A great walk to a great pub: the Sun Inn, Dedham, Essex

A gentle rural landscape is the backdrop to an arty saunter around the River Stour, crisscrossing the Suffolk/Essex border, and ending in a 500-year-old pub

Dedham is your typically picturesque, gentrified English village; even the local Co-op bears a hand-painted sign declaring itself to be “high class”. In the tourist season it draws crowds by the coach-load, soaking up the area’s fame as Constable Country and as a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. And while ties with Romanticism are unavoidable, Dedham has another fascinating connection with art: it was the birthplace of Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, established in 1937 for “artists outside of the system”. Notable students included Lucian Freud, Maggi Hambling and John Nash.

This and more I learn from my guide, local resident, author and psychogeographer Justin Hopper, who made a walk through the pretty flatlands of Dedham Vale so much more than going to see the site of The Hay Wain. On his recommendation we begin our trail westwards, on a less-travelled path.