Both churches have been proposed as the setting for the opening scene of “Great Expectations,” when the young boy Pip, visiting the graves of his parents and his brothers — “five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long” — encounters the convict Magwitch, who has escaped from a nearby prison ship. (“‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!’”)

I’m carrying my favorite gazetteer, discovered in a book store in nearby Rochester on a previous foray: Colonel W. Laurence Gadd’s “The Great Expectations Country,” published in 1929 and long out of print. Colonel Gadd is forever “striking out,” in his rather upright way, but there’s a likable modesty to his guidance (“I make no claim to infallibility”) as we follow him from the Hoo Peninsula, via Rochester, to London, where the adult Pip is sent when he receives a fortune from an anonymous benefactor. But the colonel’s starting point, like the novel’s, is the marshes.

Image Charles Dickens Credit... Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Both Sanctuary and Inspiration

The Hoo Peninsula divides the estuary of the Thames from that of the smaller Medway 10 miles to the east. To get a sense of its shape, take a seat on the churchyard bench and rest your right foot on your left knee: the Thames follows the curve of your heel and sole; the Medway the bony top of your foot. Both rivers open to the North Sea beyond your toes. The marshes occupy most of the northwest of the peninsula, which is to say your heel.

A foot is apt for a place that offers such stimulating walking, but the terrain is not without its challenges. If you look at a UK Ordnance Survey map, you can see how wet it is: not only bounded by the two rivers and their mud flats, it’s veined by hundreds of ditches, streams, dikes, fleets and runnels, most of which can only be crossed using infrequent footbridges.