October 5, 1997: Rainham to Swale
The shoreline scene between Lower Halstow and the Swale
I decided on a slightly earlier start for our fourth day on the Saxon Shore Way, and the Lees and I were already in the depths of Victoria Station shortly after 8:00 on a grey but sultry Sunday. We bought return tickets to Swale and each of us did a little food and liquid shopping while waiting for the 8:35 to Dover. Our conductor was nonplussed when we showed him our return tickets to Swale – since it is a rather remote and underused site. “We’re getting off in Rainham and walking to Swale,” Tosh told him. “You’re walking?” he said in astonishment. It seemed to him, a resident of the Isle of Sheppey, to be an impossible task – but we knew it to be another eleven-mile stretch, easily within our range.
An hour later, at Rainham, we again had to hunt up a guard to unlock the loo for Harold. There was no toilet paper but I had some in my pack. Shortly before 10:00 we were ready to retrace out steps up Station Road. Nothing had changed: the newsagent, the Chinese takeaway, the gnome-filled front yards, the fridge dealership in somebody’s garage. The way back seemed to go more quickly than the way in, and – after a brief spell on a busy highway – we were able to escape by dashing across the traffic and entering a lane marked with a public footpath sign. This route proved to be on the left side of the fence separating us from the orchard that we had walked along last time. In only 20 minutes we were back on the Saxon Shore Way.
We continued forward behind a boatyard and emerged briefly on a road at Otterham Quay. As usual, we seemed to have inherited low tide and the boats were well beached. A turnoff into some woods provided us with a rare bit of uphill (“You didn’t tell me about this black arrow,” I complained to no one in particular.) The way forward at the top of this hill was a little unclear. I suspect that we were meant to walk diagonally through a pear orchard, but this did not seem practical and we headed up the west side before switching to an easterly direction. Tosh, meanwhile, had disappeared among the trees, emerging at the end with a pile of ripe windfall pears that we put into our packs before using an escape stile to return to more road walking.
We followed the Upchurch road past a new housing development (rather tasteful four bedroom homes), the Brown Jug pub, and Horsham Park with its hung tiles and corkscrew topiary. Indeed, we stayed too long on this road, climbing the hill to the edge of Upchurch itself when, seeing its church ahead, I realized we had missed a turnoff. So we marched back down the hill (Tosh picking some small sweet plums that hung over the roadway), and I found a stile and sign buried in an overgrown hedge. On the other side were views of the water once again and a country lane heading northeast. It passed a fishing hole and so there was some traffic on it, but at the end we were invited to enter a route through an apple orchard and this lead to another round of windfall fruit gathering.
The route put us out at Wetham Green, but once again we wandered too far along the road in search of our next turnoff. We were fascinated by the waterfowl and the pheasants in front yards here but no lane beckoned on our right after 300 yards, as the book advised. It took me a while to realize that once again we would have to retrace our steps. I again found a deeply embedded stile and footpath sign (though no sign on any lane) and we were soon circumnavigating an academy for equestrians, where pupils on steeds were being chided by an impatient schoolmistress. The route seemed to have a makeshift feel to it, lots of little stiles across raggedy fields, but eventually the line straightened out and we walked next to a line of trees to the road at Ham Green.
Harold spotted the continuation to the right and we pressed forward on Shoregate Lane, with more views of the waterside – which we soon reached ourselves after detouring around the Shoregate Wharf Sailing Club. We now had a raised sea wall to follow for some mile and a half. At Twinney Wharf this disappeared briefly and we had to improvise our way over to the caravans and parked cars that signaled the next stretch of embankment. It was still low tide and the salty marsh territory, with its browns and greens, was quite interesting.
Ahead of us we could make out the village of Lower Halstow on our right and just at about noon we headed off to reach it, taking a short cut through some broken ground only to discover that the SS Way turns inland here too and that we were soon back on route. Just before we reached the church of St. Margaret of Antioch I directed us into the village itself, following a mallard-choked stream and into a housing estate where every second window carried a fluorescent lime green sign protesting the establishment of a nearby dump that would contain nuclear waste. Off to our left I spotted a pub on the main street of Lower Halstow and at about 12:20 we pulled up to The Three Tuns.
