Along the wild & windy north Kent coast
Herne Bay to Birchington-on-Sea, Kent
The day after completing Stage 1 of the London Loop, I headed further east beyond the Thames estuary into Kent proper for a stroll along the coast, following, as I had before, the Saxon Shore Way. ‘Bracing’ is, I think, the usual term for such an expedition, as there was a bitterly cold biting wind whipping up the sea into white-crested waves. But then the main reason for my visit was to explore Reculver, somewhere enigmatically isolated; the tempestuous weather could only add to the atmosphere.Start: Herne Bay Station TR171674
Finish: Birchington-on-Sea Station TR297694
Length: 10¾ miles/4½ hours
How to get there: Start and finish are both served by Southeastern services from London Victoria to Ramsgate via the Medway Towns, an hour and a half or so from London. It’s also possible to travel from St Pancras International on the whizzy High Speed train, changing at Faversham, but the journey time is roughly the same.
Exiting the station I begin to wonder whether I should have worn more layers: the wind chill factor means that almost immediately I’m feeling very cold. But I decide that to keep warm – and to avoid finishing this walk in the dark as I’ve arrived in Herne Bay later than planned and it’s nearly December – I’ll just have to walk faster.
My route begins along a wide tree-lined street of 1930s semis to a sea front of elegant Victorian 3- and 4-storey bay-fronted town houses, ornamental gardens, a stately clock tower and a wonderful but deserted Art Deco bandstand. The initial impression, despite the weather- and season-related lack of people, is of an attractive and prosperous seaside town proud of its heritage, although, as in many similar resorts, ugly and incongruous modernity intrudes: the pavilion, resembling an aircraft hangar, at the end of the stubby pier; a tower block that would be more familiar in Herne Hill than Herne Bay; and bizarre litter bins in the shape of moulded plastic cartoon woodland creatures.A sheltered harbour in which small boats are moored is formed by a curving breakwater over which waves are crashing. Feeling adventurous (and perhaps childish) I head along the breakwater, second guessing where the waves will break to avoid getting drenched but still ending up damp due to the spray lifted by the waves and thrown horizontally landwards by strong gusts.
The shelter at the end of the breakwater provides some respite from wind and wave, and also a great viewpoint of the frontage of the town. Until the early 19th Century, Herne Bay was home to a small fishing and farming community, and a popular landing spot for smugglers many of whom were not the folk heroes as is often assumed, but violent gangs prepared to kill to protect their illicit incomes. But the potential for tourism became apparent to a group of London investors who began to develop the town in the 1830s (hoping to rename it as St Augustine’s – a plan rejected by locals) initially by building a pier and promenade. Visitors arrived by steamer from London, their numbers augmented with the opening of the Herne Bay & Faversham Railway Company’s station in 1863. Steamer services ran until the 1960s by which time the town was on its third pier: the original structure succumbed to worms and its owners’ bankruptcy in 1871; a replacement opened in 1873 but this was too short to allow steamers to land and was superseded by an iron pier, complete with electric tram, opened in 1899. At over a kilometre long, this was the second longest pier in the country (after Southend on Sea) and was key to the town’s prosperity.
Turning seawards, I can see a structure in the distance: the pier head, isolated, cut off from the shore and far out to sea. Having been chopped in three during the Second World War to prevent it being used for an enemy landing, the pier finally succumbed to storms in 1978 after a post-war period of decline that saw the scrapping of the tramway in 1950, the replacement of historic stone balustrades (salvaged from old London Bridge upon its demolition in 1831) with iron railings in 1953 after storm damage, and a fire in 1970 which destroyed the Grand Pier Pavilion (the forerunner to the present aforementioned pavilion). A project is under way to restore the pier at a cost of £8.5m to £12.5m, as a catalyst to further investment in the town.Further out to sea (about 6 miles further out to sea in fact) and just visible through the spray are the 30 turbines of the Kentish Flats wind farm, each 115m tall with 90m diameter rotors. Their combined output is 90MW of energy, enough to power 100,000 homes should there be sufficient wind – no shortage of that today. When it began generating in 2005, it was the largest capacity wind farm in the UK, but in this respect it was recently overtaken by the nearby Thanet Offshore wind farm with 100 turbines producing 300MW which, upon its opening in September 2010, took the crown for the largest offshore wind farm in the world.
I make my way along the breakwater back to the shore, occasionally running ahead to avoid a deluge of saltwater, but aware that I could just as equally be running into the next breaking wave. All part of the fun.
