16th
January Take me to the River
James Taylor
The road to the Tilbury Ferry docks passed a large squat fort surrounded
by large water channels complete with modern drawbridges. This was the
impressive Tilbury Fort, one of many built by Henry VIII to protect his ports. Next
the question was how to get across the Thames and into Kent. A purist Green
birder would have cycled all the way back to the Isle of Dogs and gone through
the tunnel there. I decided to take the ferry. As punishment for my lack of
green credentials, I did not see much of the Thames. As I crossed aboard the
ferry, The Duchess M, I could not find my only tenner in my many pockets. I
spent the smooth ride over the river frantically searching for the money. Just
before docking, out fell the bank note from within the pages of my small WWT
notebook.
It had been a quick trip over the calm water but one that was possibly permissible in the rules of Green Birding as the ferry was timetabled, making this Public Transport. Maybe I had stretched the rules a bit and to tell the truth I still feel a little guilty about taking this short cut when the forty-mile round trip was available. Now boats are not allowed when one is doing a pure Green non-motorised year list! My aim was to visit every RSPB and WWT nature reserve - visitors centre. Whether it was pure Green or Dirty Green was neither here nor there. I needed to get to all the reserves, including those on remote Scottish islands.
Some people, more than one, joked that I should be Flintoff like and use
a pedallo to get to Outer Hebrides and other such islands. Now that would have
been fun and ultimately lethal. I would have ended up in Iceland!
With the ferryman paid and a huge container ship moored up in Tilbury dock, Wallenius Wilhelmson, photographed, I made my way along the main road towards Shorne Marshes RSPB Reserve. After being given instructions from a well-spoken young girl on a horse, I found the small lane that would lead me to my next RSPB destination. The only problem was that this lane was blocked by an extremely high, black spiked fence, with equally high reinforced gates, preventing access across a railway level crossing. This road would not be taking me to the river. Signs on the gates asked one to phone for access. Where was the phone? On the other side of the level crossing. To the right of the gates was an access road to half a dozen or so small business units and outside one was a gleaming red Zephyr car. Now this was the same make of car that had been my Dad’s first ever car bought when I was about eleven years old.
Before
then Dad had at first cycled to work and then he had a Vespa scooter to do the
same journey. I still remember how Dad used to take both my brother and I to
Edgbaston Cricket Ground to watch Warwickshire CC play a Sunday league match
with sometimes both of us on the back of the scooter. That was back in the
Sixties when Denis Amiss opened the batting and Rohan Kanhai, Alvin
Kallicharan, Lance Gibbs and John Jameson played for us. Edgbaston on a Sunday
in the Sixties would be almost full and my brother and I would jot down every
detail of the forty overs each match in our large cricket score books.
Sadly, nowadays its one man and his dog that comprise a crowd at cricket
matches except for Twenty20 and Ashes Test matches. Indeed, the last time I had
attended a packed Edgbaston had been on that fabulous day when Australia almost
won the second test of the Ashes series in 2005. England needed just two
wickets on the final day; Australia required 107 runs. It was going to be a
quick victory for England, wasn't it? My wonderful son, Joshua and I sat in the
main members stand and watched in nervous agony as the supposedly impossible
runs target was slowly eked away by dogged resistance from first the great
Shane Warne, who was to stand on his wicket; a particularly bizarre way to get
out, and finally the very brave Brett Lee and Kasprovich.
The tight knot of yellow and green bedecked Australian supporters to our
left sang out how many more runs were needed to win after every run. “59 to go,
59 to go, ee i adio, 59 to go.” The agony turned to despair and disbelief when
the Aussies got down to single figures and it seemed inevitable that they
should win. Simon Jones had a chance to take that final wicket but his forward
dive had the ball bounce off his outstretched hands.
Three runs to get and Steve Harmison sent a ball in short and aimed it towards
Kasprovich’s body. He fended it off with the ball just brushing the glove. It
flew down the legside and Geraint Jones took a superb low catch to his left.
England had won what was later described as the best test match ever by the
press. Joshua and I leapt about with the rest of the crowd. Michael Vaughan and
the England team ran about screaming before massing together in celebration. The
place went crazy, with everyone lost in the moment. Well, everyone that is
except Andrew Flintoff who, in a gesture of complete genuine respect and
sportsmanship, had gone over to the battered, shattered and forlorn Brett Lee
to offer his hand, his commiserations and congratulations on putting up such a
fantastic rear-guard action. A match that had so very nearly brought Australia
a very unexpected victory, was now a moment of national celebration.
How wonderful it was to be part of the crowd with my son on that Sunday
morning. We will always have the memory of that moment to remember. How loudly
we all sang “you should have batted first,” to the Australian captain, Ricky
Ponting after Joshua and I had relocated to the Barmy Army in the Eric Hollis
stand. Ricky had won the pre-match toss of the coin and put England into bat.
