Day: 210 3/6/99 Sutton Bridge to Fosdyke

Weather:  Overcast

Distance:  28.5 km (17.7miles)    Total Distance:   2740 miles

I was up early again and off to The Wash for the second time. The storms of yesterday were past and surprisingly I did not see any damage as I drove, but I heard that even in Coventry there had been flooding, even further up our street where the water had come in via someone’s back garden.

I parked outside the Bridge Hotel in Sutton Bridge and headed off down the bank of the river.  I asked in the offices of the boat yard if there was a public footpath through the yard and was told it was as long as I kept to the road,  so off I went ignoring the mandatory hard hat signs. 

The path was in a reasonable state and even when the grass was long it was not too wet. Most of the dew had dried off. There was little need for a map all day.  I knew I just had to keep to the path.  It got pretty overgrown once I got to the end of the River Nene and started to head west. 

I soon had an air display taking place above me to take my mind off the walking.  This was a practice bombing range and the jets were flying in every minute or so.  There was a war going on in Kosovo at the time with NATO trying to oust the Serbs and return Kosovo to the ethnic Albanians and it was easy to imagine what the people of Belgrade were going through at the time. They even had a mechanism where the sound of dropping bombs went off every lime their lasers hit the target. 

As I neared the actual range I could see red flags flying.  The man who I walked with on Tuesday had told me that the path through the range was always open and only the marsh on the sea side of the wall counted as the range proper.  

The signs were pretty unclear as to what one was allowed to do but I pressed on fearing that someone may come out of the many buildings along the road at any moment and turn me back but they never did.  This may have been because the buildings were all observation towers facing out to the marshes and in effect I was walking behind them.  The red flags and the associated roadway went on for miles and miles.  I was pretty glad of this in a way because it meant less struggling though undergrowth, 

Eventually I reached the end that was marked by a particularly bad overgrown half mile that took some struggling through.  I do not know whether it was a coincidence or not but the planes stopped their practice when I entered the range and started as soon as I came out!

The rest of the walk was again mainly on sea defences, mainly in a reasonable state.  I walked past a nature reserve, under the pylons and up onto the road.

Fosdyke was a terrible place to hitch.  I tried for a time outside the pub, then walked up into Fosdyke and tried again and then walked eastwards and tried to hitch on a minor road thinking I may take the back roads. All failed because the traffic was going so fast on the main road and there was hardly any traffic on the minor road, only what seemed like fruit processors going home at the end of their shift. 

I went back to the pub and tried again, this time with more luck. A Renault ‘people mover’ stopped and it was a large man who told me his name was Mike Terry and he used to be Dorothy Squire’s pianist. I asked him what he did for a living and he told me he was in the entertainment business – but I knew that before he told me – you could tell by his camp nature! I did not know much about Dorothy Squires other than the fact she was a singer.  He told me how he was on his way to Lowestoft to do a show.  He spent the winters singing in Spain and the summers going around the seaside towns of the UK.  He was on his way down to Port Talbot the next week to do a press conference for a forthcoming tribute show he was doing to commemorate the death of Dorothy Squires.

I decided  to go to King’s Lynn to try the Youth Hostel there but when I got there I was told it was full but the lady did try the hostel near Spaling for me when I asked her even though it was meant to be closed on Thursdays.  Fortunately it was open due to demand and off I set.  All in all it took me a couple of hours to sort it out and travel between the hostels but I think it was worth it rather than camping even though I had the camping stuff in the boot of the car.  The hostel was fine – a house on the outskirts of a village.  I met a man in the dorm who was ever so chatty – a city planner and we discussed university campus’s.  I went down to the pub in the town for tea and had a chilli and a decent pint of beer.