Back on the promenade I pop into a fish and chip shop for some lunch before heading east. The dearth of customers means that my portion of chips is cooked especially for me and the five minutes this takes gives me a chance to warm up and watch the blustery beach from behind misty glass. Outside, between the shops and the shoreline, some of the few other visitors to Herne Bay today are sheltering in their cars, contemplating the wind and rain through steamy windows.Bag of chips in hand I head eastwards, being very soon accompanied by a squealing, squawking, squabbling, rowdy overhead mob of seagulls. I toss chips into the air to watch their competitive swooping and twisting acrobatics, elbowing (do wings have elbows?) each other away in the hope of a tasty morsel of hot potato. Having eaten my fill I empty the remains of the bag onto the concrete sea wall and step back quickly to avoid the divebombing white cacophonous mass of flapping scavengers. The remaining chips, scraps and all, are consumed in a matter of seconds.
A raised concrete road atop the sea wall arcs along the shoreline, forming a Maginot Line defending from the sea the amphitheatre-like Beltinge Cliff, a gently curving slope of scrubland. Half of the width of the road is covered in pebbles and bladderwrack as the foamy brown waves shovel great handfuls of shingle up and off the beach, burying the waterworn timber groynes in the process. Flocks of sandpipers (turnstones maybe, or sanderlings) take to flight in rippling waves at my approach, launching themselves into the buffeting winds beneath a dramatic and malevolent highly textured sky of blues, greys, and whites with hints of orange and yellow – the same skies captured so vividly on canvas by J M W Turner in some of his finest work. The Kent coast, and ‘the skies over Thanet [which] are the loveliest in all Europe’ (Turner’s words to John Ruskin), formed the subject matter for many of Turner’s paintings, including The Fighting Temerarire, and his association with the area is now recognised by the Gallery in Margate that bears his name.
At Bishopstone, sandy cliffs, formed of geologically important deposits laid down 55 million years ago, rise steeply where the track ends. The cliffs are part of Reculver Country Park and fall within the extensive Thanet Site of Special Scientific Interest, noted primarily for its overwintering birds (particularly sanderlings, turnstones, ringed plovers, and grey plovers) but also for its littoral plantlife and algal communities.Following the twisting path to the clifftop leads to the shelter of woodland composed of ash and field maple, and a wooden bridge that takes me over Bishopstone Glen, a sheer ravine that forms a gash in the soft clay and sand. Where the Glen emerges from tree cover, the steep sides are pitted with the myriad nesting holes of sand martins, an important summer visitor here. On the clifftop, spiny yellow-flowered gorse proliferates, as do warning signs, large in both number and dimension, that advise visitors to keep away from the unstable cliff edge that suffers from constant landslips. The signs feature a graphic of a stick figure falling head first off a crumbling cliff – some wag has annotated one of the signs giving the stick figure the name ‘Eileen Dover’. Well, it made me chuckle.
Briefly back into scrubby elm woodland, the exit from which frames my first view of the striking towers at Reculver, dominant in the surrounding landscape of sea and low-lying marsh and farmland. In the distance, Birchington lies in a pool of sunlight; panning round to the south, the gargantuan cooling towers of Richborough Power Station. A 10 minute stroll down a gentle grassed slope brings me to the hamlet itself. In terms of present day human habitation there’s not much here: a mobile home/caravan park, a pub, the Wildlife Trust visitor centre (very much closed today); seemingly nondescript and unnoteworthy. But historically it’s an entirely different picture.
At the time of the Roman invasion in AD43 the landscape at Reculver looked very different: it was located at the mouth of the Wantsum Channel, a river that separates the Isle of Thanet from the mainland, at the time a mile wide here, two miles wide in places further along its course, but now silted up and nothing more than a narrow drainage channel. The strategic importance that this gave to Roman Reculver, or Regvlbivm, led the Roman invaders to first build a ‘fortlet’ in around AD43, possibly a signal tower or lighthouse, which coins found on site suggest was in use until the AD60s. The site later transformed into a larger fort or castrum protected by wide ditches and walls 20 feet high and 10 feet wide at the base. The date of construction (around AD210) and layout of the later fort has partly been determined from the inscription on a stone recovered at the site in 1960:AEDEM PRINCIPIORVM
CVM BASILICA
SVB A TRIARIO RVFINO
COS
FORTVNATVS
DEDICAVIT
which roughly translates as:
the shrine of the standards (AEDEM) of the headquarters (PRINCIPIORVM) together with (CVM) the crosshall (BASILICA) were built under (SVB) the consular governor (COS), A. TRIARIVS RVFINVS. The work was carried out by FORTVNATVS
and refers to the Governor of Britain at the time, Aulus Triarius Rufinus, and Fortunatus who was probably commander of the fort. We also know, from the Notitia Dignitatum, that at some point the fort was garrisoned by
Tribunus cohortis primae Baetasiorum, Regulbio
or the Tribune of the first cohort of Baetasians, a cohors peditata quingenaria, or five hundred-strong unit of foot soldiers, recruited from the Baetasii, a tribe inhabiting land between the Rhine and the Meuse in what is now Germany.
