Tales From The Riverbank - Great Expectations

As I came out of Dartford Station I went down the ramp, crossed the road and picked up the Darent Way, a riverside path rather like the Wandle Trail.  Over Temple Hill and out into the marshes, following a completely straight surfaced cycleway, with granite setts visible in some of the worn tarmac. This is the Joyce Green Tramway, that horse-drawn ambulances used to take patients from the pier on the river to the Joyce Green Isolation Hospital.  Paddle steamer ambulances brought patients from Fulham, Rotherhithe and Blackwall.  The hospital was used to deal with periodic epidemics of smallpox, diphtheria and polio.  I don't know about you, but I tend to think of remote Victorian isolation hospitals in the marshes as being one step from the lime pit, but, apparently not.  As there was no medication for these diseases the hospital relied on the Florence Nightingale principles of cleanliness, nutrition and fresh air, and survival rates were high.

At the end of the track there's a wiggle up on to the levee - no sign of the hospital any more - but you can't miss the Dartford Crossing Bridge.  It's big, and it's near.

I found it quite pleasing to be riding along my quiet riverside path, while the trucks queued overhead.

A few miles on you start to pick up the pretty extensive network of cycleways that surround the Bluewater Shopping Centre.  I would guess that the constructors were required to provide them -  there are a few instances of this along the Thames.  I turned off on to an older cycleway, formerly NCN1, and there was still a Millennium Milepost in place.

Over Castle Hill, and down to the Ebbsfleet International railway terminal, still on good cycleways.  This is a bit of a ghost ship - no international trains stop here any more, as the costs of border control and customs formalities are now such that the international service is no longer economic.  So you can get to London in 18 minutes, which is pretty slick.  But you can't get to Paris, or Brussels, or anywhere else, really.

Cycleway to Gravesend, to take a look at the old Customs House.  Gravesend is the port where the taxes levied for entering the Thames, at the Yantlet Line, were collected.  This process was first put in place by Edward lll in 1356, when he appointed John Page as the first Searcher, who had Tide Waiters, men who boarded the ships, to help him.  This was a huge money spinner until well in to the 1950s

The old Customs House, in the picture, dates from 1815, and it has a room on the roof with huge windows to give an excellent view of the river.

There are two changes to the ride at the East of Gravesend.  The first is that the route follows the Thames and Medway Canal, of which more in a moment, and the second is that you are in Dickens country.

At the height of his literary powers and fame, Dickens lived at Gads Hill, in Higham, a good-looking house which is now a school.  On his walks around the area he would take sites and local cameos and weave them in to his tales.  In Great Expectations, for example, the model for the kindly Joe Gargery's forge is at the corner of Forge Lane, in Chalk. Dickens would have been certain to have passed it if he had walked to Gravesend, a couple of miles from his house.

The building is still there, though it is much smarter these days.

A building which is also still there is the Ship and Lobster pub, a very rough-looking establishment, where Pip and Herbert Pocket stayed before attempting to smuggle Magwitch on to the Hamburg Paddle Steamer.  I very much doubt that Dickens, in full fig, would have dropped in to the Ship and Lobster for a quiet pint.  It has a good local reputation for both food and beer, but I gave it a miss, too...

The route goes along the bank of the Thames and Medway Canal for a couple of miles.  It's a short canal, which was never a commercial success.  The idea was to make a direct connection between Gravesend and Strood, allowing the numerous Thames barges to avoid the passage around the Hoo Peninsular. Less than eight miles long, half of which being a tunnel through a chalk ridge, it looked a straightforward prospect.  It wasn't, and the tunnel alone killed more than fifty men.  The barge operators quickly found that it was easy to miss the tide, and be unable to enter or leave the canal due to other traffic. It was more reliable, cheaper, and frequently quicker to sail around.  So that was that, and the new-fangled railway bought the tunnel which is in use to this day.

It's a couple of miles from Higham Station to Cliffe, where I started the ride back in November, but, just to finish things off I went on a little further to St James' Church, Cooling, which is just around the corner.  The church was apparently one of Dickens' favourites, and he would take a picnic and sit there looking out over the marshes.  The opening scene of Great Expectations is set there, where Pip is standing at the graves of his parents and five brothers.  The gravestones are unusual, and Dickens describes them accurately.  They are still there now, but reveal a considerably worse situation than Pip's sad case.

There are thirteen infants' gravestones in this picture, and others elsewhere in the churchyard.  Infant mortality on the Hoo Peninsular was huge - more than 250 infant deaths per thousand births in 1861, the year of Great Expectations. A current figure would be about three deaths per thousand births. The reason was malaria, then known as Marsh Fever or Ague, which was common in the marshes and blighted the lives of those that survived a childhood infection.  The last outbreak of malaria in this area, in Sheppey, was in 1957.

So, there we are, a beautiful place, and a lonely one, but a terrible place to raise a family and to make a living until very recently.  

My Thames ride is complete, and I am very pleased at it.  It is nice to be able to complete a winter ride in a winter, without having to wait a couple of years for a pandemic to roll through.  Old Father Thames has been kind to me, I have had good riding, have met some interesting people, enjoyed some good food and have learned quite a lot.

But Spring's coming, and I'm ready for it.

Mark