Stephen Nunn reveals history of Primrose Marsh near Mundon

Appearing as early as December and lasting right through the spring until May, it is a tough little perennial that can cope with most habitats.

While it often appears in open woods and shaded hedgerows, it favours damp ground (particularly alongside running streams).

You will also see patches of it in meadows and it was once so prolific in those areas that it was also known as the field primrose.

Sometimes it even lent its name to parcels of agricultural land and the 1843 Tithe Award for Maldon reveals one such example.

Primrose Marsh consisted of 22 acres adjacent to the track-way to the village of Mundon and was bounded at its south end by trees and a brook – an ideal combination for the little plant to flourish.

Primrose Marsh today

At that stage the marsh was owned by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, but was rented to Charles Hurrell, of nearby Brick House Farm. You wouldn’t think of it as a marsh today, but all these years on it is still there and continues to carry its original title, albeit that it is now Primrose Meadow, rather than Marsh.

When I attended the Plume School in the 1970s, it was our sports field and we made regular trips from the Mill Road campus (the Lower Plume as we knew it) to go and play football and rugby there.

Little did I know at that time what a rich lineage there is beneath that often muddy, churned up pitch.

It is a place steeped in intrigue and legend, including a persistent story that, during the English Civil War, Roundhead troops hung Royalist sympathisers from the branches of a large oak which stood alongside the brook end. Many years later locals still held that anyone who subsequently dared to cut its timber was doomed to die within the close of the same year.

We know that over the following centuries Primrose Marsh-cum-Meadow had dried out enough to form part of a farming estate, but fast forward to 1935 and it also briefly doubled as, would you believe, an airstrip.

According to my friend Paul Doyle (in his Fields of the First, published 1997), it was on Monday, July 8 that “the large field known as Primrose Meadow” was the location of the ‘Astra Show’, part of the daily rounds of flying under the banner of Alan Cobham’s National Aviation Day displays.

The adventurous pilots of the motley squadron of visiting Tiger Moths and various Avros took off from the site to perform daring acts of formation flying and aerobatics, as well as offering ‘joy flights’ to eager residents at five to ten shillings a thrill.

The next day the ‘Flying Circus’ moved on to Walton-on-the-Naze and Primrose Meadow again fell silent.

However, that tranquillity might well have been permanently broken some half a dozen years later.

The so-called ‘Brick House Farm Estate’ (which encompassed the meadow, farm and the fields right down to Mundon) was selected as the location for one of eight new bomber airfields to serve the United States 8th Air Force in East Anglia.

The area was first allocated for such purposes in August 1942, but by the middle of December, construction work had been postponed indefinitely.

As we know, the aerodrome contractors never arrived and, ever since that time, Primrose Meadow has served as a welcome, well-loved and well-used open space – a “green lung” among evolving housing development. It continues not only to be a very popular place for football training and matches, but also for dog walking, kite flying and daisy chain making – a tranquil area of recreation for children and adults alike.

It has not been without threat of development, but despite all of that it is still there. At first glance it is just a field, but we know that it is more than that.

In many ways it epitomises the chequered story of our town – a tale that encompasses everything as diverse as marsh to gibbet, footballers to pilots, the footprints of thousands and so much more besides.