Walk 41 -- Leysdown-on-Sea to Warden Point, Isle of Sheppey

Ages: Colin was 59 years and 319 days. Rosemary was 57 years and 96 days.
Weather: Sunny and exceptionally clear. Mild with a light wind.
Location: Leysdown-on-Sea to Warden Point, Isle of Sheppey.
Distance: 3 miles.
Total distance: 253 miles.
Terrain: Tarmacked car park next to the sea wall, hard sand on the beach with scrunchy shells, and unmade-up roads with very muddy patches.
Tide: Way out.
Rivers to cross: None.
Ferries: None.
Piers: None.
Kissing gates: None.
Pubs: None.
‘English Heritage’ properties: None.
Ferris wheels: None.
Diversions: None.
How we got there and back: We drove – with bikes on the back of the car – from the Medway Youth Hostel to Warden Point where we parked next to a monastery! We donned our walking boots, locked the bike rack inside the car, then cycled back to Leysdown-on-Sea. We sat on the sea wall where we had parked yesterday and ate the hot pasties which we had just bought. There was no suitable post to chain the bikes to, so we walked – pushing them – for half a mile until we found one.
At the end, we had a cup of tea from our flask in the car. Then we drove to Leysdown-on -Sea to pick up the bikes. From there we drove back home to Bognor.

The weather was brilliant today, warm and sunny! That helped our mood, especially me because I am pretty miserable without my proper glasses. I am getting used to my plastic-framed distance glasses and didn’t take them off so often today. Also, we had slept well again in our comfortable oast-houses hostel at Medway with only quiet fellow guests. It is so pleasant there, modern, light and airy.
We sat on the seawall, where we had parked yesterday, to eat hot pasties which we had just bought. It was so clear we could see not only the towers of Reculver, but all the way to Margate! We couldn’t see a suitable post to chain our bikes to, so Colin suggested we push them along for a while because we had to walk along the edge of the road anyway. About a quarter of a mile further on, where the road turned inland at an angle, we found a post and so left them there.
The tide was way out, so we went down on to the beach. That saved all the zigzagging round caravan parks for the next couple of miles. The sand was hard-packed and crunchy underfoot because of shells. Thousands of beautiful shells are pressed into the sand on that beach. I stopped to take a close-up photo of them, and as I stood up a passing stranger made some sarky remark. I countered with, “When I’m famous….!” and he laughed.
Colin remarked on all the caravan parks right up to the seawall with barbed wire along the top so that access is impossible when the tide is in. Who pays for the upkeep and repair of the seawall? Bet it isn’t the caravan park owners – and if it comes out of the local Council tax, then why are the general public barred from walking along what they have paid for? Hypocrisy reigns supreme at all levels of government! However, we didn’t let it spoil our mood of the day because we really did enjoy that walk along the beach in the sunshine.As we approached Warden we could see an abandoned car which had been driven on to the beach and left below high tide level, so it was a wreck. Some children were playing nearby – it’s nice to see children playing on the beach but not to the backdrop of stolen cars.
There we left the beach and climbed up the loose sandy cliffs which are unstable and falling away all over the place. I wouldn’t like to live within a mile of them! At one place, our path completely disappeared, and we could see where it continued on the other side of the landslide. We took an unmade-up road inland, and turned into a track leading past yet more caravan sites. It descended into a muddy hollow which we couldn’t avoid, but since we had cycled through it a couple of hours earlier we knew it wasn’t very deep. With our boots and gaiters, it was no problem – unlike a family coming the other way who were wearing sandals and trainers!
We passed our parked car and took a short cul-de-sac to Warden Point – at fifty metres above sea level it is supposed to be the best viewpoint on Sheppey. Well..! at least we had a very clear day and could see quite a bit of the Essex coast. Not much else to say about it, really. We returned to our car which we had parked next to a building that looked a bit like an old barn, and was marked as a chapel on the map. A board on the wall claimed it was a ‘Monastery of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary’ – that sounded very Catholic to us. While we were drinking our tea, we heard what sounded like a convent bell calling people to prayers, but there was no apparent bell tower and no sign of movement within the building nor the garden behind it. Curious!

