The best watering hole in Essex

Truly wild ducks come from unimaginably lonely places. They move mostly at the witching hours of dawn and dusk or under a full moon. They are magical, mysterious quarry. Once you have seen a wedge of mallard or wigeon and heard them calling to one another in a frosty, moonlit sky, it is hard not to become utterly bewitched. It is a feeling that makes a Gun trudge many miles through thick mud in the pre-dawn blackness delighting in bitter weather and gale-force winds.

Paradoxically, the urge to hunt these wonderful species goes hand-in-hand with the urge to nourish, to protect and to nurture them. Wildfowlers tend also to be the finest of naturalists. Scott, Savory, Cadman, Falkus, Willock, Humphreys, Campbell-Black, Novorol, Paley, Watkins-Pitchford. There is a seemingly inexhaustible list of nature’s finest observers who learned their trade knee-deep in ooze, with