Country diary: This ‘secret’ island takes me back to Swallows and Amazons | Amy-Jane Beer

Horsey Island, Hamford Water, Essex: It’s the setting for one of Arthur Ransome’s wonderful books, and today it’s farmed by a single family with innovation and careYou need two permissions to access Horsey Island: one from the farmer, the second from the tide, which offers a four-hour window in every 12 when the causeway can be crossed. It takes me 20 minutes to pick my way over, wading the deeper sections where spindly marker posts show the way. It’s a disconcerting place to loiter. In places the mud either side is a foot higher than the track, and riddled with tiny creeks in which streamers of sea forsaken by the tide rush along invisible gradients. The whole expanse fizzes and trickles as air and water try to escape from the mud and heaps of bladderwrack.The dreamlike quality is enhanced by a feeling I’ve been here before, which, in a way, I have. The island is the setting for Secret Water, part of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, which I loved as a child and revisited ad nauseam during a phase when my son read almost nothing else. It is here on the River Wade that two of the adventurous children are trapped by rising water and rescued by a marsh-wise local boy nicknamed the Mastodon, because of the enormous round tracks left by his “splatchers” – like snowshoes for traversing mud. Continue reading...