Epping Forest: Loughton Camp

I don't know why I hadn't been to Epping Forest until now. It is only 10 miles or so away from where I live, and despite journeys across London always taking longer than you think they ought to, in theory it's manageable from home in around a 35 minute drive. I suppose I had assumed, with it being inside the M25, that either it would still have a bit of an urban feel to it, or it would be full of people. To my surprise when we finally visited today neither of those things were true.

It was a bit of an impromptu outing, and I didn't really do any planning beforehand other than watching a video on YouTube in the morning which helped to confirm that it was actually worth visiting. I also had the girls with me, so thought it best not to be overly ambitious with the length of the walk. Thus after a brief survey of the relevant section of the OS map I decided we'd just do a short circular, around 3 miles, from The Original Tea Hut to Loughton Camp and back again.

One thing that surprised me a bit was how little detail there was on the OS map. There's a network of small but clearly well trodden paths, however the OS map only details the major tracks. Although in most parts of the forest we saw the trees were reasonably spaced apart, so you're never fighting through dense undergrowth, the paths were also quite windy and it was difficult to see far into the distance. There weren't really any signposts along the way either - which I suppose was nice in helping to maintain the wild feeling of the place. Anyway, getting to Loughton Camp required checking our location at regular intervals on my phone, and I think you'd probably struggle to find it without some kind of assistance like this. All of that said, the forest isn't huge, so you'd probably be fine to just follow your nose and wander about at random, as the whim takes you - if you keep heading in any direction you'd never be that far from a road, or civilisation.

Epping Forest is well known for fungi - there are apparently in excess of 1600 known species to be found there, and I had heard people go there to forage for porcini, amongst other varieties. I actually wonderred if I might have found a very early specimen today: the earth covered protrusion (top row of the set of photos up above, in the middle) looked a bit like a small bolete of some description, presumably just freshly emerged from the ground, but it was too small to see the underside of the cap, and I didn't want to disturb it as it was so young.

 When we finally managed to find Loughton Camp, we stopped for a coffee / hot chocolate break. I put down a tarp as a ground sheet and we sat here for a while, enjoying the peace of the forest, the only sound being bird song and the occasional voices of other distant walkers we could hear but not see.

After our coffee break, we walked around the earthworks of Loughton Camp. It's a Bronze Age hill fort, probably about 2500 years old, and one of two of a similar age in Epping Forest. Happily it doesn't adjoin any of the roads passing through Epping Forest, and didn't even seem to be served by any of the major tracks directly, so it was really peaceful. We only encountered a couple of other people during our time there. Not sure if it comes out in the photos, but the terrain left behind by the hill fort - perhaps combined with natural features that predated it, makes for a really interesting woodland landscape now, and there was a good number of fairly ancient beech and birch trees to be seen. I was slightly reminded of the southern stretch of Offa's Dyke where it runs along a tree covered ridge above the river Wye.

We headed back to the car roughly long the same route we had come from, and paused for refreshments at the Original Tea Hut before driving back home. I'd very happily return to Epping Forest, it's amazing that there are spaces which feel so far away from the hustle and bustle of the city, but still within the M25.