his nearby rectory. Jumbo or not, it’s a brutalist and ugly thing in an otherwise pretty little area where we also saw a Quaker Friends’ House doubling as a polling station. It was local voting day in the UK.
The water tower was right at our next target, the Balkerne Gate. It is the largest surviving gateway in Roman Britain, dating from the second century. It’s a very impressive structure with the lines of red brick running through the stone wall that we got used to seeing in Torino.
Next to the gate is a big white pub, The Hole in the Wall, with some of the Roman gate showing under its foundation, where they had simply built on top.
Beyond the gate, is a highway and beyond that a large residential area so it was time to turn back and track down the final area we’d planned to check out, the Dutch Quarter. Continue reading “A day in Colchester”