Hampshire: Warsash Ferry to Gosport 28/6/2001****

 

From the ferry we walked south down the Hamble River above a muddy stony shore.  Where the river met the Solent was a shingle spit with lots of sea kale on top, cordoned off to protect breeding ringed plover.  The shore of the Solent was sand with flint pebbles, with a shingle bank above, with more sea kale and plenty of sea campion and sea sandwort.  Approaching Solent Breezes, the shore was littered with bricks, concrete and ironwork wreckage from broken sea defences and pipelines, with a clear view of the Isle of Wight.  The point was protected by sea walls, followed by a low sandstone cliff. The low incipient shingle ridge in front of the cliff was already well colonised by orache and occasional plants of kale.  Below Brownwich Farm was a marsh behind the beach with large stands of reed-grass and common club-rush.  When the cliffs ended chalets stretched ahead. The sea reached the embankment, forcing us to walk on top until we arrived at Titchfield Haven Nature Reserve, with its large stands of reed and pools where we saw a number of water-birds and waders, including little egret and redshank.  The wall over the river had rock samphire and wall-rue, for which there were few habitats in this area, although the samphire also occurred later at the edge of shingle beside the path.  Where the houses of Hill Head started we returned to the shingle beach, having to pass over several groynes, eventually coming across plenty of sea kale and yellow horned-poppy.        At Lee-on-Solent people were wind surfing.  By the hovercraft station silver ragwort planted on a sloping bank behind the path had managed to spawn a wild clump on the shingle below, where common mallow, alsike clover and cat’s ear provided plenty of colour.  [In early June 2007 we returned and saw starry clover, early bur-medick and French oat-grass, more new colonisations.]  The MoD uses the headland beyond for military exercises, but today it was open for us to cross and see lesser gorse and prickly sedge Carex muricata pairae.  There was more sea kale and other shingle plants like viper’s bugloss and English stonecrop.  Just beyond this area thousands of dead spider crabs had been washed up in tide-lines along the beach, along with a dab fish.  The road returned to the coast and provided a concrete walkway above the beach as relief from constant walking on shingle, to which our feet got increasingly sensitive.  The shingle was now more barren, but sea kale persisted round Stokes Bay up to Gulicker Point.  The D-Day control centre was here, one of the many mementoes of the war in this area.  A few hundred metres around the point we came up against the formidable ultra-fortified barrier of Fort Monckton, apparently a prison, but actually an MI6 spy training base in a former Napoleonic fort.  We walked the perimeter at the edge of a golf course to get to the road and reach the concrete embankment on the other side, in front of the Home Office Haslar Detention Centre, similarly protected by high fences and abundant razor wire.  Along the embankment were a number of sea fishermen (or undercover agents?).  We continued along a road on the seaward side of the Haslar Naval Hospital only to be blocked at the end because of a military camp extending to the coast, cutting access to the road.  We had to backtrack half a kilometre and take a road behind the detention centre and hospital, finally reaching the road at the far end of the peninsula between high walls crowned with razor wire.  Strangely we met few tourists on this walk.  The road provided a bridge over the sea inlet to the ferry terminal and bus station in the centre of Gosport, including a new walkway by the coast with modern decorations accompanied by modern restrictions – no cycling, no skateboards - and a view across a huge marina with hundreds of yachts.  We were glad of an ice-cream and a bus back to Warsash.

Starry clover   Early medick   Lesser gorse