Kent: Cliffe to Allhallows 18/5/2010*

 

Alexanders   Common vetch   Wall butterfly

We drove to Cliffe and parked by the Six Bells, named from the number of bells in the church that were introduced in the mid C19th – although now there are more.  We walked by the church and back the way we came yesterday through the Shorne Marshes reserve, which was very pleasant with the mixture of spring birdsongs – reed, sedge and willow warblers, nightingale, chaffinch, wren and more.  On the lake and on the shore when we reached it were hundreds of shelduck, which were gradually forced inland as the tide turned and started to come in.  A few other waders were also on the Thames estuarine mud, such as sanderlings and turnstone, plus quite a few oystercatchers.  The embankment was easy to walk but very impoverished as far as flowers go, with mainly hoary cress, spotted medick and alexanders.  We chose common vetch as "plant of the day" because its intense flashes of purple among the other dull plants were such a relief.  Sheep were pasturing on the farmland inland, and the occasional heron and little egret flew up.  A pair of shelduck in the dyke provided a little variation, but there was little to see.  We ate lunch on the embankment where the stone ramparts were fringed by a long line of buddleias, so uniform as to seem planted, but why would anyone plant hundreds of buddleia here?  Despite the lack of many flowers, there were many green-veined and small whites around, an occasional orange-tip and peacock, and several wall butterflies, perhaps having recently crossed the channel.  We had to go inland a little round Egypt and St. Mary’s Bays, but we had little problem until we came in sight of Allhallows and thought we had almost finished.  The footpath here runs through the saltmarsh but is little used, so that the grass was very long and hard work.  People prefer to descend to the shore and walk along there, but we were unfortunate in reaching there at high tide, so the saltmarsh channels were impassable.  Not only were the rights of way difficult, but they were not signed and in places obstructed by scrub.  In one place we had to get through a barbed-wire fence because the way to the stile was blocked.  Although we did go down to the first beach and record quite a few shells and saltmarsh plants, we had to return to the difficult embankments.  Eventually we got to Allhallows, having spent an hour going less than a mile, but then had fenced “leisure park” and marina to get round by a narrow path between tall fences and the sea-wall.  The beach below was covered in sea, but would have been difficult to walk anyway because of all the wooden groynes.  The way up to the village was through the leisure park (which is much larger than the village itself).  Here we found a shop and post office where we were able to get a taxi number.  Hoot Taxis came promptly and ferried us back to Cliffe by the direct inland route of narrow twisty roads, past a number of modern orchards with close, dwarf trees. Thames estuary