I’ve wandered into an oil painting. In front of me is a millpond with a cream-coloured cottage at its edge and a froth of English greenery on its banks. The scene is unmistakable. Where my mind’s eye sees carthorses and a wooden wagon there’s now nothing but damselflies and duckweed, but the view still has a potent familiarity.
It’s John Constable’s early 19th-century masterpiece The Hay Wain – the star of an uncountable number
of tea towels, jigsaw puzzles and biscuit tins – and I’m standing right inside it.
Who was John Constable?
Few landscape artists are as synonymous with a specific region as Constable. Many of his best-known works were painted within walking distance of Flatford Mill, the scene of The Hay Wain and one of three local mills once owned by his family on the Essex-Suffolk border.
His canvases sing with open skies, mighty elms and slow waters, his colours seeming to capture a countryside stuck in time. Yet there’s a dramatic undertow to these grand bucolic scenes: labourers toil, reflections ripple, clouds gather.
“He’s renowned as a painter of idyllic England, but I bet the air round here would have been blue!” says Ilona, one of the volunteer guides at Flatford Mill, holding up a reprint of Constable’s 1822 work View on the Stour near Dedham.
It shows men hefting barges into position beyond Flatford Bridge; behind her, the same waterway and bridge are instantly recognisable. “This was hard manual work. And it was a troubled time in Britain, remember, after the loss of the American colonies and the Napoleonic blockades.”
What was Constable known for?
Constable tended to give his works rather anodyne titles – Scene on a Navigable River, for example, or A Boat Passing A Lock – but this belies the stories they hold of industry, rural life and a changing world.
Late November 2025 sees the opening of a landmark five-month exhibition at London’s Tate Britain Gallery, focusing on his artistic rivalry with another legendary painter, JMW Turner. Both Turner and Constable were born around 250 years ago, in April 1775 and June 1776 respectively.
As an exhibition, the word epic comes to mind.
What is Constable Country?
I’ve come to Constable Country – the name given to the area of the Dedham Vale National Landscape where the artist grew up, and which inspired so much of his work – to wander.
A small web of linked walking trails threads across the landscape here, none of which are especially long but all of which give the chance not just to find out more about Constable himself, but to enjoy the unhurried, peaceable Stour Valley. Let the waterside strolls and tearoom stops commence.
John Constable was, in many ways, a lucky man. Born into middle-class comfort in the village of East Bergholt (barely a mile from Flatford as the cloud drifts), he trained to become a miller until his love of painting steered him on another path. He entered London’s Royal Academy in 1799 at the age of 23 – Turner, by contrast, had done the same at 13 – and began to make his way in the art world.
Walking Constable Country
I begin my decidedly more modest journey at Manningtree Station, where an oaky green footpath leads me away from the bustle of passengers arriving from Liverpool Street.
Within minutes, I’m walking among a lazy tousle of blackberries and dappled sunlight. Soon the path reaches the low-lying Cattawade Marshes.
Canada geese are grazing on the open flats and a warm breeze shuffles the reeds. The railway line is still only a few hundred feet away but already the views are wide and gentle, framed by teasels and banks of cow parsley.
Manningtree Station wasn’t opened until 1846, almost a decade after Constable’s death in 1837, but it has a part to play in the valley’s story.
The Stour was the first river in the country to be made navigable, its flow having been regulated with sluices and lock gates to allow London-bound cargos of grain, malt, bricks and more to be hauled inland by horse-drawn barges. When the age of the train arrived, trade on the Stour was badly hit.
It’s this pre-railway river – or, strictly speaking, canal – that so often appears in Constable’s work. His paintings can appear sleepy at first glance, but he’s also depicting a place of physical exertion, of boatbuilders, sweating horses and trammelled towpaths.
Before long I’m walking next to the water myself, watching giant dragonflies zip across the surface and dabbling mallards go bottoms-up in the green shallows. By the time I reach Flatford, with its cottages, mill buildings and cake-abundant café, I’ve only covered a couple of miles.
