On a hot and busy UK Bank Holiday we decided to fit an attempt of this Southend Millennium route around some cold sea swims!
Expected bad traffic meant a late start and unbelievably busy coastal route for the first 5Km - still beautiful and wild.
The best bit of this route is when you head off the coast and discover that this area has hills and some well marked paths around Hadleigh castle and the mountain bike trails - full of blackberries and families enjoying the last days of summer.
Once you head into the second section of the route things change. There feels like more of an attempt to stitch together some countryside sections but it may have been a long time since some of these trails have been used - some heavy nettle sections - unused crossings and well quite frankly some head-scratching lack of any visible path field crossings.
Biggest flaw with the route is the Rochford Golf course - at some point there was a gate and a railway crossing but it's definitely padlocked and overgrown - definitely not a safe place to attempt a rail crossing! After consulting some amused golfers we realised that we had to totally retreat out of the golf course and back to where we started - we crossed the bridge over the railway station and then followed the map to take the closest route back onto the course. You can see that we did 42KM vs the original 39KM.
After this the route becomes a bit of a wide field and main road fest until you hit the sea again and we were treated to the most glorious sunset over Southend and more madness in this UK seaside town. This was a marathon fkt (for Gabys birthday) in all senses.
If you fancy doing this route and have any questions - message as I can help with original route versus our longer version.
Comments
Congratulations on the FKT.