That ended Walk no.41, we shall pick up Walk no.42 next time by the ‘monastery’ at Warden Point on the Isle of Sheppey. We drove back to Leysdown to pick up our bikes, then we drove home to Bognor where we arrived before dark.

Walk 40 -- Eastchurch to Leysdown-on-Sea, Isle of Sheppey

Ages: Colin was 59 years and 318 days. Rosemary was 57 years and 95 days.

Weather: Dull, but remaining dry except for one five-minute shower late in the afternoon. There was a light wind and it was quite mild.

Location: Eastchurch to Leysdown-on-Sea, Isle of Sheppey.

Distance: 10 miles.

Total distance: 250 miles.

Terrain: A busy road with no footway where we had to leap into the hedge every few seconds, then a quieter road. Several miles across farmland where there was no vestige of the footpath, but we managed not to have to wade through any drainage ditches. An unofficial path around a hill, an official path across a very bumpy field, hard-packed tracks, a grassy bank through a nature reserve, and finally a pleasant grassy bank along the top of the sea wall. Quite a variety, and not easy walking!

Tide: Out, coming in.

Rivers to cross: None.

Ferries: None, though we passed the other end of the long disused Harty ferry which would have saved us twenty-nine miles had it still been functional.

Piers: None.

Kissing gates: Nos.39 & 40 at the beginning of the Shell Ness Nature Reserve, and no.41 at the end of it. (No.39 had sharp bits of wire and I pierced my thumb!)

Pubs: None, because the Ferry Inn was closed for major refurbishment!

‘English Heritage’ properties: None.

Ferris wheels: None.

Diversions: None.

How we got there and back: We drove – with bikes on the back of the car – from the Medway Youth Hostel to Leysdown-on-Sea where we parked by the sea wall. We donned our walking boots, locked the bike rack inside the car, then cycled back to Eastchurch where we left the bikes chained to a post on the patch of grass where we had parked the day before.
At the end, we had two cups of tea from our flasks in the car. Then we drove to Eastchurch to pick up the bikes. From there we drove back to the Medway Youth Hostel.

Last night was very comfortable in our converted oast-houses hostel, there was only one other guest. The warden told us that he had been “all day” clearing up after a school party who had stayed two nights and were “completely out of control”! We had originally planned to come a day earlier, but put it off because the weather was so foul. Had we stuck to our original plan, we would have spent our first night caught up with those dreadful kids! God is good to me!!
However, today did not start very well – last night I broke my glasses. I have been wearing spectacles since I was two years old as I was born with a complex eye defect. For the past ten years or so I have been wearing light-sensitive vari-focals and have become absolutely dependent on them. Without my glasses everything is out of focus no matter how near or far it is. The difference between my near-vision and my distance-vision has gradually increased and is now vast. Colin attempted to mend the glasses with sticky tape and then with ‘super-glue’, but to no avail. The nose piece sheered off one side and there seems to be no way the two pieces can be stuck together. I had an old pair of distance-vision specs in the car which I sometimes use for driving, so I put those on today and used a magnifying glass for map-reading. But it was all very uncomfortable and I have no middle-vision. The plastic frames kept slipping off my nose and made my ears sore, so I spent a good bit of today’s walk with them in my hand looking out on a fuzzy world! My head felt odd and I got quite depressed.

Before we started today's Walk, we had a quick look round Eastchurch. The village claims to be the "First Home of British Aviation, 1909" and there is a memorial to some of the earliest pilots, many of whom were killed whilst experimenting with their flying machines. We were disappointed to find there was no mention of Farnborough, nor of 'Colonel' Samuel Cody who flew the first fixed wing aircraft in this country on the 16th October 1908 on Laffan's Plain, now the two-mile runway at Farnborough. Surely Farnborough is the "Home of British Aviation"?

