retiredmartin

February (yeh !) 2024. Halstead

One benefit of a week with the parents in Waterbeach; it’s a useful base to conquer the East Anglian counties,

and as February brought some crisp sunshine so the Colne Valley (not Burnley’s Colne) looked enticing.

This is the Colne Valley of steam railways with CAMRA beer festivals (ugh) and ancient castles and traffic beaten weatherboarded cottages, little known outside Essex but a magnet for coach loads of school children, destined to be forever stuck on the A1307 from Cambridge to Haverhill.

The Colne Valley of Samuel Augustine Courtauld, who a hundred years ago built these wonderful houses, naming “Emma” and “Persuasion” and “Mansfield Park”,

for unfathomable reasons.

Halstead is a tidy town of 12,000, the Ware of the east.

You can walk the hilly(ish) high street and back in half an hour,

so I did, admiring the honesty with which the Conservatives have renamed their club.

Some lovely architecture I’d forgotten in the 7 years since my last visit. 7 months is normally enough for me to forget these days.

They seem to have lost all their banks, and STILL not acquired a pedestrian crossing

And the pubs, 3 in the Guide, all look inviting enough.

Our newbie, the Courtyard Tap, is a shop conversion with seats around barrels, you know the type.

It gets the thumbs up as it’s cosy, the Pale rich, the soundtrack “Common People”, and the lady in charge (they always are) is a gem.

She tells me their little brewery is opening a tap in Sudbury, the sort of preemptive tip I once craved.

I forgot to ask her about the Jane Austen connection.