The Broomway

May 15, 2016

What is it like to walk in emptiness? The wet sand reflecting the sky until the two seem to merge into one. Clouds moving across the ground. Vast. Luminous.

Horizons on every side. The edge of the land you've walked out from visible as a narrow, grey-green line ... but distant. The edge of the sea not visible, not audible, but always present in your awareness as the greatest source of danger all the time you are out on the sands. Ships moving slowly along an invisible channel. The coastline of a different county drawing a pale blue ridge line between the sand and sky.

Few sounds. The wind. A cuckoo calling on the mainland. A gull's scream overhead. The constant fizzle of the oozing sands. Feet splashing through water.

Small details that would normally be overlooked. Worm casts dot the sands as the water retreats. Tiny white crabs. A solitary Dunlin. Isolated poles. A broken breakwater drawing a charcoal line in the distance.

The Broomway is a public right of way over the foreshore at Maplin Sands off the coast of Essex. It runs for six miles along the Sands some 400 metres from the present shoreline. The track is extremely dangerous in misty weather as the incoming tide floods across the sands at high speed, and the water forms whirlpools because of flows from the River Crouch and the River Roach. Under such conditions the direction of the shore cannot be determined.

Like the similarly dangerous path across Morecambe Bay, the Broomway has a reputation as “the most perilous byway in England”. It owes this reputation to the disorienting nature of its environment in poor visibility and the near inevitability of death by drowning for anyone still out on the sands when the tide comes in. The Foulness Burial Register records 66 bodies recovered from the sands since 1600, which is only a fraction of the total who have drowned.

The Broomway was formerly marked by a series of markers resembling brooms, but is now unmarked. There is no actual track and access is restricted by the MoD.

Adapted from Wikipedia

More information about the Broomway

Guided walks along the Broomway: Nature Break Wildlife Cruises

Six islands

February 29, 2016

Wallasea Island, Foulness Island, Potton Island, Havengore Island, Rushley Island, New England Island - six islands. Clustered between the River Crouch, the River Roach and the North Sea - or rather Maplin Sands. Separated from each other by creeks. Restricted access over land. Only fully navigable at high tide.

A boat trip. The wind was in the east and it was bleak and cold. Even colder once we were out on the water. An icy, biting wind and no shelter. Poor light. All the colours greyed out. I've walked along the banks of the Crouch on a brilliantly sunny winter day and the colours were so rich - russets, golds, deep blues and greens. But this time everything was silver, grey, brown and black.

I like the marshes best when the tide is out. The exposed mud and the way it reflects the light is far more attractive to me than when the channels are full of water. But I was interested to see the shore from a different perspective - from the water rather than the land. And in this bleak, cold light the edge of the marsh was reduced to dark lines dividing water from sky. Horizontals. Only the occasional vertical line - channel markers, breakwaters, fence posts.

The islands have always been remote. Isolated farms. Nature reserves. MOD ranges. Smugglers ... Places for people who people who choose to be at the edge of things.

Two Tree Island 25 September Helen Terry

Watching the tide turn

September 25, 2015

My previous visit to Two Tree Island a few weeks ago was at low tide, when all the mud was exposed. It was a damp, cool day and everything was grey and green. Revisiting the island today just after high tide, in glorious sunshine, it was all pale blue, grey and silver.

When I arrived the channel was full of water and I walked down the slipway to the water's edge and spent some time looking up and down the river. It is a long slipway and standing at the end, with the water lapping my boots, I could almost trick myself into a sense that I was standing in - or even on - the middle of the river. The water was mirroring the sky but was clear enough that at the same time I could see the bottom and the fish moving within it.

After a few minutes I turned around and was amazed at how much had changed behind me while my back was turned to the island. The edge of the island was emerging from the water, but not all at once. The mud is shaped by the waves into ripples, a simulacrum of the surface of the water itself. What I could see were the crests of these mud-waves which, as they emerged (to my eye), took the form of sinuous hieroglyphs while the water twisted and snaked between them.

As I watched, the relationship between solid and fluid was changing so fast that I almost couldn't see it happening. Positive and negative shapes enlarging and shrinking and shifting before my eyes. I mean, if I focused on a particular point of course I could see the mud emerge as the water receded. But everything was so mobile, the water, the reflections, the light; and as I gazed at the surface, there was simply a general impression of everything changing and moving moment by moment.

I like these ambiguities.

Green and Grey

September 6, 2015

I have been doing lots of walking. In North Norfolk and closer to home in Essex. August was unusually dull and wet but there were still a few bright sunny days. But now, as summer shifts into autumn, the first mists have appeared ... and lots of rain.

Wet weather strengthens the greens in the landscape. Brilliant greens against all shades of grey. Walking through the pine woods at Holkham, the pouring rain turned the moss an almost lurid emerald. On another day at Cley, mists veiled the ridge behind the marsh, muting all the colours in the background - blue-greys, green-greys.

Back at home, two days ago, we went for a walk around Two Tree Island. A nature reserve, the island is tiny and sits in the Thames Estuary between Leigh on Sea and Canvey Island. Saltmarsh and mud flats edge its northern shore where it runs into the estuary. The skies were pale, animated by banks of heavy cloud - greys tinged with blue and even violet.

Observing the transition between silver water, grey shining mud and the grey-greens of the salt marsh. All kinds of edges.

Marshland

March 14, 2015

“When the 19th century art critic John Ruskin wrote that “mountains are the beginning and end of landscape”, he was, on this occasion, wrong. For some of us, it is at the shore’s edge that landscape truly begins and ends, where the land meets and inter-penetrates with the sea and the sky. It is also where many geological eras and human belief systems find their fulfilment or nemesis. In his introduction to S. Baring-Gould’s novel, Mehalah, set on Mersea Island in the second half of the nineteenth century, Fowles refers to the “vast God-denying skies, the endless grey horizon, the icy north-easterlies on the Dengie flats in winter.”

— Ken Worpole "350 miles: an Essex Journey"

One of my plans for this year is to spend time exploring the Essex marshes. I sometimes feel that I know the Norfolk coastline better than my own so I decided it was time to redress the balance. At the beginning of January we walked out along the Dengie peninsula. It was bitterly cold. The tide was out but the mist made it hard to distinguish water from mud flat anyway. At one point I watched a flock of Knot disappearing and emerging out of the mist as they did their "dance" over the mud flats.

The walk is along the sea wall, with salt marsh to one side and farmland to the other. The difference in the colour and texture of the land on each side is stark. I was reading John Cage at the time and there was a bit about the visual equivalent of silence being "nothing to see". So I was thinking about this as I walked through this bleak, flat, featureless landscape. But gradually you adjust, so that each line of posts, a bend in a creek or a change in the vegetation becomes an event. So instead of "nothing to see" the small details become more striking - almost "noisy".

We went back last weekend. This time it was a bright, sunny March afternoon and warm enough to regret some of the layers I'd piled on. I love the way the colours of the marsh are changed by the different light.

My drawings at the moment are dominated by diffuse edges and long horizontals, punctuated by short vertical strokes.

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