The first part of today’s walk was dreadful! For over a mile we had to walk along the side of a very busy B-road where there was no footway, not even a grass verge. The traffic was constant and speedy, and every few yards we had to leap into the hedge in order to stay alive! Colin wanted to cycle it, said it was “stupid” to walk such an unpleasant road. It probably was, but I was insistent that I want to always be able to say we have walked every inch of the way from Bognor. I told him that he could cycle it if he liked, but I was going to walk – so he did too, just declared at the end, “I hope you enjoyed that, because I didn’t!” No, I didn’t either, but we haven’t given in yet and missed out walking any of ‘the nearest path to the coast’!
With relief we turned south into a lane which we had to walk down for a further mile, and we were only passed by one fairly slow car. At the start of this lane was a big notice telling us that the Ferry Inn at Harty was closed due to major refurbishment! Is there a conspiracy to stop us getting any ‘real ale’ on our ‘Round-Britain-Walk’? Should we turn teetotal now? That was the only ‘real ale’ pub we were due to pass in three days of walking, and I had planned to get there just after lunch to wash down our sarnies before it closed. I must congratulate Colin on the lack of fuss he made – I think he has given up and gone into a decline!
At the bend in the lane, according to the map, the public footpath leads off across the marshes for about two miles to the Harty Ferry – but in reality we could see no vestige of it. There was no signpost, no stile, and no sign that anyone had walked that way before us! We climbed over a gate into a field, and started navigating by orientating the map and then looking for a landmark to make for on the horizon. Being marshland, all the field boundaries were deep drainage ditches and we were concerned that we would not be able to cross them where we wanted to. We were hungry by then, so we sat on the sloping bank of a ditch out of the wind to eat our lunch.
Then we carried on, navigating by looking at landmarks, and found we could cross most of the ditches at animal gateways. (Colin reckoned he saw a hare in the distance, but I couldn’t see it with my ‘wrong’ glasses on.) Eventually we ‘lost it’ completely, couldn’t get across a ditch where we were convinced the ‘footpath’ was supposed to go, and so made towards a flock of sheep being shepherded by three blokes who didn’t seem to like each other much. The one who fancied himself as ‘boss’ obviously thought the other two were incompetent, and they were taking very little notice of what he was saying. We got the impression they were ‘townies’ playing at farming. They had one dead sheep in the back of a truck, and when Colin told them where we had passed another one they didn’t seem much interested. By then we had seen the end of the ditch, so we refrained from asking them the way and they treated us as if we were invisible which is not usually our experience with country people.
Further on, the ‘path’ was so soggy and uneven we kept leaping across a narrow ditch to walk on the driest patches. We could then see where we were ‘supposed’ to go – up a hill alongside an arable field. But we knew we would immediately have to walk down again to the old ferry, so decided to take an unofficial path round the edge of the hill and stay on the level. We crossed over a fence where it was broken, and this path was much more clearly marked than the so-called public footpath we had tried to follow for the last couple of miles.
Colin found a plastic decoy duck and tried to kid me it was a real one which was tame enough to let him pick it up. We also found a large number of shot ‘clay pigeons’ and spent cartridge cases with the name of the Ferry Inn printed on them – no wonder the path was well marked!
The grass seawall bank, which came in from the west where we climbed over the fence, looked as if it had a firm dry path along the top. Studying the map later, we reckoned we could have walked straight along it from the nature reserves where we were yesterday, keeping nearer to the coast and saving us several miles, walking through a prison, along a main road and other such nasties. It is easy to see these things in hindsight, but if we had parked our car at the Ferry Inn yesterday and then not been able to get through because of deep drainage ditches and marsh, we would have been right up it! It is not marked as a public footpath, but that seems to be irrelevant on the Isle of Sheppey.
We walked down the ferry road as far as we could, which was quite a distance because the tide was way out. We had to be careful not to slip on the seaweed. Oare Creek seemed to be little more than an armslength away, yet we have had to walk twenty-nine miles extra because the ferry is redundant. We could have been here last October on Walk 36 instead of five months later on Walk 40! We sat on a rusty boat trailer and ate the sticky buns we had bought earlier in the morning in Leysdown.
As we walked past the Ferry Inn, there still seemed a lot of work to be done to the car park and gardens, and they haven’t much time if they hope to get the place open for Easter which is only next week (I hate it when Easter is in March). A group of men were laying turf, but it was very yellow and had obviously been rolled up too long. They spoke to each other in a foreign language except the one in charge who seemed frustrated that the others weren’t working hard enough and doing it wrong. We wondered if they were illegal immigrants being exploited as cheap labour.
We were discussing this as we walked up the road when we realised we had passed the spot where the footpath supposedly led off into a field (Colin was in charge of the map because I had given up frabbing about with my magnifying glass!) We walked back, and again there was no sign of the footpath where it is so clearly marked on the map. We crossed a dry ditch and a string of barbed wire, then set off across the bumpy lumpy field through the long grass. It was very hard walking, thank goodness it wasn’t far. I wished we had gone round by the road after all, but Colin was delighted because he kept seeing a hare, or maybe several different hares. At last I saw it too, but by the time I had got my telescope to my eye it had disappeared into the grass again. Colin was over the moon because he reckoned he had had seven or eight sightings of hares today – I wish I could see!
We regained a solid track, passed a derelict house, and eventually walked down to a Nature Reserve which goes all the way along to Shell Ness, the most south-easterly corner of Sheppey. Two kissing gates lead into the Reserve, the first had bits of broken wire netting on it and I jabbed my thumb making it bleed. The public footpath was well signposted, for a change, along the top of the grass covered sea wall – so much for our silhouettes supposedly upsetting the nesting birds here! It was the best part of today – easy walking along a grass path with excellent views of the birds. We saw oyster-catchers, shelducks, partridges, pheasants, greylag geese, Canada geese, widgeons, eider (a drake with four ducks), coots, peewits, a heron flew over, ringed plovers, a white goose and some wrens. The downside was that we got caught in a shower of rain when we were right out in the open! Rain was not forecast for today, but we could see this shower edging towards us and it didn’t miss – oh dear!
By the time we got to Shell Ness it was fine again. There is a row of houses there plastered with PRIVATE KEEP OUT type of notices of which we have seen so many on the trek so far, and probably will see a lot more of. We walked down the back of them to the Point, and sat down for a while to look at the sea. We could see Whitstable clearly, and Herne Bay in the distance. Through my little telescope I could see the twin towers of Reculver on the horizon – it seems a long time since we were there.
It was a couple of miles to our car along the seawall, which was quite pleasant walking. We passed an official nudist beach! We had permission to take all our clothes off and gambol about in the waves, but we resisted the temptation because of the stiff breeze that was blowing across on this March day! In fact, there didn’t seem to be any takers at all, I wonder why! It was nice to be by the real sea again – occasionally we seem to have lost sight of the fact we are doing a coastal trek when we have to take so many detours inland to avoid marshland, stomp through industrial areas which could be anywhere, and there has been too much river-bank walking since we got in the region of Sheppey. Our car was parked by the seawall at the southern end of Leysdown-on-Sea.