This was a well-appointed country pub that did serve food. We made the instant decision to have lunch here and save our Victoria Station sandwiches for another time. I had a pint of Fosters and Harold and I ordered the fish and chips while Tosh had the stilton plowman’s. A nice spaniel made the rounds of the tables and the only sour note was sounded by the fruit machine – which proved an irresistible magnet for one of the locals. We had covered four and a half miles and I hoped to make a 4:04 train six and a half miles on, so we didn’t dawdle – leaving the pub at 1:00.
We walked by the church (locked, so we couldn’t see the murals), using a road again and hunting for an appropriate turnoff to the east. This we found at a road junction and here we began a long stretch over fields, with quite a few problems in trying to figure out where we were and how to reconcile the guidebook’s description with what we were encountering on the ground. At one point we had to enter a field that was being plowed as we crossed it. Tosh was convinced that the farmer was deliberately raising a cloud of dust to bathe us in a fine brown mist but I wasn’t too certain. We headed straight for a brickworks while I tried to spot likely signs and stiles in the distance. Then we had to head steeply uphill, with one guidepost on the hillside to serve as a guide. On the other side I found a stile and a Saxon Shore Way sign but I have to say that nothing strongly resembled the text I was following. Our route also passed another fishing hole (with one solitary boy) and a turf plantation. We couldn’t tell what direction we were supposed to take and crossed a field toward what seemed a yellow sign, only to discover that we had been misled and that we needed to make further progress around the field’s perimeter before finding an escape route onto a farm lane. Even here we missed a turnoff and walked all the way out to the road at the end, encountering a locked gate which we had to climb. I knew where we were, however, and a short stroll on the road heading west brought us back to the SS Way and a descent to the shoreline.
Technically we were walking along the tidal reaches of the Medway here, not the Thames, and we at last encountered a rising tide that provided a wonderful riverside scene, with little green islands, the sails of small boats, and – looking like a miniature Stonehenge according to Harold – the four distant pillars of the Kingsferry Bridge against the background of the Isle of Sheppey. Our route kept us along the water’s edge for some time but the view to our right was fascinating; a large ship seemed to be making its way slowly overland, an illusion caused by the absence of any view of the Swale on which it sailed.
At a farmhouse we had a rest among hay bales while I tried in vain to see a 3:04 train making its way over the Kingsferry Bridge. After some indecision we headed over a stile along a counterwall, winding east then north. Geese and swans flew over us and landed in ponds in a desolate and remote countryside. A road brought us up to the Swale at last, our first indication that we were near this spot coming when the spray from an invisible water skier danced above the horizon.
I had timed things just right. It was 3:20 and we had about a mile and a half to go, but Tosh was slowing down and the nearer we got to the bridge the more I began to wonder if we would make it. I was also a bit disconcerted to see a 3:34 train pull in at our little halt – a train not indicated on any of the schedules I had consulted (including Railtrack’s website and the national train info telephone number). Kingsferry Bridge itself was choked with traffic while the central span was raised to let one little sailboat pass beneath. At about 3:54 we neared the parking lot on the western side of the bridge. It was not easy to see how to get into it, but some trippers showed us how, and the gentleman in this duo, in answer to our questions about how to reach the halt on the highway above us, directed us under the bridge.
Here we discovered no path up to the halt at all – only a road leading away from the whole scene. So we darted back beneath the span and I improvised a little path up the hill to the highway, climbed over the aluminum shield and looked hopelessly for a way to dart across the stream of traffic. Eventually Tosh discovered a little space dividing the two streams; we could dart just half way and then a van flashed its lights at us, letting us cross the remaining stretch, climb the steps of the halt and reach the platform only two minutes before our train (which we flagged down, as though it were a bus) arrived to take us on a ten minute ride to Sittingbourne. We were quite tired after the recent sprint.
We had only a brief wait at Sittingbourne and at 4:25 we climbed aboard a crowded train and found seats. The American girl sitting across from me was reading Charles Bukowski’s Post Office. Again we all slept a bit before waking to the only strong sun of the day at Woolwich. We reached Victoria at 5:47, after a most successful outing.
To continue with the next stage of our walk you need: