Brown Rain
The Saltmarsh Trail - Bradwell-on-Sea - Bradwell Marina - St. Lawrence

St. Peter-on-the-wall

Sales Point

Bradwell Marina

Bradwell Creek

’It’s meant to be spring’
said a woman on the train to the rain
as it splattered against the window
falling from a pigeon-grey sky.

Kindness (1) The Bus
The bus driver took me
a mile off his route
-It’s no bother mate, there’s no one else on board
and we’re ahead of time
You don’t want to walk an extra mile in this weather do you?’

St Peter’s-on-the-wall
A hauntingly simple little barn which claims to be the oldest church in Britain, founded by St. Cedd in 654, who having trained at Lindisfarne, responded to an invitation from Sigeberht the Good, Kind of the East Saxons. With one companion, he took a boat down the east coast and set up camp here, in the abandoned Roman fort of Orthona. Together, they built a church using the Roman stones and bricks, their lines undulating in the wall. Random stones collected from the beach nearby are held by mortar made of shells and sand from the shore. Despite its rusticity, it has stood firm against 1500 years of the North Sea’s storms and a bulwark against the fears of the penitent who leave their prayers pinned to the wall.

The writing of history can seem so bland….’they took a boat down the east coast’…… A puny little craft, piloted by two missionaries down a perilous East coast with its tides and sandbanks. If they’d been caught out in the North Sea as stained and foaming as it is today, huddling frozen and sodden, offering prayers rather than maritime expertise, they’d not have made it all. And through all of those privations, all history can relate is that ‘they took a boat!’

Bede, the Saxon historian, relates how ‘Sigeberht had become a pious king practising Christian forgiveness, but was soon murdered for his new attitude. The perpetrators were his two unnamed brothers, who were angry with the king "because he was too ready to pardon his enemies"'. (Wikipedia)

Orthona
Trees - a rare sight along this coast
Rattle in the rain
Behind them
a collection of huts
a community founded by Norman Motley
an RAF chaplain seeking to establish re-conciliation with the German foe
after the last war.

The website says; ‘The Othona Community is now a network of people stretching over the UK and beyond. It's a bit like a big extended family in many ways – good and sometimes not so good, as families often are!’

The North Sea
Slurry stained
splashing against the muddy shore
fashioning clay into stone.
Curlews te-ueh in the wind holding their poise on steadying wings
curved beaks like Concorde’s nose
mallards flee from fleets
a skein of Brent geese fly like an ill-formed peleton
ragged and squabbling for optimum position out of the wind

Sales Point
Is a headland, marked on the wind-blown map as such
Images of cash tills and ‘customer service staff’ - conflict with the noisy sea and rain.
This is the point where the Blackwater estuary begins.
Lifting one foot off the ground in order to walk is perilous, as the wind grapples like an opponent in judo seeking to throw me.
Out in the sea, unseen as its covered by the waves, is an old Saxon fishing weir, with the remains of over 20,000 stakes forming a three-sided wall.

Whilst the rest of the UK has snow
Essex enjoys brown rain
The Blackwater river
the colour of Marsala Chai

10 Egrets and a nuclear power station.
With each step the dull grey silhouette of the Bradwell power station takes shape and becomes a minimalist, futuristic block
like twins
in the style of an inflated light industrial shed.
Algae streaks the summer-sky-grey, windowless walls. It is both monstrous and beautiful, as simple in style as St. Peter’s.
The de-commissioned nuclear reactor which was shut down in 2002, and is in the ‘decommissioning stage’.
Final demolition is scheduled for 2093.

10 egrets, shoulders hunched, stand in a greening field
in the foreground of the power station
backs to the wind
feathers shivering.

The Green Man, Bradwell Marina
Old style pub - 16th century old style
Fire in the grate
Haddock and chips
Southwold Beer
A board about smugglers using the inn
and the tunnel beneath the stone flags
where contraband was hid
Conversation with Tony the barman on sandbanks in the North Sea
Kit dries out, hands warmed.

Ken Worple, a chronicler of this coast, said that ‘it has to be experienced as terrain. The rain, wind and sun must be accomodated’.
Blackthorn wears beads of water on thorny tips
their flowers ready to burst.
A hare skips ahead on the path
all ears -
fields ride up a hill, their drills in perfect lines
Bare trees - oaks in the main - rock in the wind
stone chats flit along the hedge - chirruping shrilly

Pill-boxes
or machine-gun nests
I’m becoming a connoisseur of the
many brown concrete hexagons
set into the sea-wall, facing out across German Ocean (as the North Sea was known ‘till the First World)
They are of the ‘Type 22’ style or to give it an Official designation: fw3/22

‘Type 22 is the most common design. It is a regular hexagon with walls approx 0.3m thick by 1.8m long. Most have a loophole on each side of the hexagon, apart from the side with the entrance, however some have a low entrance so that so that an additional loophole can be accommodated or a smaller loophole next to the entrance’. (www. http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk)

St. Lawrence
There is no bus till half past four - ( it is just gone three)
and the taxis are ‘fully booked mate, till five at least.’
So I march along the road
arms swinging, thumb out
in the wild hope that someone might stop
and offer a mud-splattered, wet walker, a lift.

Kindness (2) -
The Ford Fiesta
pulls up whilst going in the other direction
and asks where I am going.
Southminster, I reply.
Jump in, he said.
Then he asked where, ‘after Southminster’?
London, I say
I’m going to Chelmsford, says the ex-army man, I’ll take you to the station - you’ll get a quicker train from there.
Which I do.

16km Bradwell-on-Sea to St. Lawrence