Owning and driving a Caterham Seven expands your horizons. You may meet and interact with similarly-minded people – car Clubs are good for this – and you will certainly drive to new places – near and far – to explore the road over the next hill, round the next bend or past the next town.
Essex is a local county to me – the border is only a 25-minute drive from home – but not one I have had much experience of as a driven destination. Previously, to get to Essex I would traverse the M25 Orbital Motorway, turn off on one of the many large spur roads – the A12 or M11 most likely – and drive directly to the chosen destination. But really Essex is a large rural county, and as I have discovered, has a network of minor roads that are a brilliant way to spend driving. My preconceptions of Essex are based on my 1980s / 90s childhood – so white-van man abusing other drivers, boy-racers in modified Ford Escorts and other such cliché’s. Maybe these still exist in some places, but I have found the empty backroads and B-roads gloriously white-van free.
I had thought Essex was flat. A bit like nearby Cambridgeshire, or its northern neighbour Sussex, with large open skies and not much else. I was wrong. With a series of rivers and smaller streams carving up the landscape, Essex has a crinkly relief which creates enough ups and downs to put a smile on any driver’s face. The highest point at Chrishall Common may only be 143m above sea level, but the frequency of dips, drops and rolling hills can provide an undulating and enthralling drive in every direction. It would also seem that the Romans decided that Colchester (Camulodunum) was such a good place to be that they didn’t bother ‘modernising’ the more rural roads. Each is a curve-fest of bends, criss-crossing the fields and low hills linking villages in the same way that the horse and cart used to over 100 years ago. In the Caterham these roads are pure joy to drive.
Hats off to the Essex highways team too – the road surfaces and ‘feel’ of the tarmac under the wheels is far superior to nearby Hertfordshire or Cambridgeshire. Maybe it’s the lower traffic levels, or just a better attention to the job, but there is a clear difference at the county border and Essex comes out on top. There can be a lot of water about – rainwater run-off from the fields takes a while to drain, and it can leave all manner of debris and muck behind. In the summer this is not an issue, but for autumnal driving, and I suspect in spring too, things can get messy. A post-drive washdown should be part of the plan.
Here's the first of my Essex drives. More to come…