Date walked: 27th October 2014

Map used: OS Explorer 150- Canterbury and the Isle of Thanet

Distance: About 8 miles

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Upstreet, on the A253 out of Canterbury, is something of a walkers hub, with three designated paths converging on the Great Stour river at Grove Ferry, just a couple of hundred yards down the hill. Today I caught the bus out of the city again but now headed north from Upstreet, towards the North Sea. The Saxon Shore Way shares the same route as the Wantsum Walk, at this point but even together those walking them had made little impression on the young crops.

Despite this being the season of fungi I had seen few mushrooms on my walks from Canterbury, but this Shaggy Parasol was a perfect specimen.

The low-lying nature of the land was soon apparent as I reached Sarre Penn, part of the drainage system of the Chislet Marshes.

It’s surface was covered in a blanket of weeds, but a little further on the surface of the still water was pretty clear.

Leaving the stream, the track brought me to a little hamlet of Chitty and on leaving it gained a tarmac surface for half-a mile. A field of young brassicas, also undeterred by walkers,…..

……led to the little village of Boyden Gate. The very plain Wesleyan chapel is now a residence.

The path turned off north again and the fields were now occupied briefly by apple orchards, providing me with a welcome snack (windfalls of course).

The route then adopted a minor road as it approached and then crossed the Thanet Way (walking on it is not recommended).

A gentle rise in the path across a field brought me to another small road where a very smart black mock-mill stood attached to a smart house.

I could see the sea! (a traditional game in my family was to shout this out from inside the car). The path took a wide track under the railway line and made for Reculver.

I usually make you look up the back story by giving you links about places but here’s a little extract from Wikipedia about Reculver.

“It once occupied a strategic location at the north-western end of the Wantsum Channel, a sea-lane that separated the Isle of Thanet and the Kent mainland until the late Middle Ages. This led the Romans to build a small fort there at the time of their conquest of Britain in 43 AD.”

The first thing that was great about being at Reculver was that wonderful exhilaration of being next to the sea. And for once I had no objection to the array of white wind turbines, they made no great impact on the steely blue horizon.

The next most striking thing at Reculver is the twin towers of the ruined St Mary’s church, where several families were picnicking.

It’s difficult to imagine how much the lie of the land (and sea) has changed over the last 2,000 years, English Heritage have provided a picture.

The Saxon Shore Way turns West here and follows the coast to Herne bay and Whitstable but I headed east on the Wantsum Walk into what was once open water and is now a cycle route and footpath.

On the shore, several Cormorants were hanging about.

A very pleasant mile later had me contemplating staying on the path to Birchington as I sat by a pond where the route also splits and heads inland.

A solitary swan whooshed by to make a reasonable but “could do better” landing on the pond, its large webbed feet surfing for the last 10 yards.

I decided to turn south, following a drainage channel where two more juvenile specimens were cruising.

This time, the path went over the railway line, rather than under.

At the crossing of the A299 is an industrial estate where a field has been planted with Photo-Voltaic panels. We’ve got some of these and apart from them not performing as well as I would have hoped, I can’t shake off a conviction that these “alternative” energy sources are a very unreliable, expensive and fundamentally irrelevant response to our need for electricity.

St Nicholas at Wade boasts a fine church faced with flint…

….and some pretty houses.

I went in search of St Nicholas Court, shown as an antiquity on my map but found myself wandering around some farmyard and feeling intrusive, so I gave up.

From the village a mile’s trek across fields running parallel to the A28 brought me to Sarre, just a couple of miles down the road from Upstreet and a convenient place to catch the bus back to Canterbury, where toasted teacakes awaited, natch.