Dedham Vale is a landscape of English oaks, pollarded willows and water meadows around the meandering River Stour. The villages are small but with imposing churches built on the profits of the wool trade. It is the landscape of John Constable and so, for many, of lowland England.

Constable painted many scenes around the Mill, especially William Lott’s House (or Willy Lott’s Cottage), located just below Flatford Mill on the banks of the Stour. The tall riverside trees appear to be elms and Lombardy poplars.

Constable’s most famous painting is probably The Hay Wain completed in 1821; this encompasses the same elements of cottage and river as the two earlier painting but set within a wider landscape of water meadows that then enables the Hay Wain to take centre stage. The small tree next to the house with its leggy stems looks like a flowering elder.

Since 1943, Flatford Mill has been a Field Study Centre and Willy Lott’s Cottage has been preserved as it was two centuries ago. The entire site is managed by the National Trust. Below is the same view that Constable saw when he painted the Hay Wain, on a brightening October afternoon with little changed except for a landscape with oaks and without elm trees, a higher river and more trees and scrub on the far bank. The hay cart and its occupants have been replaced by a pair of mute swans.

Flatford Mill is itself a large, beautiful building, once owned by Constable’s parents, hence why their son painted so many local scenes; it sits between the pretty villages of East Bergholt, where Constable was born, and Dedham, where the Alfred Munnings Museum is located. The river has been navigable for centuries and horse-drawn barges ran down through the locks taking goods to Mistley where Thames Barges would take them on to London. Today, that trade has stopped, the locks are largely unused and the banks of the river are overgrown. This is today a rewilded and recreational riverside; the Field Study Centre with its students from far and wide adds much needed life; but it is much quieter than when Constable knew it as a busy farm, mill and thoroughfare.