Michael Vaughan’s smile grew at that moment. Vaughnie knew Ricky was wrong to
do so.
Once more I digress down memory
lane. These are the things I think about when cycling those long miles, hour
after hour. I think about the past or sing. Now which would you prefer me to do
here? “When you’re feeling down, try positive thinking . . . “
I was photographing the Zephyr car, when the
door to the unit opened and out came the car’s owner. He invited me in for
coffee and for the next hour I was treated to a tour of several old classic
cars being restored lovingly by Paul Burnham, the manager of Burnham Motors. I did
not understand a word of what he said as he took me to each of his cars. “Took
six off the top with this one.” “The Wankel rotary engine needed reverting.”
Still for an hour it had been a
pleasure to see these old cars and the Zephyr in particular, with its car wide
seat as I remembered it back when a car seemed like a luxury item beyond a
young boy’s dreams. Thanks Paul.
Beyond these units, the road
ended with a large GWR shunting yard and despite knocking, shouting and illegally
entering the offices there in order to try to ask for assistance, I could not
find anyone to ask about how I could get across the rail track. The Marie
Celeste of railway offices.
Sensibly, for a change, I was not
prepared to push the bike along the Eurostar track. I could just imagine the
headlines. ‘Biking Birder ends trip in Brussels – stuck to and out of my brain
on the front of the 5.15.’ Out of my brain on the train!
Instead I made my way back along
the country lanes towards Shorne and found the way down to Lower Highnam. A
long road from there followed the overgrown Thames – Medway canal and ended
with an entry road with large industrial
buildings and a lone small bungalow nearby, Bridge House.
I wondered where the bridge was as I could not
see one but that was not what I asked when I rang their doorbell. A man named
Bill answered the door, with his curious wife looking out from behind a nearby
curtain, and he soon directed me towards the excellent cycle path, which went
all the way back to Gravesend. If only I had known, or done a bit more
research, all that cycling up hills along a busy A road, and all of that
searching and palaver over the level crossing would have been avoided.
Half a mile later, the cycle path crossed a concrete road leading down
to the Thames and the reserve. At last a small notice board, tucked away beside
old, ruined buildings adjacent to the expanse of the estuary, had that
wonderful blue and white Avocet logo denoting Shorne Marshes RSPB reserve on it
and information of the old fort’s use as a starting point for the D-Day
landings.
It was 3.15pm! A lot later than I had hoped to arrive here and time was short if I was going to explore the reserve and not just tick it off. Still in the brief time available before dusk there were Avocet [91] and Dunlin [92] with Redshank [93] too. Not large numbers of Avocets, in fact there were only three and just five Redshank but the Dunlin flock was a couple of thousand and brilliant to watch as they wheeled their spectacular, murmuration way over the water before settling on the exposed mud on the other side of the river. Five sorts of gulls; Greater and Lesser Black backed, Herring, Common and Black-headed were there and twenty-eight Wigeon. A male Stonechat sat on the broken brick of the fort and a few Fieldfares took off from the fields. Thirty-two species of bird seen in around an hour and two huge ships seen going down towards the sea; Cobelfret Ferries – Celandine. All of these were seen from this isolated, expansive and fabulous RSPB reserve with not a soul around to share it all with.
I cycled back to the cycle path with the gloom of dusk descending and
stopped to find the Little Owl [94] calling
whilst sitting on a wire tight against a telegraph pole. Further along I came
across a large obelisk dedicated to the canal workers of old and here a couple
more Little Owls were exchanging calls and glances.
A phone call from an anxious Dave Saunders asking how I was doing and a
few miles later, after cycling along the local country lanes in the dark, he
had his answer. I was doing fine despite having got a little lost, again,
trying to find Dave’s house. A pair of Polish men; Kamel from Krakow and Wlodek
from Gdansk, gave me directions and after storing the bike in Dave’s garage, I
was invited into this until then stranger’s home to meet the family, to have a
shower and be fed.
I do not know how Dave, a local CID officer and his dear wife, Leslie
had found out about my journey but they had got in touch to offer accommodation
for the night. What I do remember is their friendliness to this stranger in
their midst and the spread of food that greeted me all laid out so beautifully
in their lovely dining room. Small pancakes with caviar, mussels on crackers as
hors d’oeuvres were followed by chicken tikka, washed down with a very
palatable red wine.
The evening’s conversation was about birds but also included families,
children and work. Leslie was an English teacher at the nearby Strood Academy.
A couple of years before they had moved out to Spain, to a small villa near
Cadiz but had returned disillusioned with their retirement dreams in tatters.
25.82 miles 663 feet elevation up 692 feet down
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