Anne Boileau
Coggeshall, Open Gardens and the love of trees
Monday 25 March 2024
These pages have gone way too long without the writing of Anne Boileau. This particularly beautiful piece will surely touch us all. One of the striking features of Coggeshall is the surprise of the back gardens, which are often larger and more leafy than you would expect on seeing the front aspect on the street. […] Read more >
William Smith, basket maker
Thursday 28 July 2022
We have gone too long without the beautiful writing of Anne Boileau, so here’s a delightful piece to lighten our summer spirits… Delving into Trevor Disley’s fascinating book of old photographs of Coggeshall, I discover William Smith, basket maker, who supplied our town with all manner of baskets from his workshop in West Street. Before […] Read more >
Sowing the Seeds of Hope
Thursday 9 December 2021
Writer Anne Boileau relates the wholly uplifting tale of a rewilding project in north Essex Alex Stevenson lived in Coggeshall until recently. But now she has revealed herself as an Essex Isabella Tree. A landscape architect and award-winning garden designer, she helped draw up the Coggeshall Neighbourhood Plan and recently organised an eco-fair in the […] Read more >
A journey can feel like a pilgrimage
Friday 29 October 2021
Writer Anne Boileau pays homage to the brent goose, an enchanting bird that graces the Essex coastline every winter In October last year I saw them touch down in the stubble field by the Essex Way above Coggeshall. They landed, about 50 of them, and stood very still and silent on their webbed feet, looking […] Read more >
A patchwork of paradise in a very special nature reserve
Tuesday 3 August 2021
Writer Anne Boileau offers an enticing taste of a delightful Essex woodland where “small groups used to meet up for dawn chorus and bacon butties in the spring”. A little chunk of paradise has fallen among us… Between Stisted and Greensted Green lies a small nature reserve known as Belcher’s and Broadfield Woods, or Brookes […] Read more >
A forgotten song
Friday 9 July 2021
Turtle doves were once common summer visitors to Essex. Now we only rarely hear their purring… and writer Anne Boileau misses it “The winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our […] Read more >
Springs and Rams
Tuesday 8 June 2021
‘We’ve become deaf to the music of underground streams, forgotten how to celebrate the sacred springs’… in this beautiful piece, writer Anne Boileau pays tribute to an ancient source of water and to the machines that worked their own magic with it. Whalebone Spring; Peter’s Spring; Ladle Spring; Pigeon Spring… just four springs among dozens, […] Read more >
Cherry blossom, tigers and dragons
Monday 26 April 2021
Lockdown was easing, spring was in the air (if still a little chilly) and writer Anne Boileau was wasting no time in meeting a friend. The pair chose Arger Fen – “one of the loveliest woods I know” – for their walk and it held for Anne the magic it always had. Her beautiful words […] Read more >
Prayer for a Tree
Friday 26 March 2021
We are delighted to present this “little piece from Coggeshall” by writer Anne Boileau. “I’m obviously not getting out and about much at the moment, so it’s local,” she tells us. We’re almost there, Anne… in the meantime, thank you so much for this. Prayer for a Tree I’ve got a twig in my hand. It […] Read more >
Cello Concert with Birdsong
Wednesday 2 September 2020
The writing of Anne Boileau that has graced this website during recent months has both captured the spirit of the age and cast a reflective light of history on where we are today. Here Anne presents Cello Concert with Birdsong, which she describes as “a story with an Essex slant”. “Beatrice Harrison could not have […] Read more >