Steaming piles

Another section of our walk around the Kent Coast completed today. This section was between Swale and Sittingbourne, to the west of last Sunday's walk between Sittingbourne and Teynham.

These remaining sections are not beautiful but they do have a fascination owing to their situation, aspect and past. Like last week we walked along the southern shores of the Swale, a channel separating North Kent from the Isle of Sheppey. Swale station, our starting point, is as desolate a place as you are likey to find. A single track, single platform halt on the branchline to Sheerness on Sea, on its own, on the edge of the world, between marsh and sea, guarded and dominated by the two Sheppey road crossings - the new bridge and the old Kings Ferry lifting bridge.

From there to Sittingbourne we walked along the top of the sea defences, sometimes with the creek on our left, sometimes with industry. Past Ridham Dock, a small scale harbour associated with the paper trade, then past this site which we could see streaming away in the distance for quite a while.

We were wondering what on earth it could be. Earth is probably what it is, or earth being created. The conclusion we came to was that it is a garden waste composing plant - a place where all the contents of our green bins are recycled to useable materials again and that the steam is either from the heat generated by the process or by steam being injected into the materials to speed up the process.

Along the way we passed a freighter unloading what looked to be Fullers Earth or perhaps kaolin for the nearby papermills. We had to negotiate a deep gash is the sea defences created to allow construction equipment to access a site where a new waste incineration site is being built. (We saw at the start of the walk at Swale that the footpath had been closed but we went on anyway, this was the reason it was shut!)

On past the Sittingbourne and Kemsley Light Railway, a heritage line that runs a narrow guage line that was formerly used to transport paper related materials to and from the now defunct factories in Sittingbourne and the docks at Ridham and finally through the Milton Creek Country Park back to Sittingbourne.

Amongst all this industrialisation, past industrialisation (sites of old brickworks) derelict boats and wharves, vacant land and mudflats there was a great selection of wildlife - small birds galore, living in the small bushes and reedbeds and all sorts of waterfowl on the Swale and Milton Creek. And the Country Park is doing great things to popularised and develop the western bank of Milton Creek.

Quite a few more miles of this sort of stuff to do - 11 miles from Rainham to Swale plus the long stretches along the Isle of Grain. That's probably one of the reasons why this walk is no longer maintained or promoted as a long distance footpath.