“You won’t get far with your walks Heather if you keep going back to places you like”. Several people have said this to me, but if I find somewhere I like, it’s good to revisit it. I chose a campsite because of it’s name, Nevergong. It sounded interesting. The campsite is in 26 acres of woodland, with two large ponds and a smaller frog pond. I was camping with friends and was pleased that one had chosen the open clearing in the wood next to the frog pond. They were very small but had a deep croak. They croaked during the day and during the night, but not constantly and it was very nice to hear them.
The campsite has a state of the art pizza oven. We had pre-booked pizzas and they were ready soon after we’d put up our tents. My tent is lovely and cosy when I’m zipped inside my inner tent, but it was windy during the night and there was a loud sound of wind in the willow trees behind my tent and the occasional croak from a frog.
The next day we drove to Herne Bay to walk to Reculver. On the way we noticed a large plume of smoke in the distance
I saw the Amy Johnson bench again, and this time also managed to find her statue. An inscription nearby said that this pioneering female pilot died somewhere off Herne Bay. The statue is life size and is captivating and she looks out towards the sea where she died. How tragic to have managed to fly on her own to Australia and die later on just of the coast of Kent. I showed my friends the gorgeous statue of a boy holding a boat, by Paula Haughney, which sits on a wall looking out to sea and which I love.
We took the low path next to the beach towards Reculver and climbed the cliff to the country park. There are stunning wooden benches along the walk, carved in the shape of the ruins of St Mary’s at Reculver. It was nice to be doing this walk with friends.
Perhaps its the location, or the shape of the towers of the ruins of St Mary’s, or nearly two thousand years of history going back to when there was a Roman fort on this location, but this feels a special place. “Towers of Mordor” a friend commented!
At Reculver at the ruins of St Mary’s and the remains of the Roman fort, where a wall surrounds the wide flat land the fort used to stand on, we followed the Saxon Shore path inland back to Nethergong campsite.
On our left hand side were low lying fields. In Saxon times this would have been sea, separating the Isle of Thanet from the mainland. The area gradually silted up and the land was drained and reclaimed, like the Fens of East Anglia. There was a broken stile to climb and some narrow bridges to walk over, one was overgrown with reeds and nettles. For a short part of the walk we were on country roads, one crossed a dual carriage way of the A299. Some of the footpath is both the Saxon Shore and the Wantsum Walk.
I saw oast houses near the campsite, and heard music from a birthday party on the campsite. The owners of the campsite had mentioned there was going to be a 40th birthday party and invited us for a drink, but we had our own supply of wine. It was wonderful to sit by a fire pit cooking salmon and vegetables, and the pudding we invented last year of cored apples stuffed with freshly picked blackberries, wrapped in foil cooked on a wrack over a fire.
A few metres away people sang and played guitars as the evening grew darker and the stars and crescent moon became brighter. The wind blew through the reeds. Tiny frogs croaked in the Frog Pond. They ignored the female singing voices, but if they heard a melodious deep male voice they seemed to croak a reply, as if they were trying to join in.
I slept deeply, dreaming of Saxons walking along a sea shore which existed where I had walked through fields. I wondered if they had cooked outside, gazing at stars and listening to frogs and the wind in the reeds, or if they would have heard the sea in the distance?
Heather's Slow Seashore Strolls 