Shorelines - Recommended Walks
One of our speakers at Shorelines: Literature Festival of the Sea, Tom King recommended three walks around the coastline of Southend on Sea in case visitors found a spare hour or two in-between our fantastic, packed schedule of writers, artists and theatre productions at Shorelines.
Tom King is a writer and journalist who has spent much of his life (and work) exploring, walking and writing about the Essex coastline. Below he has chosen three of his favourite walks for you to enjoy. Make sure you don't miss his event, Thames Estuary Trail: a Walk Around the End of the World on Sunday 17 July at 12.30 - 1pm.
Even many of its residents think of south-east Essex as one big suburban ant-colony. As for the outside world, if it considers the region at all, it's as a place of wall to wall bungalows and supermarkets, retail parks and road junctions.
Actually, that's a ruddy libel. The predominant characteristic of this region is wildness, and we're not talking about what Essex girls do on hen nights.
The reality is that much of the landscape remains as salt marsh and mud-flats, without a bungalow in sight. The dominant geographical features of the area are the estuaries of the Thames and the less well-known but equally haunting River Crouch. The two estuaries and their marshes comprise the largest single nature reserve in England.
These vast worlds of mud and water, vaulted by giant skies, effortlessly dwarf the puny urban conglomerations of Southend and Basildon. The sheer emptiness and wildness of it all can be almost overwhelming. Animal behaviourists will tell you that even the sea-gulls display symptoms of neurotic stress triggered by agoraphobia. You can move for hours through these landscapes without setting eye on another human being. Yet this wild place exists just 30 miles from Piccadilly Circus.
In 2000 I set out on an extended journey to explore the shores of the Thames Estuary on foot, and get to know this wilderness a bit more closely. Starting at the mouth of the Thames Estuary, on the secretive island of Foulness, I followed the north shore westwards to the outer rim of London. Crossing the water to the far side of the river, I then retraced the journey, mirror fashion, heading back eastwards along the Kent shore. The result was the book Thames Estuary Trail, which happily (plug) remains in print ten years later.
The walk described in Thames Estuary Trail took most of the summer, and can't be completed in any sort of hurry. But below are routes for three shorter walks carved out of that journey. Between them they give a representative taster of the estuaries and their wild places. These walks can generate quite powerful emotions, of which the strongest is astonishment at the beauty and loneliness of Thamescape. This, it can be argued with some force, is the real Essex. Nobody who walks this way will ever be able to watch The Only Way is Essex in quite the same light again.
PRACTICAL NOTE:
Can it really be 11 years since I did these walks! Time lag and memory lapse mean that I have not attempted to give a detailed account of the routes. They can be easily followed using the large-scale Ordnance Survey Explorer series of maps. Keys to the relevant maps are given with each of the routes below.
CANEWDON AND PAGLESHAM CHURCH END:
OS Explorer No 175 “Southend”
A beautiful 7-mile walk in the land between the Thames and the Crouch. For much of the distance it follows a ridge above the River Crouch, before cutting across country to join the short but equally beautiful River Roach, a backwater link between the two estuaries. As with the other two walks, this route showcases the wildness of the Thames marshes. Canewdon village is full of legends of the local witches. Two miles further on is a reminder of a more scientific approach to life. Beneath the mud near Paglesham Church End lie the remains of the Beagle, the ship that carried the young Charles Darwin on his world voyage, enabling the birth of the theory of Evolution. A modern legend of a different sort lies behind the Punch Bow inn at Paglesham. The food as you'd expect.
CANVEY ISLAND:
OS Explorer No 163 “Gravesend and Rochester”
The 14-mile circular walk, following the seawall around the periphery of Canvey Island, pretty well says it all about the south-east Essex landscape. Drive into Canvey and through the windscreen you glimpse what looks like non-stop suburbia and heavy industry. Now strap on your boots and try a different approach, as you follow the sea-path along Canvey, Benfleet, and Holehaven creeks, then pursue the Thames shore to Canvey Point. Much of the way you're in open water-margin country, with just the seabirds for company. In the south-west corner of the island, a zone of oil and gas terminals begins, but you never lose the sense of unfettered space, and the raw industrial landscape has a magic of its own. The entire route around the island is a right of way, although it entails some scrambling up and down ladders set into the sea-wall. It can be done so don't let anybody tell you otherwise, and with the sea always at your shoulder, this is one walk where it's really hard to get lost. If you get tired of wild landscape, there's a legendary pub, the Lobster Smack along the way, as well as an excellent foodie restaurant, the Labworth, set into the seawall.
ST MARY'S MARSH:
OS Explorer No 163 “Gravesend and Rochester”
Not a lot of people living in Southend have ever set foot on St Mary's Marsh, yet tens of thousands of us look out at it on a daily basis. It's the distant strip of green marshes and fields that runs along the Kent shore between All Hallows and Hope Point. The human population is minuscule, and visitors even rarer. But readers all over the world have been wandering this place in their imaginations for 150 years. St Mary's Marsh is the main setting for Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. Anyone who knows the book will find it replaying in their mind as they walk this seven mile route through the marsh – the cannons booming on the river to indicate an escape from one of the prison ships, young Pip Gargery's encounter with the convict Magwitch in a bleak churchyard on the marshes, the wild pursuit of Magwitch across the drainage dykes of St Mary's Marsh, the fog rolling in from the river. Dickens knew every inch of these marshes, and little has changed since 1860, when Great Expectations was published. Don't try reading Great Expectations while you're walking, though, or you could end up in a drainage dyke yourself, as I did.
Written by Colette Bailey 17 June 2011