That ended Walk no.40, we shall pick up Walk no.41 next time on the seawall at Leysdown-on-Sea. We had tea and biscuits, then we drove back to Eastchurch where we parked momentarily on the newly tarmacked PRIVATE PROPERTY NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY track to load up our bikes. Then we returned to the Medway Youth Hostel, near Gillingham, for the night.

Walk 39 -- the Kingsferry Bridge to Eastchurch, Isle of Sheppey

Ages: Colin was 59 years and 317 days. Rosemary was 57 years and 94 days.

Weather: Dull, but remaining dry. It brightened up later and we saw the sun for the first time in ages! There was a light wind and it was quite mild.

Location: The Kingsferry Bridge to Eastchurch, Isle of Sheppey.

Distance: 9½ miles.

Total distance: 240 miles.

Terrain: Grassy banks and across marshes where it wasn’t nearly as muddy as we had expected. We ended up walking through a prison!

Tide: Out, coming in.

Rivers to cross: No.11, the Swale – though it is not really a river because it is the strait between the Isle of Sheppey and mainland Kent.

Ferries: None, though we passed the other end of the long disused Elmley ferry which would have saved us twelve miles had it still been functional.

Piers: None.

Kissing gates: None.

Pubs: None.

‘English Heritage’ properties: None.

Ferris wheels: None.

Diversions: No.16 from a farm called ‘Great Bell’ where a worker told us the public footpath ahead was closed and the only way we could get to Eastchurch was through the nearby prison!
How we got there and back: We drove – with bikes on the back of the car – from Bognor to Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey where we parked on a patch of grass at the very edge of the village. We donned our walking boots, locked the bike rack inside the car, then cycled back to the Kingsferry Bridge where we crossed over it and left the bikes chained to a fence almost under it.
At the end, we had two cups of tea from our flasks in the car. Then we drove to the Kingsferry Bridge to pick up the bikes. From there we drove to the Medway Youth Hostel near Gillingham where we spent the night.

