May 1, 1999: Plucks Gutter to Deal
On the whole, The Saxon Shore Way is well-waymarked.
Our first spring walk of 1999 was also our ninth stage on the Saxon Shore Way, a route we had abandoned the previous September when we had reached Plucks Gutter on the River Stour. Our task on May 1, 1999 was to get up early enough to complete a full day’s walking in so remote and distant a location. The Lees and I agreed therefore to meet at 7:50 at Victoria, a decision that required a 6:30 setting on the alarm clock. In the event, as in so many other nights preceding walking expeditions, I had the greatest difficulty getting to sleep – and even watched a taped baseball game from 4:30 to 5:30 before snatching a last hour of shut-eye.
I had done most of my packing the night before (with Dorothy having put together a lunch for me after a visit to Sainsbury’s) so I was able to shower, shave, and dress for a 7:00 departure from the flat. I made excellent connections to Victoria and even had time to buy some extra liquid (a peach and banana smoothie) after getting my roundtrip ticket to Deal. While Harold waited in the ticket line Tosh got us coffee – denouncing the selection of gooey pastries on offer at several concourse kiosks.
We boarded the 8:05 to Ramsgate and had an hour and a half’s ride to Margate; in this time I managed to exhaust Tosh’s hunger for ASL gossip. A baby-faced teenager in shorts sat opposite, his walkman lashing us with back beat and his feet comfortably ensconced on the seat in front. Two old ladies behind us clucked censoriously: “In our day mothers wouldn’t allow such things.” You know you are getting old when you find yourself nodding in agreement with such sentiments.
While Tosh made some purchases at the train station I went out to engage the services of a cabbie. I evidently missed a classic instance of Toshmania. After feeling all the apples in a basket at the counter, and finding each to be a mealy foreign import, the lady managed to drop one of these objects onto the surface of the cash register, where it recorded a sale of $2.99 in its descent. The lady manning the machine did not demand payment, though she was vexed that she didn’t know what category of purchase had been wrung up, but Tosh, feeling somewhat guilty over the encounter, now felt compelled to buy two of the mushy apples.
The cabbie discussed local crime as we made our fifteen-minute journey back to the Dog and Duck in Plucks Gutter. The place was already open for morning coffee but we satisfied ourselves with soft drinks from the Coke Machine. I drank a Diet coke and the Lee’s shared a Bass Shandy; Tosh claimed that the machine had given her the wrong selection – but can we guess who pressed the wrong button?
The morning was clear and sunny, warm but not hot, and I decided to walk in my maroon t-shirt from the start. I had my shorts with me too, but the first hour or so along the banks of the Stour convinced me that I would do just as well in my thick cords – for the trail was very overgrown with grasses, buttercups and nettles. Harold felt the sting of the latter through his thin cotton trousers and we didn’t make too rapid a progress over surfaces that seemed ready and willing to undo an ankle or two. The river was rather still and muddy but the tall reeds and the yellow rape on the banks opposite provided a magical reflection on the surfaces below. “This Kent landscape would have pleased Monet.”
Dominating the scene ahead of us were the giant turbines and smokestacks of the Richborough Power Station, though neither it not the oddly sited wind turbine next to it seemed to be in action today. Bea Cowan’s guidebook lists the distance to the power station from Plucks Gutter at three miles; I would say it was closer to four. It seemed to take forever. Twice we fell off the route, which requires a faithful adherence to the riverside, because front-leading Tosh was seduced by other tracks heading too far to the right.
We had agreed to wait for our first rest until noon, but fifteen minutes before this, just before we reached the rail line, Tosh wanted to stop in a field full of cows. (Others, across the river had spotted us and would have followed us too had it not been for a fence.) Tosh seemed worried that the next section would be sunless, but I suggested that we were not likely to have the company of trees for very long. Two cows and two little calves dashed through an open gate and under the rail bridge. We found their track to be rutted, muddy, and very unpleasant and when we had the chance to cut a corner of the river, just as it turned from east to south, we took it. Tosh was out in front here and following a dry path heading toward the power station. It ended in a swamp and so did she – so we had to head back to the bank above the river, following this and sliding down to the riverside again to pass the giant structures of the power plant.
It was now about 12:15 and Tosh was directed to look for a lunch spot. She didn’t like the idea of sitting beneath some overhead power lines (having become convinced of their carcinogenic dangers after reading articles in the New Yorker) and so we climbed onto a hill and sat down in some short (and therefore rather dry) grass for our repast. Our view was still focused on the power plant, though it was now behind us, and on four cabin cruisers that were following one another downstream.
As on our recent Dorset walk I was bothered by an abrasion that I could feel at the base of my right toe, where my boot seems to have developed an annoying fold, and so I used this time to tape over this spot on the foot. I ate a ham and turkey sandwich, some cheese and onion crisps and a Twix Bar. Tosh threw me a tangerine. We didn’t linger long over lunch and soon we were ready for the resumption of our thirteen and a half mile walk; Tosh already wanted to know how much longer before we reached Sandwich and its pubs.
Views to the left were rather grim: an industrial estate crammed with used cars in various states of dereliction. The cars whizzing by on the A527 also helped to destroy any illusion of sylvan quietude. A farmer wearing shorts arrived in the field on our right – in his Range Rover – to have a look at his cows. We exchanged greetings as I lead the group around a final few bends in the river and up toward the surviving battlements of Richborough castle, a Roman fort. Fortunately a line of hedges screened us from the rail line on our right but after crossing under the highway we had to take to tarmac itself on the Richborough Road, with a car breakers on our left and views of an eighteenth century smock mill on our right. There was a debate over the term “car breakers” – with Harold nominating the American “car wreckers” and Tosh opting for “car squeezers.” Why not just “carnage,” I suggested.
