Helen is a very welcome addition to today’s starting grid. She and John drove to Kent yesterday and stayed with friends overnight. This morning, they make their way to Folkestone, leaving their car en route at The Captain Howey in New Romney which will be our resting place this evening. In the meantime, Ben, Mike and Gary return to Folkestone Central from St Pancras – and incredibly find that the distance between the station and the esplanade seems to be considerably shorter than when we trudged the other way five weeks ago.
We rendezvous at a café near the bandstand and wend our way down through Lower Leas Gardens to the sea front with John sporting a very smart new jacket. He spent part of yesterday near Dover attempting, without success, to trace the one which was attacked by the brier on our last walk. It looks as though the waterproof qualities of the new model will be put to the test tomorrow which is due to be a day of heavy rain and strong winds. The weather today, whilst cloudy, is dry with just a gentle breeze.
We set off along the sea front around 11:10. As we approach Hythe, we meet Wendy, a friend of John and Helen who also knows Ben and Gary. She lives near Canterbury and has travelled to Hythe to join us for at least part of today’s walk. Shortly after passing Hythe Golf Club, and just over an hour after leaving Folkestone, we have to divert away from the sea front in order to get round the Hythe Rifle Ranges which stretch for a couple of miles or so along the coast. For around 30 minutes, the diversion follows a very attractive tree-lined route by a canal. We then have to walk along a couple of residential streets before reaching a point where paths diverge. One leads south to a road which borders the western end of the rifle ranges and is signposted as being the England Coast Path. The other continues west along the north side of a small lake and, according to John’s map, should rejoin the official coast path at the end of the ranges where the road gets back to the sea front. John, Helen and Mike decide to trust the map and take the lakeside path so as to avoid the road, whereas Ben, Gary and Wendy take the official route which is, in fact, slightly purer. It also transpires to be about 5 minutes quicker when we are reunited on the sea front with neither trio having encountered any navigational (or any other) difficulty. Indeed, the lakeside group has witnessed a maintenance train on the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Light Railway and the road group – or at least the one member of the group tall enough to see over the fence – has witnessed squaddies firing very proficiently at distant targets.
The shoreline now turns gradually southward, and we’re able to follow it through Dymchurch and St Mary’s Bay to New Romney where we arrive shortly before 4 o’clock. This marks the end of the walk for Helen and Wendy. Helen walks half a mile or so inland to the Captain Howey, and Wendy catches a bus back to Hythe. It’s less than half and hour until sunset, but the rest of us want to get a bit further along the coast so as to reduce the mileage in the anticipated bad weather tomorrow. Our aim is the Pilot pub in Dungeness which is just over an hour away, but the final section should have the benefit of street lights so we hope the gathering darkness won’t be a problem. And our hopes are realised. After a bit of beach action through and beyond Greatstone-on-Sea, we walk over the shingle to the road where the illumination is such that the head lamp which John has brought with him is hardly needed. As we approach Dungeness, John phones Helen to let her know our ETA at the Pilot so that she can collect us there, and also to take her drinks order. Our arrival time is just before 5 o’clock and, despite the relatively early hour and the remote location, the Pilot seems to be doing a reasonable trade in both drink and food. We restrict ourselves to just the one drink before driving to the Captain Howey and having another. The bar there is nowhere near as popular as the Pilot but, when we reconvene for supper later, the food is good, wine (and stickies) are available at reasonable prices, and the service is efficient and friendly. We learn from one particularly chatty waitress about her adoption of stray or injured animals, to include cats, tortoises and birds. An entertaining evening.
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