Day 149 – East Tilbury to Cliffe Pools: 10.1m: 3.8h

Ben awakes with a dry cough and a few concerns over his energy levels which, perhaps not surprisingly, lead to suspicions of COVID. Hopefully, they will prove to be inaccurate diagnoses. Today we’ll be crossing the Thames into Kent via the Tilbury/Gravesend ferry. This only runs every hour and our key timing requirement is to get to the Tilbury terminal for the 10:15 crossing. We reckon that the terminal is not much more than three and a half miles away from the Coalhouse Fort. However, this assumes a direct route alongside the river being available and, to give us the time to deal with any navigational issues such as those which arose yesterday, we’ve decided to allow ourselves a couple of hours to get to Tilbury. We’ve therefore booked a cab for 7:30, so it’s an early (and substantial) buffet brekker, and we’re back at the fort car park in time to get under way at 8 o’clock.

In fact, the route sticks to the river bank all the way to Tilbury. The underfoot and overhead conditions are good and, without rushing, we’re approaching the terminal just after 9 o’clock. There’s a crossing at 9:10 and we can see the ferry coming over from Gravesend, so we increase our pace and reach the terminal a couple of minutes before the ferry starts to board. The crossing takes just 5 minutes, so we’re now an hour ahead of schedule. Our destination is Cliffe Pools on the Hoo Peninsula and our cab pick up point is the Six Bells in Cliffe at 1:30. We don’t want to spend an extra hour in the pub (no, really!), so a mid-morning coffee in Gravesend is called for. We anticipate that there will be a suitable stopping point in or near a riverside park complex on our way east out of the town. However, part of the route through the park is closed and we have to make our way around the closure via some roads and small industrial estates which don’t bring us back to the river until we’re outside Gravesend. We therefore make our stop at a mobile refreshments stall by the entrance to a police training establishment which doesn’t serve the best coffee in the world, but at least achieves the objective of delaying our progress, if only by 10 minutes.

Back by the Thames, we’re just three and a half miles or so away from the Hoo Peninsula, and the route seems pretty straightforward through grassland alongside the river. However, Ben is beginning to feel increasingly weary and, having passed by a firing range and the Shornemead Fort, we initially miss the turn onto the path which leads directly – and with more purity – to the peninsula. By the time we’ve doubled back to walk along the path and arrive at the fenced off Cliffe Fort, we’ve almost entirely eaten into the time which we saved by catching the earlier ferry. Once round the fort, it takes almost 30 minutes to reach our finishing point on the coastal side of the RSPB site at Cliffe Pools and then the same amount of time to walk into Cliffe itself. We arrive at the Six Bells shortly before 12:45 and manage a couple of drinks before our cab arrives. This takes us to Strood station from where we’re due to be catching a high speed service to St Pancras International. However, on reaching the station car park, we’re told by staff that no trains are running in that direction due to an incident on the line. The only alternative is the service from nearby Rochester to Victoria, and the cab driver gets us over the Medway to Rochester station in a matter of minutes. It’s also a matter of minutes before a train to Victoria pulls in, and we leave Rochester almost 20 minutes before we were due to leave Strood. Therefore, although (to nobody’s huge surprise) it’s a slower journey than the high speed route, we still arrive in Victoria with more than enough time for John and Mike to cross London and catch their trains from Paddington and King’s Cross. And so far as Ben and Gary are concerned, Victoria provides a very convenient direct tube line home.           

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