Arriving at Flatford
Constable initially struggled to find attention in London, but it was his now-famous larger canvases, the so-called “six footers”, that brought him success. Based primarily in the capital, he was in the habit of spending the summer months back in the countryside of his childhood, where he would make extensive sketches and studies.
These then formed the basis of his enormous paintings, which he created in his London studio over winter and spring. It was a long process, but it worked. And in the Stour Valley, he had a fruitful subject matter.
It’s very easy to linger at Flatford, as generations of visitors have discovered.
The travel company Thomas Cook & Son began running Constable Country tours as long ago as 1893, and despite an amusingly grumpy article in The Times in the 1920s (“You make your way to the bridge, wondering if you can spot just where he sat to paint the Mill and what changes it will show after all these years, and you come upon a tent marked TEAS AND ICES”), the experience of arriving at Flatford today is a well-preserved one.
The vegetation has changed – elms succumbing to disease, sycamores grown mighty, oak and ash filling the views as they’re no longer being chopped for boat timber – but the mill, the bridge and the course of the River Stour itself are much as they always were.
Later in the day, I pass a few wild swimmers and slow-paddling kayakers as I wend my way towards Dedham, following a truly lovely stretch of river that meanders through broad, cattle-cropped water meadows.
“No sharks around, then?” smiles a kayaker as she passes a swimmer. The serenity of the scene, with willows dangling into the water and martins swooping over the banks, makes the joke even more ludicrous.
On to Fen Bridge and Dedham
At Fen Bridge, an expertly rebuilt version of the wooden footbridge that Constable himself used in his school days, a 100-strong herd of cattle has come to the water to drink.
In the late-afternoon sun, the colours of their coats are rendered sharp – cream, chestnut, jet-black, butterscotch – and the sight feels like a view of an older world.
Turner may have been the master of turbulent storms and oceans, but Constable’s milieu was a bucolic one, and it carried the scents of cut hay, barge stoves and livestock.
The village of Dedham proves a restful overnight base, with the historical Sun Inn a fine place to eat and sleep well. The high street holds ivied mansions, a Co-op with a vintage façade and the looming 16th-century tower of St Mary’s Church, which appeared in the background of multiple Constable paintings, though not always where it should have done.
“He liked to place the church tower where it worked best for the composition,” Ilona had shared with me during her Flatford tour. “Perhaps it was on castors.”
Immersive country walking
I spend the next day following other short local trails, heading north into the mellow hills to reach East Bergholt, where the valley views spill open and the site of Constable’s now-vanished childhood home is marked by a plaque.
I then wind west through shaggy river pastures to Stratford St Mary and Langham, another village immortalised on his canvases.
The path hops between Suffolk and Essex at will, crossing the rude presence of the A12 but otherwise serving up immersive country walking.
When I reach an onion field – its bulbs seemingly ripe enough to be served up in a Ploughman’s lunch there and then – I realise it’s the first arable crop I’ve come across.
The riverine landscapes here are mainly soft and uncultivated, the kind where you find yourself choosing a patch of grass to sit on, before gazing at the Stour and marvelling at how Constable depicted it with such vivid watery realism.
His opinion of Turner was based on admiration as well as rivalry. He described his contemporary as “stark mad with ability”, remarking that Turner “seems to paint with tinted steam”.
But Constable himself was blessed with transcendent gifts of his own, capturing light, scale and accuracy of colour in a way that was unparalleled at the time.
A walking break in Constable Country is not strenuous – there are no mountains here or roiling seas. The key footpaths, all told, cover only around 11 miles, but they lead you through a tranquil pocket of England that is largely unspoiled and – thanks to its artistic heritage – frequently fascinating.
The Tate exhibition, bringing together two titans of the age, is likely to be just as absorbing.
Discover more incredible walks around the UK
- “Forget 1066, Agincourt and Waterloo, this is the most important battle in English history”
- ‘I found the real Glastonbury on my own pilgrimage, following legends and ley lines’: Walking The Glastonbury Way
- “Nicknames for the island included the Madeira of Scotland, the Costa del Clyde and the Naples of the North.” This unsung isle is Scotland’s best-kept secret
- Walk in the footsteps of Britain's greatest poets with the spectacular scenery that inspired them
