Departure Point

Every river seems to have a place like this; somewhere small boats go to die. The rotting fibreglass carcasses of forgotten pleasure craft and Sunday afternoon fishing boats drawn up onto the mud, windows broken, slowly filling with pools of stagnant water. Between them, narrow jetties cross the salt-marsh to firmer ground. At the landward end of each boardwalk stands a shed with wall panels that have long since rotted away exposing their dank interiors. This is the Stour estuary in East Kent.

The coast here is a fringe both in a physical and psychological sense. It is a strip of land cut off by the coast road and its clinging industrial units, a forgotten edge where things have been left behind. I’m drawn here by the sense of abandonment — the detritus and unloved buildings — the layering of history. It’s an area poised for change. New buildings, new roads, and an economic development area funded by central government, churning out a steady supply of zero-hours contracts to pacify the locals into feeling less abandoned. But the concrete and sheet-metal of progress hide a lot.

Along the riverbank lie the scant remnants of Richborough Harbour and its boat yards. The skeletal remains of the first ever roll-on-roll-off rail ferry rise from the mud. Built with conflict in mind, it transported troops across the channel with business-like efficiency, to fight in the trenches of the First World War. Very little remains now. Between the wooden columns that once help up the jetty, course grass is flattened into swirls by the wind. The only harbour buildings that still stand are the officers’ bungalows, slowly collapsing on the edge of an industrial estate, and a detention block that once housed military prisoners. The little jailhouse is well hidden, tucked away in a fold of the river behind a breakers yard where acres of torn and crumpled cars spread like a modern day ‘Totes Meer’. Lines of headlights peer sadly through chain-link fencing, hoping for the auction but expecting the compactor. You enter the cell block, picking through the nettles clustered around the doorway. Look closely at the cell walls and you’ll find graffiti that has survived for a century, etched into the concrete walls. There are depictions of streets scenes, saucy music-hall dancers and unflattering drawings of the Kaiser. Little fragments of long-lost lives disappearing under the spray-paint colours of modern life. 

Upstream, the footprints of the boat yards have been erased by the glass and steel of what was, until recently, the research centre for the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer. The birthplace of the famous ‘little blue pill’ is now a commercial enterprise zone, open to anyone with a start-up plan and a bank loan. Nearby, some of the old farms have turned to intensive agriculture, creating a landscape of poly tunnels and caravans for migrant workers. The tightly regulated perspectives of planted lines draws your eye across the fields to the shining Pfizer buildings beyond. It’s a scene that might seem more at home in a contemporary Japanese landscape than somewhere in the English edgelands.

Because of its position at the end of the country, the river mouth and its broad, shallow bay, have been a natural point of departure and arrival for countless generations. The nearby ruins of Richborough Castle still mark the Roman gateway to Britain. Two millennia ago Richborough was a gathering point, where sea routes met the road network that led to the northernmost reaches of the Empire. This earlier incarnation of Richborough Harbour is long gone, and so, here, is the sea: the quay where Roman ships once unloaded their goods is just an earth bank where the Stour narrows and loops back on itself, over a mile inland. 

Cutting across the neck of this great meander is the beautifully named, Stonar Cut, an artificial channel linking the upper and lower waterways. The sound of its name spoken aloud, and it’s brutal man-made directness, are at odds with the soft-turfed banks of the Stour beyond as it loops slowly across the coastal plane. A single house sits on the strip of land separating the looped sections of river, watching over The Cut from its position, pinned between the water and the dual carriageway and all but lost among industrial buildings. It isn’t alone though; other people live here too. Caravans, shacks and house boats are hidden from the eyes of passing motorists by mesh fences, and stacked containers, outside the world of postal addresses, census entries, officialdom…

At the other end of the The Cut, where its muddy banks splay into the shallows of the estuary, the hulk of a Second World War coastal defence boat lies up to its gunwales in estuary mud, tucked between shorefront sheds, still guarding the estuary. It appears at low tide like the remains of a Viking funeral. Along with the pillboxes and bunkers that pepper the coastline and its hinterland, this sunken guardian reminds you that the close proximity of this headland to The Continent hasn’t always been an advantage.

Although this area is only a couple of miles square, it has seen some of the most important arrivals in the country’s history. Moments that changed us. Julius Ceaser first landed here. His fortified encampment was recently excavated as part of a huge archaeological dig. Hengist and Horsa, the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion were reputed to have landed here, as did Saint Augustine when he arrived from Rome on his mission to convert the British Isles to Christianity. The English Channel has always been bound up with the threat of invasion, as well as being an avenue for commerce and a hopping off point to the wider world. But, for some, the coastline of northern France has become a place of apprehension again. In recent years refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal immigrants have gathered there in temporary villages trying desperately to find a way of making the crossing to the UK, each ready to risk their lives by crossing one of the most congested and dangerous waterways in the world. 

Connected to the remains of Richborough Harbour by a chain of anti-tank teeth snaking along a lost shore line and the web-like channels of brackish water that spread along the curving lip of Pegwell Bay, is the imprint of the UK’s first international hoverport. 

A huge expanse of concrete and tarmac is broken by the fractured geometry of the outlines of vanished buildings and the faded markings of car parks and loading lanes. The shrubs that adorned the terminal and its approach roads have gone feral. The ramps that once launched the noisy hulks onto the waters of the channel are still here, sloping into the mud of the grass-lined shore. The hoverport opened six years after Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ speech and closed twenty years later. Today, it has a beautifully melancholic feel; somehow, nothing seems so old fashioned as things that once represented the future’s cutting edge.

Until the end of the eighties the hovercraft ‘flightpath’ was overlooked by the huge grey blocks of Richborough Power Station. Demolished now, it was the area’s dominant feature for forty years. When it was being built, the narrow roads that served the area didn’t cut the mustard, so residents were moved out, carriageways widened and houses demolished. But, the upheaval left something behind. There’s no footpath there now, but people glancing from the windows of passing cars might see a rose bush blooming in the thicket beside the road. The rose grew around the door of one of the old cottages and somehow it outlasted both the house and the power station’s massive concrete and steel structures. 

Walking between these places, along the seldom-used paths beside dual carriageways, or nettle-thicket tracks – forgotten rights-of-way behind houses, neglected field boundaries, or the unclaimed territory of seldom-visited shorelines – it’s easy to feel as though you shouldn’t be there, but I like that feeling of separateness. It sets your senses slightly on edge, makes you look harder. Maybe it’s just being a townie that makes me feel this. This area is a long way from being rural, but it definitely isn’t ‘town’ either.

Farther along the coast there’s another place I like to visit. More exposed than the soft, sad banks of the estuary. It’s a headland, and standing on the beach with England behind you, the shoreline curves away on both sides. On a grey day, when the seam of the horizon has become invisible, it can feel like you’re standing on the edge of the world.

At the back of the beach, way beyond the roll and hush of the waves hitting the banked shingle is an old boat, drawn up onto the land. It’s been there a long time. Years. Since I first saw it, it hasn’t moved. An ancient tarpaulin is drawn around its hull like a shroud, tied down and crusted with salt and grime. Sea kale grows in green clouds round it. But it’s not like the boats in the graveyard at the river’s mouth: despite its age and the heaviness of its black timbers, this one looks poised, as though it’s waiting for something. Perhaps more than the forgotten ports and harbours of this stretch of coast, this old boat reminds me that this place has always been a place of arrival and departure. Sometimes it feels like a ghost at the window, waiting for the return of the people who left – those who emigrated, or those who went to sea or to war. On other days, I look at its wrapped form and the weights tying it down, feel its inertia, and I can only see it as a slowly decaying monument to the ones who stayed behind.