Hertford Club Site, Hertfordshire

Our last day in Hertfordshire has been spent in the Lee Valley, or more specifically in the Regional Park of that name.  The park covers 10,000 acres running alongside of the River Lea and is a mess of rivers, navigable waterways, flood relief channels and lakes.

The Lee Valley was once home to a variety of industry; gravel pits, waterworks sites, distilleries and munitions factories, but over the years much of the land fell into neglect. Even before the end of the last war, it was suggested that the valley be regenerated for public use. But it remained dormant until in 1961 the Mayor of Hackney took up the challenge and by 1963 an appraisal of the Valley’s potential as a vast leisure and recreational resource had been done. Royal Assent was granted in 1966 and the Lee Valley Regional Park was finally constituted in 1967. 

When London bid successfully for the 2012 Summer Olympics, much of the southern half of the Lee Valley Park was developed to form Olympic Park.

Extraction of the deposits of sand and gravel deposits left by the last ice age started at Bowyers Water in the 1920s and even continues today. However some of these pits have been filled with waste and become meadows and others gradually filled with water to become a haven for wildlife; birds, insects and plants.

We drove through narrow country lanes to Broxbourne where we parked and accessed the Lee Navigation, then set off south along the canal for four and a half miles to just south of the Waltham Town Lock, before heading eastwards into the Country Park, where we wandered up and round the many lakes and waterways. 

Water birds were plentiful, swans and visiting Canada geese with their young, ducks and coots, and here unlike yesterday, flocks of seagulls with bullet shaped noses in flight. We found these to be black headed gulls, and when not in flight, not to be as fascinating after all. We looked out for otters; there are at least four families in residence, after all having disappeared for decades of pollution. Apart from nature’s wildlife there were an abundance of walkers, cyclists and mariners enjoying the hireage of small electric boats, apart from the narrow-boats and launches one would expect upon the waterways.

We returned to the car after four and a half hours of walking, a little sun burned and weary. Back at camp we were accosted by one of our neighbours and his visiting mate, who had cycled over from St Albans for the day. The cyclist was keen to make the acquaintance of fellow countrymen; he is a Kiwi himself who has been resident here in the UK for over ten years. We spent some time chatting with both, the host having cycled much of New Zealand himself, and we agreed that England offered much better walking and cycling opportunities than our little country on the other side of the world.