The Roman fort was abandoned around AD360, but soon after, once Roman occupation of Britain had ended, Reculver possibly became a seat for Anglo-Saxon kings, although the suggestion that King Æthelberht of Kent moved his court there in AD597 is open to question. Certainly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that:
A.D. 669. This year King Egbert [Ecgberht of Kent] gave to Bass, a mass-priest, Raculf [Reculver] — to build a minster upon.
This minster, or monastery, at Reculver was clearly of some importance given that Ecgbhert’s brother and successor as King, Hlothhere, held council there in 679, while one of its Abbotts, Berhtwald, became the first native-born Archbishop of Canterbury in 692 after the death two years previously of Archbishop Theodore, an event also recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
The monastery’s importance declined in the 10th Century, possibly as a result of Viking invasion – the Vikings used the Wantsum to raid Canterbury in 839 – but the building retained its status as a place of worship as St Mary’s Church. By the time of Domesday, it served a population estimated at 460 to 575, extrapolated from the Book’s record of 90 villeins and 25 bordars. The two towers, originally topped with spires, that are such a signature feature were added in the 12th Century, and the church was enlarged in the middle ages. But as the years passed the sea gradually ate away at the coastline. In 1540, John Leland wrote that the church wasA.D. 690. This year archbishop Theodore, who had been bishop twenty-two winters, departed this life, and was buried within the city of Cantwanbyrig [Canterbury]. Bertwald, who before this was abbot of Raculfe [Reculver], on the calends of July succeeded him in the see; which was ere this filled by Romish bishops, but henceforth with English. Then were there two kings in Kent, Wihtred and Webherd
withyn a Quarter of a Myle or litle more of the Se Syde
but by 1630 it was only about 500 feet from the shore. By the 18th Century the villagers began to move away from the advancing sea, constructing a new church further inland, and, in 1805, deliberately destroying the Anglo-Saxon church. Only the towers were retained as navigation aids, following intervention by Trinity House who then purchased the site in 1810, according to a stone plaque embedded in the stonework of the wall between the towers:
THESE TOWERS
THE REMAINS OF THE ONCE VENERABLE CHURCH OF RECULVERS
WERE PURCHASED OF THE PARISH
BY THE
CORPORATION OF TRINITY HOUSE OF DEPTFORD STROND
IN THE YEAR 1810.
AND GROINS LAID DOWN AT THEIR EXPENCE,
TO PROTECT THE CLIFF ON WHICH THE CHURCH HAD STOOD.
WHEN THE ANCIENT SPIRES WERE AFTERWARDS BLOWN DOWN,
THE PRESENT SUBSTITUTES WERE ERECTED,
TO RENDER THE TOWERS STILL SUFFICIENTLY CONSPICUOUS
TO BE USEFUL TO NAVIGATION.
CAPTN JOSEPH COTTON DEPUTY MASTER
IN THE YEAR 1819.
(‘The present substitutes’ refers to weather vanes which survived until the 1920s.)
What remains of the church is still a remarkable place, a shell standing resolutely and dramatically on a headland that overlooks the sea where Barnes Wallis tested his Bouncing Bombs prior to 617 Squadron’s raids on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams on the River Ruhr on the night of May 16th 1943.
I spend some time exploring. Other than the towers, only the remnants of the other two corners, small sections of wall and a few tombs and gravestones remain. The stonework of the church consists of either flint or sandstone; where the walls are constructed of the former, the mortar has weathered to a greater degree than the hard flint, whereas the softer sandstone has been smoothly scooped away leaving the mortar standing proud; the effect is as though the sandstone walls are an imprint of those of flint. Likewise, the epitaphs on the few remaining gravestones have similarly weathered to become largely illegible, but I am able to just make out the words of one inscription:Here lieth Ye body
of John Collard
who died Aug 4th
1760
Aged 78 years
Also Mary his Daugr
who died Oct [date illegible]
1745
Aged 24 years
With daylight hours ebbing away, I press on, past what appears to be the remains of the flint construction of one of the Roman walls. Turning away from the sea I follow the levée of the Rushbourne Sea Wall. To my right, flat agricultural land, fields of winter wheat and sugar beet, being grazed by swans; to my left the pools of the hatchery of the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company, deep scoops in the ground like bomb craters in which young oysters are hatched before being transferred to the oyster beds in the seas at Whitstable. Little Egrets, crying harshly, flap lazily round in circles before landing to feed, obviously successfully as the path which I’m following is littered with fragments of oyster shell and crab carapace.
