L.L. Diamond

This was a difficult trip! We set out to drive almost an hour and a half to see this nature reserve just outside of Colchester in Sussex, but from there we had a myriad of difficulty finding the place. We punched the location into the sat nav (GPS) and found ourselves in the middle of a neighbourhood. We happened to find one entrance by a single sign, but there was only street parking and no one else was parked along the road. We then tried the second sat nav and after giving up on its direction, turned around to happen upon another place to enter the park, but again, no parking other than on the road (I won’t even go into our attempt to turn into the local Aldi for parking!) — I will say that the parking issue was unusual in our experience for an English Heritage Site. Eventually, we decided to park on Church Lane and go into an entrance labeled Lexden Nature Reserve. According to Google Maps, it is a part of the Earthworks, but we could not tell on the map on the sat nav, and it’s not labelled as such when you arrive at that entrance.

The forest was lovely with a myriad of paths and pretty views. There are plenty of old wide-trunked oaks that are a lot of fun. Unfortunately, we had no idea through means available to us how large the Earthworks was, so after a short time and not seeing anywhere new to wander and due to the rain, we decided to leave.

I wish I had more on this, but I felt it might help someone else if I posted our experience. If you want to give the Earthworks a try, I wish you better luck than we had!