ON a bright summer’s day the mudflats of Essex sparkle like a million diamonds. Take my word for it, they do.

It’s a romantic experience from a much-maligned county, the coastline of which spans across a myriad of terrains from industrial wasteland to quirky resort towns, offering cliff-top spectacles and breathtaking open wildernesses.

One man who knows this better than most is Professor Jules Pretty and that’s not just because he happens to be chairman 0of the Essex Rural Commision, but more to do with the fact he has just walked it.

Professor of environment and society at University of Essex, Jules is one of the country’s leading researchers in agriculture and was awarded an OBE for his services to sustainable agriculture in the UK and overseas in 2006.

Last year he began chairing the Essex Rural Commision, a panel of experts including Professor Germaine Greer and former Channel 4 news political editor Elinor Goodman, which was set up to tackle the problems facing rural communities.

In the summer of 2007, Jules set out on his latest project, to walk the entire length of the East Anglian coastline, meeting its people and documenting their stories, an account of which will form his new book, the Luminous Coast.

Not published until later this year, there will be a sneak preview of what readers can expect when Jules gives this year’s Burrows Lecture at University of Essex this month.

In it he will detail his adventure and the book’s themes: The importance of the relationship between people and nature and how the ever-changing world casts a shadow over memory, place and identity.

Jules explained: “I wanted to find the undiscovered in the nearby, taking advantage of the beautiful coast of East Anglia and the experiences of freedom associated with it.

“This allowed me to consider the consequences of the modern world on these coasts and their uncertain future, hoping to show others that changes need to be made.

“I started at Purfleet at the QE2 Bridge under the M25, so the first environment I encountered was quite a harsh industrial one.

“The first bit of what you could call wilderness was St Clement’s Churchyard, in Thurrock, where they filmed the funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral. It’s a tiny church with incredible surroundings overlooking the Thames docks.”

From there Jules headed around the Essex coast, taking in the Dengie peninsula, with its eerie marshland, and the luminous mudflats, which give his book its title; the coastal resorts of Clacton, Walton and Frinton and then across the Suffolk border along Shingle Street, and through Aldeborough and Dunwich before finishing his first leg in Lowestoft. In all, Jules completed some 160 miles in a ten-day hike.

“I was going to do the whole of it in one go,” Jules smiled. “But it just didn’t work out that way so I ended up doing the rest in blocks. One of the most interesting sections was Cromer to Happisburgh in Norfolk, which I did at night with my brother.

“It was pretty tough, especially Shingle Street, where I ended up just doing one mile an hour because of the terrain. I also went back to different places to meet up with local people, travelling on punts and going out on oyster boats, getting their stories and building up a picture of the local folklore.”

Some experiences stick in Jules’s mind more than others like the time he was walking the Shotley peninsula in what he called the “teeth of a gale” and came across two weasels just sitting there staring at him.

Then there was the Wakering Stairs, close to Foulness Island and Broom Way, so called because of the way locals used to mark the path with 400 maple branches, which looked like broom handles.

Jules said: “The maps suggest they are great big empty quarters of space, but there is loads there.

“On maps places tend to be just that, places. But when you go there, the stories are different, the emotions are different, the people are different.

“I have relatives from Wivenhoe going back to the 1800s and one of my ancestor’s, John Pretty, was an alderman of Colchester, but many of them come from Suffolk and the Southwold area. So for personal reasons it was something I was very interested in as well.”

The father of two, who lives in Nayland, just outside Colchester, is more than used to travelling, spending many months abroad, most recently in Death Valley in America. He said: “I have been all over the world for my work.

“So I was really looking for a more local project this time and a trip around the East Anglian coast just came to me. It’s a kind of social history, the wild history of the East Anglian coast and what some would call pychological geography, which is basically about how people relate to places and what you get from being there.”