September 26, 1998: Herne Bay to Plucks Gutter
Reculver
Although there were warnings of rain in the afternoon, the Lees and I decided to go ahead and schedule a day’s walk on the Saxon Shore Way for Saturday, September 26th. The night before, at the Trustee’s reception at the American Embassy, I had tried to coax Jessica Bond into accompanying us, but it was soon obvious, as we waited in vain near the ticket booths in Victoria, that it would again be just the three of us. It was to be my first walk since twice coming a cropper on the Thames Walk in August, and I was anxious to see if my sore ribs had now healed. They seemed to be okay for walking, though I did take in slow motion all the stiles we encountered on this day’s stage.
Tosh was drinking a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper when I reached the train station at 8:45. I had time to buy some snacks and to snag a cappuccino before she, Harold and I made our way to the eastern half of the terminal to find the 9:05 to Ramsgate. This fast train took an inland route to reach the Medway, but I had plenty of time to fill Tosh in on life at ASL. It was very strange for this conversation to be so definitively one-sided, for Tosh was now officially retired – and clearly enjoying it. She was as busy as ever, trying to finish up a geology course at the Open University, taking chamber music and clarinet lessons at City Lit, and singing in several choruses. She complained about the space-age facilities on this train, with its press here whooshing doors –even for the loos.
We were a few minutes late at Herne Bay and then there was a delay while the station manager unlocked the toilets for the Lees. We headed north at about 10:30, passing the Gandhi Restaurant and circumventing an elderly lady who had brought a chair out to a busy corner in order to collect for a local charity. It was nice and sunny on the promenade and I took off my sweatshirt so that I could remain in a maroon t-shirt for the rest of the day. I paused several times in order to tighten my boots, since a sore spot on the bottom of my left heel and a wonky right ankle were both giving me problems. Herne Bay, with its arcades and hotels, seemed as grandly seedy as ever – never having quite accepted the fact that this spa of stunted palms on the North Sea was not, in fact, a misplaced corner of Provence.
We now had a long stretch of pavement promenade to cover, with the towers at Reculver already ahead of us in the distance. The sea slowly rose against the groins of the pebbles on our left and families, taking advantage of the last of the summer sun, donned flip-flops to brave the shoreline. A colony of dogs had a dip. We walked through a parked regatta of small boats, whose beams menacingly challenged our heads as they swung about in the breeze. A few minutes later they had all put out to sea behind us, a grand single file of white sails, heading for open water. Cliffs rose up to roads bearing the last of Herne Bay’s suburban sprawl on our right. Some swain had used paint to decorate the nearby sea wall: “Yes, I do fancy you.”
Eventually the well-marked route left the seaside to head uphill and inland. Tosh tried to second-guess this diversion by climbing a small hill ahead of us – and soon discovered her error. We had been sent on a zig-zag detour in order for the route to use an upstream bridge crossing in Bishopstone Glen. We even had a few hundred yards in woods here. A tribe of bored smoking teenagers had taken up residence on the far side of the bridge but the girls condescended to answer Tosh’s greeting. Then we had to continue uphill amid ripened berries, with views over the glen on our left. More climbing up some well-graded steps put us out on a headland that supported a coast guard house. We used a road to pass near this structure and the way was then clear for a long, gentle descent to Reculver itself – with its pub, caravan camp, information center and church towers, a striking scene made all the more electric by the gradual loss of the sun and the growing intensity of the wind.
The Lees followed a road downhill while I kept to the official path in the grass, anxious not to lose any clues as to a turnoff that we would use after lunch. We were well on schedule so we stopped off at the little Information Center and had a peek around. There were the usual maritime and historical displays and some interesting photos of the recent recovery of one of the dam buster’s bouncing bombs –which had been deployed in practice here during the war.
It was 12:30 when we reached the King Ethelbert Inn, choosing to sit inside rather than brave the breeze outside. We ordered our usual tipples and cod and chips times three and had a nice leisurely meal in friendly surroundings, with lots of dogs underfoot. At a minute or so past 1:00 a cellular phone began to ring. I reached into my t-shirt pocket, opened up the device in question, said hello, and handed the gadget to Tosh, “It’s for you.” Tosh was absolutely astonished at another one of my trailside surprises, for I had arranged all of this with Dorothy before leaving the house in the morning. We had decided to have a mobile phone available to us when we purchased another car at the end of August, and the wisdom of having it with me of the trail (especially for someone as accident-prone as yours truly) seemed obvious.
Harold wanted to show Tosh something she had missed at the Information Center so they backtracked after lunch while I went up to the surviving towers of the very ancient church of St. Mary’s on the hill behind the pub. I had a good poke around and sat for a while, tightening my boots, while the Lees caught up. It was 1:30 when we turned our backs on the sea and headed south across open country, using roads and tracks to pass between branches of the caravan camp and reach the first of many dikes in this formerly flooded marshland. It was now very gray and the likelihood of rain seemed great. Indeed I thought I felt a few flecks of moisture on my bare arms as we pressed forward toward the rail line on paths over recently plowed fields. We used an underpass here and climbed a hill, with Chislet Mill on our right. The guidebook describes this as a smock mill, but why you need a mill to make smocks I don’t know.
