The Thames Estuary Trail
North Fambridge to Burnham-on-Crouch

Walk Overview
To sit on a beach with fossils dating from over 50 million years in the palm of your hand is just one of the many thrills of this walk. The deposits of London Clay, left by the tropical seas which lapped the coast of Essex over 50 million years ago, are some of the best fossil beds in the world and finding shark’s teeth, seeds and crustaceans is pretty straightforward. As ever on these estuarine stretches of the Essex shore, the sky sky is huge, the river accompanies you as a silvered friend and the assorted birds of the air and beasts of the field, are constant companions.

The Walk

Twenty French ladies neatly dressed and with clean rucksacks on their backs,
two men whose chests are wrapped in straps (cameras and binoculars)
and me,
descend from a train
and walk towards the argent mud
in our ones and twenties
watched by two red-brown bulls in a neighbouring field.

Stonechats gossip in the hedge
a crow kraas from a nearby fence post
and skylarks sing above the bulls
and on the sea wall, twenty fast-walking, fast-talking French ladies push on in two lines
like geese.

In the widening river a trawler grumbles up and down the channel
up and down, up and down
dragging a metal crate behind it on a line.
Once the crate is at the end of its leash, it comes scurrying like a dog returning
and is hauled on board by two yellow sou’westered men
who pick out whatever it has trapped
before tossing the crate back into the water as the boat sails on.
A radio plays from the deck and gulls bob to the musical wavelets cast by the boat. 

A yacht drifts on the ebbing tide past glistening mud banks
which have been printed by the feet of waders.
A couple chat as they row a longboat towards the shadow line of sea. 
The walking is meditative; the head empties of city concerns and the body pilots one foot in front of another on top of the sea wall.
The insides of the discarded mussel shells which lie about on the grass resemble the colours of the sky overhead.

Evisceration 
The river seems to have been disembowelled,
its silver life-blood draining with the tide,
leaving lumpen bits of river flesh
which lie about like chopped butcher’s meat on a block -
muddy channels like intestines squirm
an amputated stump of an old brick works’ chimney
protrudes from hairy marsh flesh.

The Cliff
I love the definite article on the map - THE cliff
which defines the only ‘hill’ on the Crouch
all of 5m above the shore
it is covered in dense thickets of blackthorn whose buds are bursting. 

A son and his dad are on the beach beneath the cliff, the dad poking the pebbles, mud and shells with a screwdriver, whilst his son aimlessly hammers away with a piece of iron on the rusting metal of an abandoned jetty.

Have you lost something I ask the dad
‘Looking for fossils’, he says
‘Fresh air did no one any harm’ he adds
‘Just taking the boy out for an hour. Taking him away from his computer screen. He wants to find a Megalodon, but he’s not prepared to put in the time’.

He juts his head towards the boy
‘He just expects some massive jaw to appear out of the estuary’
The boy pauses, and turns to us, smiling coyly before returning to his vandalising.
Dad opens a small Tupperware pot and shows me his fossilised crab, (‘I’ve never found one of those before’, he says with shining eyes), some shark’s teeth. 
‘I don’t know what that is,' he says poking a several million year old seed pod. Pretty cool, eh’?

‘You found them here, today,’? I ask
‘Yeah, came down about a couple of hours ago. Got loads of stuff at home - seeds, teeth, shells. I met a man here once, he was an expert from some museum, he said that this was the best place in the world for fossils’
He etches the sandy-mud. I watch. The kid hammers iron
‘Well, I think we have done enough today’
‘Good luck he says, I hope you find something. You’ll spot the shark’s teeth easy, the enamel catches the light of the sun’.

I have no screwdriver, so my finger scrapes at the sand and mud. Gently, I nudge away an oyster shell, upturn seaweed, move a rotting stick. I leave furrows in the gritty mud, and footprints, which become little lakes. The winter sun shines like a desk lamp beside me. A large flock of several hundred Brent geese shout out guttural crrrronks from across the river. A skylark trills in the still air above me. Oyster catchers scream, fighting over a worm. It is warm. I scratch away at the Eocene shore and will every jewel of water into a tooth, but every liquid diamond is a disappointment. Time passes as I examine the earth’s archives.

And then
there it is - 
a black enamelled triangle set in its bone
lying in the mud by my feet

‘Sharks have many teeth and can lose up to 100 teeth a day’, I read on my phone, so finding a tooth might be no big thing -
but for me it is a thrill - 
this tooth 
from across the eternities of time.

After an hour, I sit with my finds
three shark’s teeth
a petrified crab’s claw
and a fragment of an eighteenth century clay pipe.

I wonder how much the coast has changed 
since the Eocene age
when Essex was a tropical land
and mangroves, and palms lined the shore
hippos and elephants inhabited the liminal plains
where the sheep and cattle now graze.

I walk from the Cliff across the eons to the present day in Burnham, as the sun enflames the evening sky.
A pint in Ye Olde White Harte awaits.

Walk practicalities
START/FINISH: North Fambridge/Burnham-on-Crouch DISTANCE: 16km/10miles TOTAL ASCENT: 70m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: Sea wall path - maybe muddy after heavy rain MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: North Fambridge/Burnham-on-Crouch LINKS TO OTHER WALKS: South Woodham Ferrers to North Fambridge, Burnham-on-Crouch to Bradwell-on-Sea RECOMMENDED FOOD AND DRINK; Burnham-on-Crouch; Ye Olde White Harte, Peaberries Cafe