The first day of Spring! How my mother used to long for this day when she was coping with eight children and their chilblains, coughs, colds, sickness and diarrhoea through the dark winter days in that tiny bungalow without central heating in which we all lived until 1959. She seemed to turn a corner on March 21^st each year – so it is a fitting day to restart our ‘Round-Britain-Walk’ half a century later!
We chained our bikes to a fence just inside a boatyard almost under the Kingsferry Bridge, then we climbed a steep bank and stepped over an ‘Armco’ barrier on to the bridge. It carries a very busy road and a railway across the Swale, and fortunately there is also a footway/cycleway alongside the road. The problem that had been worrying me all the time I was planning this walk was – how do we get across the railway to continue along the southern shore of the Isle of Sheppey? On all the maps I have been using, the public footpath seems to stop when it reaches the road/railway coming off the bridge and restarts the other side. And that is just what it did! We had a choice – either walk a mile up the road and back another mile along a track, or sneak under the bridge alongside the river. Since the tide was out, we chose the latter and found the mud under the bridge was not as gooey as we had feared.
So we embarked on the Walk ‘proper’. We were looking at oyster-catchers and avocets on the tidal mud through my little telescope, and I walked a little ahead of Colin. I looked down, and there was a snake lying on the path! It was a young grass snake, not very big. At first I thought it was dead because it didn’t move for ages, but then I noticed it’s little black tongue keep flicking in and out! Colin came up and said it was probably only playing dead, and as he got his camera out it started to wriggle. He took several photos, then picked it up. It’s skin was quite dry and smooth to touch, it was a magic moment! Eventually we let it slither away down the side of the grass bank.We were quite hungry by then, it seemed a long time since breakfast. We walked on a bit so that the sound of the traffic over the bridge was dulled, and sat on the slope of the grass bank out of the wind to eat our sandwiches. We had our backs to Ridham Dock (which is a bit of an eyesore, so that didn’t matter) and were facing the marshes. The sun began to come out and it looked much brighter which cheered us no end – we have had far too much dark grey and damp weather in recent weeks. As we walked on past all the industrial complexes on the other side of the Swale – the ones we had passed on Walk 38 – the smell of factory waste and burning wafted over to us. It was horrible! We would hate to live in Sittingbourne, or anywhere in this area, because we would be sniffing in these toxic substances all the time without realising it.
We turned inland by a little inlet and followed the official footpath across the marshes – not much of a footpath, we had to orientate the map then look for a landmark in the distance in order to work out the correct route. It turned out to be not nearly so muddy as we had feared – perhaps they haven’t had the torrential rain that we have had in West Sussex earlier this week when both the villages of Findon and Angmering were washed out! We were tempted to continue following the coastline as there seemed to be a grassy bank most of the way along, but we didn't know if we would suddenly come across a drainage ditch that was too deep to wade and/or too wide to jump (there were plenty of them about) so we decided not to risk it.
Where we regained the coast we came across the other end of the long disused Elmley Ferry which would have saved us twelve miles of walking, and we could have missed out all the yucky industrial section of Sittingbourne, had it still been in operation! We walked out as far as we could on what remained of the road, but we had to retrace our steps quickly because, even as we watched, waves were covering the ground where we had just stood.
Shortly after that, we entered a Nature Reserve where there was a hard-packed track leading off into the distance – in fact the occasional vehicle was using it. However, we could see that a continuous high grassy bank hugged the coastline, so we opted to walk along that. The sun came out, and we had marvellous views of shelducks, avocets, widgeons, oyster-catchers, the ubiquitous gulls, a heron, mallards, coots, redshanks, Canada geese and so on. It was wonderful! It was only when we came back on to the track at the other end that we read a notice requesting us not to walk along the bank because our high profile might disturb nesting birds! Oh well, you can’t win all the time!
