Day 113 – Kilnsea to Sunk Island

Sharing rooms doesn’t appear to have unduly affected sleep patterns (at least not that anyone’s admitting) and we’re at our breakfast table by 8:30 in the hope that food may appear earlier than the appointed time. Our hopes are realised. A cooked breakfast without beans (good) but also without sausage (not so good) is served promptly, and we’re ready to get under way at 9:05 with Ben’s achilles having benefited (he hopes) from a combination of overnight pill taking and cream application. Our destination today is a caravan park about 14 miles away on a road just beyond Sunk Island. This is one of the few spots in the area which is easily identifiable for our cab pick up which we arranged yesterday for 3 p.m. subject to the caveat that if we make sufficiently good progress we’ll phone the driver and meet him at a telephone box a couple of miles further up the road. For now, with high tide on the Humber, we set off along the road outside the Crown & Anchor and, after a few hundred yards, turn left over a field to reach a raised embankment which runs parallel to the estuary and which marks the start of an area called Kilnsea Wetlands. The route ahead looks promising and a twitcher arriving at the other end of the wetlands confirms that it should take us all the way to Sunk Island. However, when we enter another area called Weeton Saltmarsh, we can see a number of water filled ditches with no immediately apparent crossing points to keep us on course. A couple of men working on the embankment reckon that we should be able to cross what looks to be the most problematic ditch at a pumping station but, beyond that, there are apparently gaps in the estuary path so we’ll need to go inland to get round them. But crossing at the pumping station presents the first difficulty because, whilst the high gate behind the station which leads onto the crossing can be opened, the equally high gate at the other end is padlocked. We can’t climb over it, but Mike notices that the vertical bars don’t touch the ground, so we might be able to edge our way underneath them. Mike’s first attempt, on his front, doesn’t work but John then tries by sliding flat on his back and gets through. The same technique is successfully adopted by the rest of us – helped by the fact that someone who has clearly done this before has managed to bend one of the bars slightly upwards to create a bit more room. Buoyed by this first time method of overcoming an obstacle on the walk, our attentions turn to which inland route now to take. The closest route is along another raised embankment back towards the Humber, but there’s no guarantee that this will rejoin the estuary beyond all the gaps in the path which we’ve been told about. The most reliable route is along a series of roads, but these start further away from the pumping station and are far less direct (and coastally pure) than the embankment route. We’ve so far walked 6 miles in around 2 hours, so we decide to go along the embankment on the basis that, if there are any problems, they should emerge in time for us to walk back and go along the roads. As it transpires, there are no problems. It takes around half an hour to rejoin the estuary (crossing back to the west of the meridian en route) and, from what we can then see, the way ahead looks continuous and unimpeded. Despite this, during the next 90 minutes or so, we note possible bale out points as we pass them, just in case we do need to retrace our steps. This may have something to do with the name of our destination, Sunk Island, not being wholly confidence inspiring. But the path takes us all the way to the area containing, we anticipate, the bramble patches which were mentioned to John last night. A track leads away from the estuary which we decide it would be prudent to take. This brings us to Stone Creek Farm on a road which meanders back towards the estuary and to the “caravan park” which is, in fact, a house with space outside for several caravans. Just before this, we bump into the bloke to whom John spoke in the Crown & Anchor bar. He’s with a couple of others doing some bird watching and photography over towards the estuary. We stop for a bit of a chat about, among other things, how a closure of the path (mentioned on a Council notice by the side of the road) will affect our next walk and, by the time we resume today’s, it’s about 2:30. We’re not going to reach the telephone box in the next 30 minutes, but equally there’s nothing to keep us at the so called caravan park. We therefore phone the cab driver and arrange for him to pick us up wherever he sees us on the road between the two points. This may give us the time to break through the 15 mile barrier for the day, but the driver gets to us at 2:45 when we’re opposite Sands Farm and have completed a mere 14.6 miles. We don’t suggest that he follows us for the next 700 yards but instead climb into the cab and we’re back at Hull station around 3:20. Gary is spending a couple of days in Hull with Sally and, conveniently, her train from London (delayed) pulls in a couple of minutes after our arrival. Five of us therefore repair to the bar of the Royal Hull Hotel on the station concourse where a wedding party is partaking of a few drinks before being summoned to the wedding breakfast – a concept which, in the middle of the afternoon, causes John a perhaps unwarranted degree of confusion. As for our party, we have one round of drinks before Mike’s departure on his train to York just after 4 o’clock, and another before the departure of Ben’s and John’s train half an hour later.