A night with convicts and curlews
Decoy Fleet at Dawn, the Hoo Peninsula
The Rose Moon at Egypt Bay
The cold wind gnawed as I approached Egypt Bay. A huge sky of Arctic blue canopied above me whilst dykes and ditches were thrown into sharp and shadowed relief as the sun descended from the sky. Wildfowl searched for a safe resting place to spend the night and a skein of geese flew east. Behind the sea wall, monstrous ships of unimaginable size throbbed their way upstream to the London ports with towering cliffs of containers on deck. Distant lights of oil refineries and towns began their night-time blinking. A peace of a sort settled upon the land.
The marshes of the Hoo, a peninsula of estuarine mud just 30 miles from the centre of London, is not obviously beautiful. It is a country of flat land and of huge skies, distantly bordered by avenues of pylons, masts, chimneys and cranes. Death has scarred it. Roman soldiers pursuing the woad covered Britons drowned in its fleets, the ague - a form of malaria - claimed its annual haul of victims until the mid twentieth century. Women lost their lives to the making and storing of cordite in England’s largest nitro-glycerine factory. Guns have pummelled the isolated creeks with new munitions and latterly oil refineries and power stations have poisoned the land and air.
Yet for all its treasury of human tales, nature has never let go. Its skies and fleets sing with bird song and each winter it’s home to over 300,000 migrating birds. I love it. Not just for its birds and plants, but for its isolation, dereliction and abandonment. It’s a place to breath and revel in space and be in a wilderness of sorts.
This was the final leg of the London Thames Walk, linking Gravesend to Grain. The distance was too great to do in a day, especially after hours spent exploring old riverside forts, watching marsh harriers patrol the skies and just gazing at the estuary as it unfurled its untidy blankets of mud. The day had been too bright, too fresh to rush and as day gave way to night, I had to find a sheltered place to sleep. The map signalled an ‘abandoned camp’, just beyond Egypt Bay.
It’s a scrappy place opposite the London Gateway port. A curve of mud and shells, river detritus and a sea wall. The Thames is at its widest and its deepest here, conditions which had brought the port known as The London Gateway to the opposite shore. Black-tailed godwits prodded and poked the mud, shelducks scraped the surface with their upturned beaks and oyster catchers dressed in their formal evening wear, strutted on the fresh mud importantly. On the landward side of the wall, were muddy marshes, clumps of hard wind-swept grass, the wide Decoy Fleet glinting in the evening sun and a single hut.
It was square and made of old concrete blocks, which had been much holed by time, guns and youths. On the inside wall was written, ‘Datse loves girls’. Its floor was sand-banked with dust and dried marsh dirt. From out of a whispering plastic bag, Diet Coke cans and Subway sandwich cartons, caught by gusts, jerked across the rippled concrete floor. I kicked away the worst and unrolled my sleeping mat on which I’d spend the night. It was already nearly dark and near to freezing so I made a mug of tea and ate a supper from a plastic soup jar which I’d brought from home before settling down for the night.
A super moon drowned the night in light. It outshone the city’s orange glare as well as the lights from the London Gateway. Frost crept across the land, stiffening grass stalks and turning my skin cadaverous white. Throughout the night the air hummed and throbbed with huge supertankers as they made their way out to sea or up-river to London’s ports. At three in the morning with the light as bright as day, a huge hammer thrashed at metal in the dockyard across the river. Its heavy echo reverberated across the lune-scape of land and sea. I could not sleep. I was too cold and too awed by the scale of the night.
I sat on the sea wall with the land and river thrillingly moonlit, looking over the ‘wretched territory’ as historian Luke McKernan called it. The odd duck quacked an ‘all-clear’ as it patrolled the mercury-filled Fleet and a bird of great size and darkness circled above me. It was not a night for smuggling, an activity for which the bay was well known, but if ever there was a night for ghosts this was it. There were plenty around, their restless souls clunking the chains on the wooden decking of their prison hulk, lying listless out in the muddy bay. It was, like the other hulks around this coast, a terrible place, even for the most hardened Victorian criminals. Charles Dickens, who lived on a hill up on the other side of the marshes, had Abel Magwitch escape from one such hulk at the beginning of Great Expectations and walk through the night to hide behind a tombstone in Cooling Church, where he persuaded young Pip to bring him ‘wittles’ (food).
A smear of light, the colour of salmon flesh, grew stronger in the eastern horizon. I returned to the hut, frigid with frost and made tea. A choir of skylarks began their song and with chalk fingers, I rolled my mat and bag into my rucksack. With camp struck, I walked stiffly east towards a warming sun, watching a curlew breakfast on the shore. Mist steamed from waters. Birds and fowl commuted on invisible lines in the air and a curlew was having first dibs in the mud. Across the river, Southend began to wake and traffic noise drifted across the tide-full river. I was the only man alive on the marshes and in the soft dawn light, I could not have been happier.
For a photographic essay of the Thames Estuary Walk click here