Weather: fine, warm
Distance: 23.0 km ( 14.3 miles)
Total Distance: 2059.7 miles
I made it away from the house by 6am. You can always tell it is early because the fishing programme, Dirty Tackle,
is on Radio 5. Today they were interviewing a top casting champion. It took me
a while to realise that in casting championships, no fish are involved, they
cast on dry land at a target. Why?
I parked the car at Sandwich train station in
the suburbs, and went to ask train times back from Margate in the afternoon. The lady very helpfully wrote the times down for me. Service with a
smile.
The very first part of this walk
was good, along the banks of the river and into Sandwich. For the next hour however things got a lot
worse, along main roads, past the Pfizer works and laboratories who were in
the process of building an effluent treatment plant, and then along a worse main
road without a pavement towards Ramsgate, past a power station.
Eventually I reached a point where a coastal
path began. Here a Viking boat replica was on display, along with oars and
shields. The cliffs at this tip of Kent
were low, only 50 feet high and chalk. The first bit of cliff top path looked down
over Pegwell Bay, a vast expanse of what looked like mud. The remains of the hovercraft landing
structures were being worked on. It looked like they were being demolished. No
hovercrafts landed here these days I believe.
I had to cut inland a bit at Pegwell itself before getting down onto the
lower promenade and heading to Ramsgate.
A very dilapidated area just before the port looked like a sign of bad
things to come, but as soon as I walked through the port area things looked
up. I stopped in the Stagecoach offices
to pick up a bus timetable even though I had more or less made my mind up to
use the more expensive but more relaxing train option.
I tried to stay on the lower promenade
but it eventually ran out without much warning and I had to backtrack a couple
of hundred yards to get onto the cliff top.
I soon arrived at St George’s park and a cafe flying the St George’s
flag looked so inviting I stopped for lunch - tea, cake and crisps on the
plastic furniture on the grass. It was a
popular place with dog walkers all who seemed to need refreshment when reaching
the cafe.
I liked Broardstairs from the
moment I saw it. Full of very large
cliff top housed mostly converted into homes for the elderly on the southern
side and then a quaint little town which was named after a mixture of
Dickensian references and Italian cafe owners.
After the decent and ascent out of the town it was onto the cliffs
again. One point near a disused school
forced me inland and I made an error of trying to regain the coast too soon and
had a fruitless trek down to a cove and back up again. Not long after that I took a road marked up
as private which took me down to the coast - full of very large houses - given
that Ted Heath lives in Broardstairs its probably not a bad guess he lives
here. Southern Water had kindly built a
new sewage works at the end of the road, no doubt halving the value of some
houses overnight. At the tip of North
Foreland I stopped and took a deep breath because this was the tip of Kent and the end of the South Coast!
The surfers were enjoying the rough
seas off North Forehand. Onto the road
again, past a private castle and then back to the coast again. The tide was
very high by now, smashing into and over the promenades in spectacular fashion
meaning I stayed on the cliff tops.
Margate was a 'kiss me quick' seaside resort in the full and not very
impressive on a busy Saturday afternoon after a long walk.
I got to the station and then had a
long train journey back to Sandwich with a long change at Ramsgate, but at
least a train station is a reasonably nice place to wait around as opposed to a
bus station. Some boys on their last
days of summer holidays got on at Margate and disrupted the peace of the
journey.
I got to Broardstairs YHA to be surprised
that it was a town house as opposed to the usual mansion I had come to expect
from the YHA! The dorm was in the
basement but fine. I met a lad over from
Japan. I went for tea in Broardstairs
and had a massive portion of gammon, egg and chips in the Prince Albert. It was so large the gammon balanced on top of
the peas and chips and salad and the egg on top of that.
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