Bradwell
November 20th 1995
On Monday, the day before i was due to leave, i went out with my mum for lunch at Bradwell, a small village in the shadow of a nuclear power station, on the south side of the Blackwater, right at the point where it meets the North Sea and fourteen miles from Maldon. There was a pub called the "Green Man" near the water, but it was closed all day on Mondays. I supposed they didn't get a lot of custom in November. That was the first time i'd come across a pub in Britain that closes one day a week. I guess that's the down-side of the new, more liberal licencing laws. A few years before, all pubs had to open for the whole of their licenced hours.
Bradwell riverside is straight across the Blackwater from Tollesbury and diagonally across from Mersea Island. Mersea's right in the mouth of the estuary, with the entrance to the river Colne on the other side of it and a causeway connecting it to the mainland. Bradwell village is a mile or two away from the riverside and we ended up having lunch there, in a pub called the King's Head.
After lunch we walked down to the church of St Peters On The Wall, that was built in around the seventh century, at about the same time as there was a massive city around the same spot. It's impossible to imagine it now.
St Peters On The Wall stands close to the edge of some bizarrely typical Essex marshland. It's a very weird place - and difficult to describe. It's really flat and open, with a massive expanse of sky to be seen all around. And a feeling of intense desolation and emptiness, which is enhanced by the vast expanse of the North Sea stretching all the way to Holland, Germany and Scandinavia.
The church itself is nothing special at all. It looks like an old stone barn - and in fact it was used as a barn during part of its history. The site it's on is a very obvious sacred site. And a very powerful one too, i'd say. Which is maybe why the christians desecrated it with a church and the scientists desecrated it with a nuclear power station.
In fact, one of the pamphlets about the place, which are on sale inside the church, mentions this co-incidence of power - relating to the power of "god" i think, rather than the power of the land. In a certain sense that could be seen to be the same thing, but in the way the christian church sees things, i don't think the two are really related.
The land between the Blackwater and the Crouch, known as the Dengie Hundred, which Bradwell is a part of, is a very strange and individual area. Although most of Maldon is south of the river, it seems to have more in common with the area to the north, which includes Goldhanger, Tollesbury, Mersea and, further north, Colchester. South of the Crouch, it's different again. That area's dominated by Southend, which is a hideous seaside and industrial resort on the Thames estuary and seems more related to London than to Essex.
It was with a certain amount of sadness that i looked out across the muddy grey Blackwater estuary towards Mersea and Brightlingsea and out over the North Sea in the direction of Holland. Bradwell isn't a place i'd spent much time in my life, but it somehow seemed to contain the essence of that land around the Blackwater, which i appeared to have become more attached to than ever over the previous five months. I was leaving the next day and it was possible i'd never see the place again except in my memories - and in my soul.