I’m a walk leader who spent 20 years in Essex, and I still never thought of it as a place to walk. How wrong I was!

Jenn and Mike are MJ Outdoor Adventures, and they walked along Slow Ways from Colchester to Leigh-on-Sea

This story is the next in our Trails series. We invited people to apply to assemble a group of friends and walk a multi-day trail of Slow Ways. They could submit the story of their adventure in whatever form they liked.

By Jenn Phillips and Mike Morgan-Abel 

We recently walked 86km from Colchester to Leigh-on-Sea via Chelmsford in Essex. Even though Mike spent 20 years of his life in Essex it’s not somewhere we associate with walking. So we were thrilled that we were selected to walk in that area. We went from being drenched in the storm to shorts on the beach!

Slow Ways is an initiative to create a national network of walking routes connecting the country together.

Using existing paths, ways, trails and roads, people can use Slow Ways routes to walk or wheel between neighbouring settlements, and combine them to create longer distance trips.

Our team had six sections to check the accessibility of, and find alternative routes if required.

We are suckers for a national trail, but this was a great insight into what we’ve been missing. Areas we would never have looked at, villages we would never have passed through, views from heaths that only the locals know.

You can help Slow Ways 🐌 on their mission by volunteering to walk a section local to you. Once three people have confirmed the route gets the green light.

MJ Outdoor Adventures is a Kent-based walking group and our passion is to get people spending more time outside and ensuring an accessible welcoming environment for all. We have at least four walks a month, ranging from five miles up to challenge events. We also run foraging, bushcraft, camping and navigation events, multi-day events and backpacking holidays too. We are proud to be Ordnance Survey champions for Kent for 2024-2026.

Trails for us are about connecting with nature and the people around them. Every trail we have completed so far leaves us feeling so full of happiness at the human connections we’ve had along the way and our encounters with nature. 

We like to touch on the importance of representation and diversity in the outdoors as a member of the BAME community. The outdoors can feel like an environment that is not welcoming to those from different backgrounds and this is something we want to show isn’t the case, promoting the physical and mental wellbeing reasons to get outside. 

Overall members of the BAME community are not represented in the outdoors setting. Advertising is usually nearly all white faces and due to financial and society reasons oftentimes being outdoors is not part of childhood. 

We are passionate about everyone taking up space outside. Our country is full of rich mixed cultures but if you go out on a walk or look in a walking magazine it does not reflect this which only discourages people further.

We are also passionate about the care of the environment and actively promote sustainable ways to hike and camp. 

Why not sign up to walk and review Slow Ways. You can also find and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.