When we reached Sandwich we were offered a lovely walker’s equivalent of a ring road, a tarmac stroll along the old town wall, with water filling what had once been a moat. This turned out to be duck heaven and there were some lovely little ducklings in the crowd. There were lots of locals about too, some on bicycle, some on roller blades, some walking dogs, some fishing. It would have been nice to have persisted in these parklike surroundings all the way around the town but I argued that this would not give us any view of Sandwich itself nor much of a choice of pubs. So the second time a road crossed our route we headed left, climbing for a bit and then descending the High Street to the Barbican Gate, back on the river.
Here there were plenty of pubs and we chose the Crispin Inn, shortly after 2:00. We sat in a corner – as far away from the country muzak as we could get – somewhere beneath the portraits of Bass and Crispin, two guide dogs sponsored by the pub-goers. We each drank half a lager, pulled for us by a genial lady publican. I don’t know if she was responsible for the message on the chalkboard outside, but I must say it was a rather unusual one; far from listing today’s culinary specials it offered the following question: “What do a man and a dog turd have in common?” And the obvious answer: “The older they get the easier they are to pick up.”
Wiser for this knowledge we slipped back to the riverside, where the Lees had ice creams from a kiosk and I watched a young family with a toddler and a Weimaraner named Basil. The Saxon Shore Way soon emerged from the right and we had to follow it across a little bridge to begin our march back to the sea. Initially we had a tarmac path to do this; once a family asked us how far they might have to go to get to open water but when I showed them the map, they decided it was too far.
Soon we were approaching the clubhouse of the Royal St. George Golf Links, though it was not always easy to tell where walkers were supposed to go if they didn’t want to be brained by the local duffers. At one point I urged the others to turn left when a track crossed our sandy path but Tosh wouldn’t be diverted from this surface and the result was that one of the clubhouse brigade, the one wearing a bright green polo shirt and a hat more suitable for the pampas, very charmingly but very officially left his foursome to remind us that if we were looking for the footpath we needed to be several sand dunes to the north. This was, however, another case of, “If you don’t want walkers straying off their assigned route, put up better signs or quit your complaining!” St. George did admit that many walkers get confused here.
We reached Princes Drive at last and here, with Ramsgate off to our left, we noted a long shingle beach stretching for miles to the south. Harold and I tried to walk in the verge of the road but Tosh took to the tarmac and her husband had to remind her repeatedly that a car was coming. By the same token he prohibited her from picking up any of the pebbles on our left. When we had discussed today’s outing I had raised the possibility of our remaining for dinner in Deal – particularly if we would have a long wait for a train – and, though Tosh had agreed, it was obvious had she had her heart set on Nando’s takeout chicken back in Ealing and since I had picked up a train schedule in Margate we were now aiming purposefully for the 5:32. This also meant that there was no time for dawdling and, if even more impetus were required to keep us moving forward, Tosh had now decided that she wouldn’t rest until she found a loo. There weren’t any loos.
It was not a very edifying stretch. We passed an odd estate of giant mismatched houses called Sandwich Bay Estate, with a Mock Tudor plunked down next to a Mock Georgian Revival and a Mock Modern Frank Lloyd Wright – and not a tree in sight. At least there was tarmac to this point; but for the next mile or so we had only the thinnest trod among the pebbles themselves on top of the bank at back of the beach – and this was a very grudging and unlovely surface. There was another golf course on our right and a public footpath along its sandy margins and so we dropped off the bank for the last fifteen minutes or so before reaching the outskirts of Deal, where we took to the esplanade.
A man was just coming up from the beach with two black Newfoundlands. They had been having a terrific time in the water but the prospect of climbing up some steep stone steps was too daunting and the poor chap had to carry both of them. (“You didn’t think Daddy was going to abandon you, did you, precious?”) I could tell, as we approached the Deal pier, that we would easily make the 5:32 and I would really have liked to rest my weary body and tired feet but Tosh was relentless. She climbed the top of the embankment in order to view the houses on the accompanying seafront road, pronouncing them unlovely in the extreme. “No big Deal, then? I said.
After we had cleared the pier it was time to head away from the sea toward the train station and I suggested that we had time for a quick visit to a pub (plus loo). We chose the New Inn, just off route in a pedestrian parade. I had a Diet Pepsi on ice and the Lees had coffee. Harold and I each discovered that, although you were allowed to wash your hands in the gents, you were not allowed to dry them. I used the mobile phone to call Dorothy and to report that I could make it to Mimi Flood’s dinner party after all – if she would meet me there with some fresh clothes.
Our train was on time and we began a very long, two-hour journey back through Dover and on to Charing Cross. I tried to sleep but failed. Perhaps I was worried about what the two well-spoken young couples in the corner would get up to next. They had gotten on in Folkstone after a day shopping for duty-free booze across the Channel. They were already sozzled and they had managed to break a gin bottle so their first act was to pour the rest of the contents of a sodden shopping bag out the door. They got champagne foam all over themselves when they pulled the cork and, having finished a bottle of red wine as well, they solved the disposal problem in an original fashion. We were in a station with a train on the opposite track. One of the chaps rolled down a window, reached out, opened the side door of the other train, and tossed the empty into this carriage. Then they all had a cigarette, in a no-smoking car, in celebration, and debated what to do that night. “Let’s get pissed.” “I feel like getting wasted.” (And I have many American friends who consider their own country to be a hellhole of barbarism and London, which had just endured its third nail bomb in as many weeks, to be the epitome of civilized society.) The comedy came to an end at 7:35 when the Lees and I parted at Charing Cross and I hopped into a taxi – which took me to my next appointment
To continue with the next stage of our walk you need: