‘As remote as anywhere in Essex’ says the AA Illustrated Guide to Britain’s Coast in 1984. If it was true then it certainly still is I reckon as I walk along the top of the sea wall that’s offers resistance to the highest of tides in the Roach estuary. To my left are the salt marshes with the myriad of channels gradually drying with the receding water before giving way to the mudflats and then the thin channel of deep water. A few yachts sitting just outside the channel are pulling at their moorings as white horses stream past them. To my right is a wide band of tossing and writhing reeds running parallel to the wall and beyond that huge, empty fields with a few trees and hedgerows in the distance.