Jane’s Walk 2025 – Day 1
A year has come round so fast, and here are Tom and I, with Moses, back walking for our 2 charities. CEF has had a busy year again with a steady flow of people struggling to put food on the table for their families.
This year we are walking from Gravesend to Folkestone, another hopefully flattish area for us as we are inevitably one year older, although both feeling quite fit. I am unfortunately nursing a very painful little toe, having run it over with a cash and carry trolley full of tins for the foodbank last week, which was not good timing on my part.
We are driven to Chatham on Sunday night by Richard, who is driving us for the 4th year and keeps us on the straight and narrow with constant good humour. He has brought this year 2 little electronic apps for our rucksacks so that he can’t lose us when we walk!! We are staying in an old converted warehouse in the old port, where we are staying for a few nights
Having all enjoyed a hot, dry summer this year, today is the day that the weather broke, and the forecast is for heavy thundery showers all week. Never mind, we are well kitted out with the right clothes, and it is at least warm
Our start point is at Gravesend, which has an inauspicious name, which I discovered has nothing to do with graves and is in fact an old Saxon name, as ‘grafs-ham’, the ‘end of a grove’, and is named in the Domesday book as Gravesham. It came to fame in the 14th Century, becoming the first official ferry crossing to the city of London. Ever since, it has been an important shipping port on the south of the Thames connecting with Tilbury on the north.
Our start to our walk which is to follow the Saxon Coastal Path, is through a rather tortuous path between many of the huge old warehouses which were connected to the busy port in the past and now used for various forms of storage. There are only a few ships anchored on the Tilbury side and the whole area has rather a run down feel to it. After leaving the town we walk along an embankment beside an area of mudflats leading out to the Thames estuary. To our right is a fenced off area with periodic danger signs on the fencing which we are told by a man mending the fencing, belongs to the Metropolitan Police and is their rifle practice area used on Thursdays and Fridays but luckily not today. All along this 4 mile stretch we come across large groups of Fell pony mares and their foals grazing on the rather poor grass after this dry summer. They are friendly and we wonder what their story is? We pass a large old World War 2 lookout post which sadly appears now to be used by the locals as a party venue and is strewn with bottles and rubbish.
We stop for lunch at the village of Cliffe having walked through a huge and noisy cement and brick factory, one of the important current industries in the area. After returning to our route, Moses refuses to get out of the car to finish the walk with us. He had obviously decided that he had done enough at his age of 11 years and according to Richard snored in the back of the car while we trudged through thick muddy fields to the end.
