An island walk to a great pub: the White Hart, Essex

A tour of Britain’s most easterly inhabited island – Mersea – reveals centuries of history, and a newly revamped pub

The oyster beds and sandy beaches of Britain’s most easterly inhabited island have been attracting visitors for centuries. Mersea is just a few miles south of Colchester, once Camulodunum – capital of Roman Britain – and there are Roman remains among the island’s layers of history. Bus 86 arrives from Colchester every hour, crossing a causeway called the Strood, which is often covered by water for an hour or so at high tide. But Mersea feels even more like an island if you arrive by boat, so I’m starting from Brightlingsea (bus 87 from Colchester), where a summer ferry crosses to wild East Mersea. Here the River Colne and the wide Blackwater estuary meet the tea-grey sea and strange bones emerge from crumbling cliffs.

There’s an hour before the next ferry so I stroll past Brightlingsea’s lido, boating lake and beach huts to Bateman’s Tower. It’s an octagonal late-Victorian folly, built as a lighthouse for a port that never followed. I can see grazing marshes and wind-twisted woods across the water and, arriving on Mersea’s southern shore, I am soon walking past them. Huge dragonflies are hovering in tall, flowering meadows as I detour around Cudmore Grove country park, then carry on along the beach. Dark bBurgundy-sailed Thames barges drift across the horizon.