Features of Our Walk around Stebbing in Essex

This walk of about 12¾ miles (approaching 20½ Km) was ably led by John H. from the Basildon Greenway Ramblers. The heights stayed within a band of 49 to 94 metres, with a total ascent and descent of 100 metres. The average up and down gradients of each about 1⅔% over about 6 Km (3¾ miles) was par for the course for Essex, but compensated by the total length of the walk. Some mud was to be expected, but generally, walking conditions were favourable, for it was a sunny winter's day, with an average temperature just below 5°C - and no rain!. A start time of 10:00 and a finish at about 15:30, with short lunch and snack breaks, meant that we had good exercise within the available hours of winter daylight.

On our return we had this nice, typically Essex, view of the southern flank of Stebbing village.

Now prepare ye for some plots and graphs. Not too overwhelming, but hopefully quite interesting! You will see here:

• An Outline Map of Our Walk
• Height Profile of Our Walk
• Some Facts and Figures
• Average Rising and Falling Gradients
• Less Quantifiable Considerations
• Timing & Speed
• Track File
• Postscript


• Please Read Me! Thankyou!

Outline Map of Our Walk

Our walk was "clockwise circular", centred on Stebbing, but taking in Andrewsfield and Rayne.. The map grid scales translate to 1.112 Km per 0.01° latitude and a mean of 0.686 Km per 0.01° longitude, all when using 6371.0 Km as the volumetric mean radius of the earth - as per the WGS84 standard!

Outline Map of Walk

I plotted our walk by hand on my return home. Of course, I tried to be reasonably accurate. Even OS maps, on which I based my plot, may not show all the required detail, but appear to give the requisite degree of accuracy in this case.

Because we don't live on a flat earth - unless you are a convinced "flat-earther" - maps are inevitably a distortion of what is. In other words, it's all a matter of mapping a curvaceous surface onto a flat surface. We don't want to carry curvaceous representations of the terrain on our walks, do we? In our case, the northern length of our map grid is stretched out by something like an extra 0.09 %, to make it the same on the page as the length of the southern part of our map grid. Not that much for hiking purposes really! Can't complain.

Height Profile of Our Walk

It's of course fine to say that we reached about 94 m above sea level and descended to 49 m above sea level, but what's the significance of that? Probably, of greater interest when it comes to considering personal achievements, is the total ascent - which usually requires greater effort than the descent. On today's walk, the total ascent was 100 m, which as expected, was greater than the difference of 45 metres between maximum and minimum heights above mean sea level.

Height Profile

The above plot uses a true origin for the vertical elevation (height) axis, so as not to lose track of reality. What a worthy aim!

Some Facts and Figures

Here are some "vital statistics" in metric and imperial units. The total length of the walk is measured on a conceptual "flat" plane at mean sea level, WGS84 style. Of course, as mentioned above, the total ascent exceeds the difference between maximum and minimum elevations; I'd suspect things, if the reverse transpired!

"Walk facts and figures"

Average Rising and Falling Gradients

And here, for the numerical fun of it, are the average gradients we overcame on our walk. The rising and falling (negative) gradients are both averaged over the distance given, with level stretches having rises and falls of less than ± ½ metre.

Rising and Falling Gradients

Essex of course, is not as hilly as the Chilterns, or the North or South Dows, where average gradients of 3 to 4 times those we experienced today could be expected.

By further comparison, Hertfordshire County Council recommends that its roads should not have longitudinal gradients of more than 5% and one of the steepest adhesion railways in the world, in Austria, has a maximum gradient of 11.6%. By way of further interest, the clockwise route of the Fairfield Horseshoe in the Lake District has a total distance of 15.62 Km (9.71 miles), with the following calculations: an average rising gradient of 14.66% over 6.589 Km, a level part over 0.345 Km, and an average falling gradient of 11.11% over 8.676 Km. This is seen by many as really quite challenging - but then, when you compare it with our walk, it can be said that we had a more leisurely and less demanding aim compared with Lakeland challenges!

Less Quantifiable Considerations

On any walk there are considerations which are very real but tantalizingly out of ready reach of those who wish to espouse a numerical approach to many of life's activities. Here are three considerations for starters.

• Weather: We had good walking weather - dry and sunny throughout our day, and not too windy.
  
  The average temperature, using the hourly readings from 10:00 to 15:00 (not 16:00) was about 4.8°C - excellent for walking! Did I say "not practically or easily quantifiable"? Well the temperatures below are based on those at Andrewsfield, and the temperature can of course vary locally at the different points on the walk.
  
  
  
  Met Office readings at Andrewsfield on 14th February 2016.
  
  
  To be ultra accurate (no, not precise!), we can regard each temperature reading in the above table as maintaining its value until the next measurement.
  
  
• Ground Conditions: It was muddy in places, but certainly not enough to impede our progress.


• Signposting: As so often, this was a mixture of a statement of destinations or just "here's a footpath or "here's a bridle way". As always, some of us had our own OS maps anyway!

Timing and Speed

It's one thing to discuss the terrain over which we walk. It's quite another to ask how we personally respond to walking over that terrain. There are a number of considerations, of which timing and speed can be taken as starting points.

• Timing & Start Time: Our start time of 10:00 meant that, on a Sunday morning, in rural Essex, it was only possible to reach the start of our walk by car. However, an early start allowed us to finish our walk at 15:30.


• Speed: If the walk started at 10:00 and finished at 15:30, with ¾ hour in total for the lunch break and other stops, this gives 4¾ hours actual walking time. For a distance of about 12.71 miles, we then get a walking speed of almost 2.7mph. This is slightly above your average walking speed of about 2½ mph, but, as mentioned, the terrain was quite flat. With our speed, it was still just possible to take some photographs.

Track File

If you are keen to see our walk superimposed on an Ordnance Survey® (OS) map or on another system such as Google Maps®, then you can use the following file to do so. As mentioned above, the numerical data in this file have been hand-plotted by me (no GPS!) on my return home. The data are based on WGS84. Of course, for copyright reasons, I do not show the OS-based or Google-based maps here.

• Track File

Postscript

Any map is an approximate representation of what is, and my plotting thereon certainly is. Practicality and scale are relevant considerations. We are not dealing with a planning application calling for detailed spatial descriptions of intricate boundaries. For us in the hiking community, the degrees of accuracy and precision should be just enough to give us useable and helpful knowledge of the terrain about us and beneath our feet. I hope my humble endeavours on this page are in this respect interesting for, and useful to, you my reader!