The gentle turns of the Rushbourne Sea Wall lead to a path that runs parallel to the railway line. Crossing the railway, I reach the River Wantsum, once a wide navigable watercourse but now little more than a narrow dyke, lined on either side with feathery-flowered Common Reed that rustles noisily in the breeze. Turning seawards a footbridge takes me over the Wantsum onto the Isle of Thanet, once discreet but now indistinguishable from the ‘mainland’. Over the railway once more, a narrow path twists its way between the head-high reeds on the river bank and a hawthorn hedge heavily laden with crimson-coloured berries. Here and there, patches of grassland stippled with wildflowers: pale yellow-leaved meadowsweet, and vivid green clumps of the foliage of ox-eye daisy.
The relative shelter afforded inland is gone back at the shoreline; I turn eastwards once more and, pulling my woolly hat down tighter onto my head, hop up onto the low concrete seawall and stride along in the fading light, buffeted by strong gusts. At intervals, posts support signs warning of the positions of groynes, three signs per post: the triangular shape thus formed makes an ideal instrument upon which the wind gives a virtuoso performance, humming continuously at a very agreeable pitch.Jumping down onto the shingle I find scattered clumps of the tattered glaucous grey-green foliage of rare (but obviously locally abundant) yellow-horned poppy, a specie remarkably well adapted to survive in what to most plants is an inhospitable, salt-laden environment. And on the strandline, the detritus thrown on shore by the sea: bladderwrack, cuttlefish bones, razor shells. I head down the beach to where the foaming brown waves are crashing ashore. The maelstrom of spray and wind and the din of swash and backwash puts me in mind of Lear on the heath: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!/You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
In the fading light, and with their excellent camouflage, I don’t see the flocks of birds huddling on the beach until they take to the air, wheeling away, battling to maintain a course in the violent squalls. But the encroaching darkness makes it easier to see what’s out to sea: light buoys, one steadily flashing red, another green, repeating a series of 3 pulses;
these are the modern-day equivalents of the Reculver towers, providing important, potentially life saving navigational information to mariners. And in the North Sea, the twinkling lights of ships presumably at anchor off Margate.Past Plumpudding Island, the beach changes in character to a gentle shingleless sandy slope, no more crashing waves, no swash and backwash, just a foam-flecked sea lapping at the shore between skeletal groynes. In places the sand has been stripped away entirely leaving smoothly sculpted creamy chalk bedrock. In the gloom, the lights of Birchington-on-Sea, reflected in the pools on the beach, and the presence of a solitary dogwalker, whose barking pet runs around excitedly on the smooth, soft, yielding sand, tell me that I’m reaching my destination. Enough light remains to make out the grey-black clouds overhead, racing inland at a frantic pace.
At the start of the promenade, I leave the beach to follow the footpath on top of the sea wall. Where this turns north, water crashes into land spilling spray onto the road (and giving me a another soaking). Repelled by curving concrete, the waves return seawards, smashing violently into those on their final approach, sending gallons of water and foam into the air; the continuous swell repeatedly empties and fills a tidal bathing pool below the sea wall, sucking thousands of tonnes of water out to sea in an instant before angrily dumping it all back a moment later. Incredible violence and power, but an excitingly awesome and invigorating sight, at least from a respectful distance – a reminder of the insubstantiality of man in the face of nature.
Onto the clifftop above Grenham Bay and it’s too dark to see, only the noise of the breaking waves and distant lights remind me of the sea’s presence. Feeling somewhat weatherbeaten, not to say damp, the warm glow of streetlights draws me into the empty streets of Birchington, its residents sensibly and warmly indoors. After such a windblown day, the silence is at first unfamiliar.
[…] attended a tour at the Museum Of London, of which more later, which (together with my recent visit to Reculver) inspired me to try and trace the line of the Wall that originally surrounded the City of London to […]
Very nice trek! nice weather even if chilly!
Thank you for all the informations and for the great ideas!
No trains running from Birchington-on-sea though but bus replacement… took us 1,5 extra hour!
Ah, the dreaded rail replacement bus. It’s always worth checking train times before leaving: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk
Glad you enjoyed the walk.