The harbour at Brightlingsea. Photo: David Merrett_CC BY 2.0

IT was during the last lockdown that I started thinking about ways to make a quick but meaningful escape from Camden, where I live, to places that were near enough to reach without a car or serious spends on public transport but would give me an experience sufficiently removed from normal life to feel like holidays. However short.

It took a while to put the plan to work, but I’ve begun. And for my first stop, I chose Colchester: partly because it’s easy to get to (an hour by train from Liverpool Street) but also because, along with the rest of Essex, it gets an undeservedly bad press – dismissed for decades as the home of Essex Man, that horror of the 1980s/90s who made good financially, believed in Margaret Thatcher, and spent loadsamoney without thought or taste.

He hasn’t altogether gone away. And if you go to Colchester’s extraordinary, futuristic arts centre, a shiny space-ship of a building called Firstsite, you’re greeted in the foyer by a massive effigy of Essex Man made out of newsprint: half-apologetic, half-defiant.

But forget all that. Essex actually has beauty, history and charm.

And Colchester provides it all in one go. It’s an ancient town with Roman ruins from the era when the Emperor Claudius rode in on an elephant in 43AD. And after him came William the Conqueror who, without elephants, built an imposing castle that still stands – having survived a siege during the Civil War and gone on to be a prison (serving time as the operations base for a particularly nasty Witchfinder General who locked up hundreds of presumably innocent victims in its dungeons).

Castle aside, the town is choked with handsomely historic buildings – many of them from the 18th century, including the impressive Greyfriars, which dates from the 1720s, and has been a house, a school and other things, but is now stylishly converted into a hotel.

And having stayed the night there I can testify to its great staff, great food, and a particularly fine afternoon tea for those who appreciate traditional niceties.

Another atmospheric place to eat is Tymperleys: a 15th century house with an exquisite garden, tucked away behind an ancient arch. It takes some finding but is worth the search. And though the food is basic, it’s a joy to eat it in such wonderful surroundings.

Other local joys include the town’s Mercury Theatre, recently refurbished with a café where you can sip your cappuccino overlooking the urban equivalent of a village green, and punching above its weight with shows of West End standard.

But for all the pleasures of the town, one thing you’ll want to do is look outside it – to the Essex greenery and coastline, which are unexpectedly accessible by public transport. Take the train to nearby Manningtree (it’s one stop, only a few minutes) and then walk from there (well signposted) to Flatford Mill where, if the sun is shining, you won’t want to leave because it’s so absurdly lovely.

Flatford is where Constable painted his Hay Wain: maybe the most famous English picture ever, celebrated on a trillion biscuit tins and tea-towels.

As the National Trust now own the site (and run a garden café by the riverside), their volunteers stand holding helpful reproductions so you can compare the view that Constable observed with what’s there now. It hasn’t changed. And that’s the pleasure of it: Flatford is a miracle of timelessness.

And if you walk another half-hour by the river you’ll find three more miracles.

One: the pristine Essex village that is Dedham, with its film-set high street of grand period houses. Two: the Essex Rose, an olde-worlde tea shop of the kind that barely still exists. And three: a prompt bus back to Colchester that doesn’t run too often but is otherwise reliable and gets you home as planned.

It sounds like an exaggeration, but my whole experience of rural Essex buses was a good one: unlike anything in London, you can trust them. So I took another on-time bus from Colchester to Mersea Island, for a long walk along miles of sandy beach adorned with candy-coloured beach huts; and I would have carried on along the coast to Cudmore Grove (a country park that sweeps down to the water’s edge) except I ran into a spot of bother in a section where the sea-wall had collapsed, and found myself trapped by the tide for two hours: not a recommendable experience.

Make a detour inland and you get to Cudmore by less stressful routes. And getting there, you’ll find a ferry that will whisk you off to Brightlingsea: home of exotic yachts and oyster beds. From Brightlingsea another on-time bus returns you back to Colchester.

And if you’ve managed to avoid collapsing sea walls, you’ll have had a good day.

• Further details: visitessex.com is the place to start. Also brightlingseaharbour.org; greyfriarscolchester.co.uk; mercurytheatre.co.uk; tymperleys.co.uk; firstbus.co.uk and greateranglia.co.uk