We then did continue along the track through another Nature Reserve, and by now we were so far away from everything that the only sounds we could hear were the calls of birds. We heard, rather than saw, peewits and it was lovely to listen to their constant calls – pee-ee-ee-wit! pee-ee-ee-wit! We saw lots of rabbits bounding along, they really run fast! Colin saw a robin, then we both saw an owl – beautiful sight! We think it was a tawny, it was very big and a lovely colour of pale mottled brown. Unfortunately it was downwind from us, so it kept flying on away as we approached. We had several good sightings of it through my little telescope, but didn’t succeed with photography.
The track deteriorated, and turned inland. There is a lot of marshland along this southern coast of Sheppey which is inaccessible unless you know what you are doing. We had resigned ourselves to having to walk a couple of miles inland in order to get round.
As we passed a farm, a man with a tractor asked where we were going. We showed him on our recently bought map – and on the internet map which I had downloaded only the previous evening – the green line of the public footpath leading across fields to a track which is not marked in green because tracks rarely are. A last mile up the track leads to Eastchurch where our car was parked. “Oh, you can’t go along there!” he said, “that’s private property, there’s no right of way along the track! There’s a big green notice put up by the Council, been like that for a couple of years!” “Does that mean the public footpath comes to a dead end in the middle of nowhere?” I asked, incredulously. “Must do,” he replied, “you’ll find you can’t get through if you go on that way!” “Well,” I said, “how are we going to get to Eastchurch? We can’t go back the way we came because we must have walked about eight miles and we are rather tired!” He hesitated, then conceded, “You could go along my farm track to the prison and walk out through there!” “Is that all right, I mean can we just walk through a prison like that?” I asked. “Yes, it’s fine, there’s nobody there!” This we found just a little difficult to believe because on our way to placing car and bikes this morning we had seen prison ‘buses’ both going in and coming out of the complex and it had all looked very functional to us.
So we trudged off up said track and emerged into a road passing a notice which declared ‘NO ENTRY TO UNAUTHORISED PERSONS’ or some such, and displaying another notice, road-sign type, of walkers with a red diagonal line through the middle – we got the distinct impression we weren’t supposed to be there! We were, in fact, inside the prison complex and there was a lot of traffic about – it must have been the end of a shift or something. No one stopped us to ask who we were or what we were doing there as we marched along between high walled compounds, past a notice requesting all visitors to leave the area quickly once their visit was over, and through red & white striped STOP gates which were open. We escaped!
We had been walking steadily uphill for over a mile, the sun came out, we were away from the coastal breeze, and this was the tail-end of a near-ten mile walk which had been preceded by a seven mile cycle ride against the wind – in other words we were knackered! We came on to the Eastchurch bypass, and walked along the grass verge (which was very uneven and squidgy underfoot) to the corner of the village where our car was parked. Opposite was the track we should have come out of, and sure enough there was a big green notice, signed by the Council, saying that it was not a public footpath and there was no right of way down it – we hadn’t noticed that earlier in the day. (Wonder what position on the Council the owner of the land holds – no! stop it! mustn’t be cynical!)

That ended Walk no.39, we shall pick up Walk no.40 next time at the south-east corner of Eastchurch village on the Isle of Sheppey. We were so hot and tired, we had to have two cups of tea plus chocolate biscuits before we could even think straight! Then we drove back over the Kingsferry Bridge to pick up our bikes, then on to the Medway Youth Hostel, near Gillingham, where we spent the night.