dick durham The Maplin riddle
As the bridge opens and you steer out of the narrow creek, which snakes through the flat marshlands, you could be forgiven for thinking you have escaped into the open sea. But when you leave Havengore Creek and enter the Thames Estuary, there are three miles of water no more than 5ft deep to cross before you are free, because you are crossing the greatest expanse of mud in Europe: the Maplin Sands.
There is an undersea road here at tide time, the site of the only recorded incident of a sailing vessel colliding with a vehicle, when a Thames barge ran into a submerged coal wagon, unhitched by a worried driver who galloped his horse clear of the incoming tide.
I’ve sailed over or around it hundreds of times, but until recently I’d never walked along the Broomway, a half-tide pathway that skirts the most secret island in Britain – Foulness.
This six-mile track across the Maplin Sands has been there since Roman times and was built to connect the archipelago of creeks and marshy islets of southernmost Essex, before Havengore Bridge and its corresponding land roads were built. It is so named because it was once marked with thickets of broom, the yellow-flowered shrub gathered from nearby Essex forests and placed every 60 yards along the pathway’s length on both sides.
The farmers and fishermen of Foulness were once paid a penny a week to replace the brooms each tide and ensure the road remained marked out – rather as poles are used in the Scottish Highlands to show where the metalled surface is located when under deep snow. And just as a Highlander would sink into a snow drift if he lost his way, so would the pedestrian sink into the dangerous ‘Black Grounds’, as the deep ooze inside the Broomway is known, if he wandered off the pathway. It has been dubbed ‘the road of tears’, the ‘most dangerous road in Britain’ and even ‘the most unusual road in the world’. That is because scores of people have been drowned along its length over the centuries, having got lost in fog or miscalculated the speed of the incoming North Sea flood or been swallowed by deep pits of mud.
Added to its natural hazards, The Broomway is littered with the detritus of war. Foulness is owned by the Ministry of Defence, who have tested their shells, bullets and mines here for decades and, as a lot of these bombs are prototypes, they remain unexploded. Signs warn the visitor of potential death if these objects are handled. Yet The Broomway is still a Public Right of Way and a hauntingly beautiful place, too, at this time of year, when the sands turn black with acres of brent geese fresh from Siberia.
We walked shortly after the 50th anniversary of the tragic and mysterious loss of three young men out wildfowling one dark night in January 1969. For local yachtsmen, who use this desolate back-door entrance to the River Roach and Crouch, the deaths of Richard Pinch, Andrew Bull and Robin Perry linger still. They and three others had gone off for a New Year shoot, but in dense fog they became disorientated and only three came back. That’s when the stories began.
They had stumbled on a secret weapon and been despatched by military police; they had consorted with Soviet sailors spying on Foulness and been kidnapped; there had been an accidental fatal shooting: Bull was the least experienced, and the others had panicked.
But when the bodies of Pinch and Bull turned up, it was accepted they had got lost in the fog and – perhaps stuck in ooze – been drowned by the incoming tide.
Nobody will ever know what really happened. But as I, and fellow sailors Alan Monte and Mark Balcombe, walked on the vast sands, we spared a thought for Perry’s pregnant widow, Hazel. His body was never found.
Here, you are crossing the greatest expanse of mud in Europe