taking advantage of the low traffic volume During the Christmas Holiday. on what is normally a busy rat run road I walked along Brook Lane to West Road and then up what used to be locally known as Clay Lane towards Crumps Farm. I suspected that the roadside pond at this same farm is the origin of the main flow on the western side of the brook. There is an overflow point at the pond and a culvert under the road with a good flow heading southwards.
The pond has ducks which people feed and there is also a shoal of large carp and the colour of the water indicates that it has a high nutrient status which must be indirectly feeding into the Brook.
Following the footpath on the south side of the road takes you to a series of old meadows previously grazed by cattle, latterly by horses and probably part of the field network for Crumps Farm. there is a network of ditches which generally lead in an easterly direction and very gradually downhill. They culminate in a clump of broken down Willow trees at the end of the long meadow where there is the site of a pond. In the author's memory this was much more open but has now largely been covered in by fallen trees. From this point the water flows down towards Clay Lane as described in the previous post and you can see the Orange Tree public house / restaurant in the distance.
Returning to Sawbridgeworth by following the network of footpaths through the arable land, I navigated to what I supposed to be the site of Hoestock Farm. This small, rather isolated farmstead was still in existence in the 1950s in the author's memory but has since been completely demolished, the only evidence that it ever existed being a spread of demolition rubbish in terms of red brick, slate etc. A map of the farm from the 1873 Ordnance Survey sheet shows the general layout and it would be interesting to make a more formal record probably through this blog.
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