At the top of the hill we reached tarmac and used a side road to edge closer to the motorway. On our left was another pub, the Roman Galley Inn, incongruously accented by pink bouncy castles in its forecourt. Both Harold and I were mystified by a burning light on a hillside opposite us, but after crossing over the motorway, turning right and passing an abandoned vehicle (with a “Police Aware” sticker on its smashed windows), we realized the light was not in any field; it was just a street light burning in mid-afternoon on top of a tall pole. Tosh couldn’t see any of this until we were practically at its foot. Here we turned south again to follow a farm track. On our right a large flock of gulls had landed; each bird was staring stolidly at the highway, and for a while it was hard to discern whether these were live animals or statues cut in stone. “They’re probably in shock, ” I said, “someone promised them fish and chips as soon as they got to England and all they get is this bare hill with a motorway for a view.”
At a crossroads Tosh paused to visit the bushes, instructing Harold and me to wait at the top of the next climb. This we did, having some liquid and a snack while staring down at the farm buildings in the North Stream Valley below us. Visibility was not that great. When Tosh joined us she complained of this setting because we had picked a grassy bank opposite some rusting farm machinery – but we did not move. Ahead of us on our track was a house and Tosh was worried that a lady backing her car out here would not see us, but I told her not to worry – we were now turning off to walk down a narrow slit between fields to the valley bottom. There followed a series of stiles and fences as we edged our way through the fields and houses of Marshside village. There was a pub nearby, but, as it was almost 3:00, the Lees and I agreed to give it a miss.
We used a pathway behind houses to escape to open country again and met a gentleman who was looking over one of the fences at his neighbor’s backyard fire. A large pit had been dug and refuse was being tossed into it. The Marshsiders wanted to know where we were heading and agreed that there was still a long way to go. I asked if they were planning to roast an ox in their fire pit, a remark they found hilarious: “Well, perhaps if we knew you were coming…”
The dikes, which we followed in a southeasterly direction, were often covered in a slimy algae – except in those open stretches where the wind prevented the plant from getting a purchase on the surface of the smooth water. At one crossroads there was maroon algae as well – unless, I suggested, this was the same green stuff in its autumn coloration. After passing the tree-lined Gilling Drove track on our left we turned right to walk the bank of the Sarre Penn dike. We then climbed Walmers Hill, again waiting for Tosh to catch up with us. The way forward was unclear, for the field had been so recently ploughed that there was no trod at all – but we thought we saw some footpath signs on the road and headed south along a furrow. We had to cross the Island Road carefully and continue forward toward the tree-lined valley of the Great Stour. A steep descent through these trees (with the help of steps) put us out onto a highway. Ahead was a railway line, the river itself, and an attractive pub, the Grove Ferry inn – covered in red ivy. It was open and I told the Lees we could have a last pit stop as long at we didn’t take more than 20 minutes.
Half of this time was taken by Tosh in choosing just the right kind of bottled water from the publican. Harold and I drank Diet Cokes. Everyone visited the loos and some children climbed atop the bar counter behind us to ring a bell. We left at 4:00, took to the highway, as we were instructed to do by all the Saxon Shore Way signs, circled a parking area and found ourselves back on the opposite side of the pub! Nevertheless the way forward was now clear – we were to spend our last two miles or so in the company of the two Stours, Great and Little, with a stretch of flat open country between the two after the Red Bridge. If anything, the weather was brightening and the sun was returning to rural Kent. We kept up a good pace now along the south bank of the Little Stour, which also had stretches of algae and stretches of open water. At one point Tosh asked if we were heading toward a large bridge. “No, that’s a giant haystack.” Indeed it was a haystack city, being completed by a chap on a tractor with a forklift as we passed by. There was a stretch of orchard on our right as we neared our goal, but there would be no gathering of windfall crops this time – since we were firmly fenced out.
For quite a while there had been some doubt about how we would break this walk – since we were far away from any train station here, and we knew we had to rely on a taxi somewhere. But should it be from Herne Bay, or from Canterbury or Margate? Tosh had phoned the Dog and Duck, our terminus today, and they had recommended Margate, so she had also been speaking to cabbies here (including one who supplied white limos only) and had arranged for an Arrow cab to meet us at the unusually named Plucks Gutter (not Pluck Guitar, as I often called it) at 5:00. “There it is,” I said as we neared our spot, a black cab just passing over the Little Stour bridge as we began our last minute or so on the river. We cut through the gorgeous gardens of the closed pub (another complication which Tosh had discovered) and there it was, already backed up, with motor running, waiting for us. Judging times on this day had not been easy – since there are no mileage figures available on the ground, but I have an instinct about these things now. It was exactly four minutes to five.
We were soon heading for Margate, Tosh happy with the driver’s caution in not dodging heedlessly around the slow-moving cyclists in the country lanes. In Margate itself I caught a glimpse of the pier that figures prominently in Graham Swift’s Last Orders and at 5:20 we were at the railway station. We had a twenty-minute wait. I went out front to use the new toy to call Dorothy about my arrival time and the Lees bought some homemade cookies from two ladies who had a counter in the station. We were soon aboard a fast train, which we boarded a 5:39, and we dozed on and off (when Tosh could stop talking) much of the way. I was very stiff and footsore as I returned to the platforms of Victoria, a public announcement warning us that these surfaces were slippery after heavy rains in London.
There was a little moisture in the air as I inched my way back to my front steps at 7:00, but I managed to make it without adding anything to my t-shirt. It was good to be home.
To continue with the next stage of our walk you need: