I wrote this piece a few years ago for the online journal 'Panorama'. It was accepted for inclusion, but due to the pandemic, the Roots edition never saw publication. The words reflect a day that I spent in solitary meditation and observation at Heybridge Basin on the Essex coast. I timed my visit so I could contemplate the incoming tide, and use the metaphor to amplify my emotional response to this place of my maternal ancestors.
Blackwater
by Alex Langstone
A vast expanse of tidal power punctuated with mysterious, secretive and impenetrable islands. Here the highest tides bring overspill and nervous excitement. The red ochre sails of traditional barges once plied their trade upon this waterway, which links land, river and sea to generations of my maternal family. The Blackwater estuary, at the heart of the Essex coast, brings me home. It was here, on this eastern shore that in pre-Roman times the Celtic tribe of the Trinovantes held sway. Collaborators of Boudicca and the Iceni, there isn’t much now to show they were here, but the ghosts of this lost British tribe survive deep within the land and on the tides. Later, much later, the Saxons arrived, and the kingdom of the East Saxons was born, from whence the modern county name can be traced.
The main port of Maldon, world famous for harvesting sea salt, with its beacon tower of St Mary’s sitting snug upon a hillock above the quay. Where secret political plotters once met to plan the downfall of Lady Jane Grey and just along the harbour on the Bath Wall, a secretive guild of fishermen held 'The Tin Shed Parliament'. A more distant history recalls that Earl Byrhtnoth lost his battle against Olaf Tryggvason and his Viking army nearby on the causeway to Northey Island and the famous poem The Battle of Maldon, originally written in Old English, chronicles the epic battle. Even more ancient and on the opposite bank of the river, arcane barrows were once excavated on the Goldhanger marshes.
My maternal family’s past feels near here in the old Saxon town of Maldon. The town’s name is from the Old English Maeldun, which translates as ‘monument hill’, and the town is indeed a monument to my own ancestors, where great grandparents were welcomed into the world at the fisherman’s church above Hythe Quay, grandparents married at All Saints in the centre of the town and parents sailing on the Tondeleo in the 1960s.
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| Maldon waterfront. Image © Alex Langstone |
Walking on the sea wall around this stretch of coast where sea and river meet brings the past close and an alchemical fusion of personal history and that of the landscape’s own stories and more ancient lore. Watching the tide rise at Heybridge Basin in the hours before the full moon ascends over the shimmering estuary is a meditation on the liminal folkloric nature of this shore. The peninsula to the south has stories of the mysterious Dengie marsh wizards, with their strange cures and eerie traditions –
“Break a Lapwing’s egg into a cup of tea”. Country cure from 1950s Tillingham.
Standing by the lock gates, which separate the Chelmer and Blackwater Canal from the tidal river you can view Northey Island on the horizon and beyond towards the sea, lie the two larger islands of Osea (Old English: Ōsgȳþes īeg, ‘Osyth's island’) and to the north, Mersea (Old English: meresig, ‘island of the pool’) . Both of which like to keep their secretive interiors hidden from mainlanders. All three islands have tidal causeways, which can only be crossed at certain times, and this creates an otherworldliness that gives each island its unique identity, the isle of Mersea even has its own ghost infested round barrow, that looms from the tree line as soon as you have crossed over the water.
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| Mersea barrow. Art © Paul Atlas-Saunders |
In this low country, where salt hangs heavy in the air, the old-time smugglers, pirates and wildfowler-poachers mapped out their clandestine routes between the islands and into the narrow silty creeks. Ghostly rumours haunted these places, keeping folk at bay on the dark of the moon.
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| Causeway to Northey Island. Image © Alex Langstone |
Walking out from the sea-lock and along the strand towards Maldon, as the tide reaches her peak, is a magnificent sight. Old wrecks punctuate the shore and crumbling wooden crane mountings stick out of the rising briny mire, as monolithic markers to a former time, where the industrialisation of the river was intense and mechanical. To my right, I can see the canal snaking inland and, in the foreground, impenetrable saltings break up the scene, giving the coast path the feel of the isolation of a lost island. On my left the tide continues to swell and expand, lapping powerfully against the muddy beach. A Thames Barge manoeuvres past, with her russet red sails billowing majestically, and I momentarily drift back to the past, catching a glimpse of a time one hundred and fifty years ago when these barges sailed up and down the Essex coast, moving goods to and from ports large and small. These barges were once the lifeblood of Maldon's prosperity, facilitating trade of straw, bricks, manure, and horse feed with London. Needing only two crewmen to sail, the flat-bottomed hull enabled the vessel to navigate the winding, shallow creeks of the Essex coast with ease.
The dark brooding muddy river feels like a highway that cuts through time, and indeed there are legends that persist on this shoreline that may attest to this reality. One tale is told about the barge Elizabeth, which was sailing back to Maldon’s Hythe Quay on Christmas Eve 1640, when it became stuck in the mud on the receding tide. The barge was marooned for several hours and during this time a thick sea mist rolled in. The two-man crew were experienced sailors but became spooked when they heard a strange buzzing noise overhead and shortly afterwards witnessed a humanoid figure floating in the water, close to the barge. They fished him out and placed him on deck but wished they hadn’t as he began making strange sounds and then began to rip the skin from his head, whilst his large round bulbous eyes stared ominously at them. They tipped him back in the water, and before they could do anything about it, the grotesque humanoid had stolen the small dinghy that the barge had been towing. The two sailors eventually sailed back to Hythe Quay under the cover of darkness, with only the beacon fire pot, glowing from the top of St Mary’s tower allowing them to slide safely and softly into the dark and misty port.
A local newspaper report appeared on the 30th December 1940:
Christmas Day, 1940: Thomas Harper, a farmer of the Dengie marshes near Maldon, captured a German pilot on Christmas morning. The pilot, still clad in his flying suit, was found asleep in a small dinghy stuck in the mud. He spoke no English and was taken to the farmers house where he had Christmas dinner with the family before being taken away by the police. It is assumed that he had ditched into the sea and had stolen the dinghy to try and escape. The dinghy bore the name “Elizabeth” but no vessel in the region is registered as such. Enquiries continue.
I first heard this story from an old friend in the 1980s, and I often recall the eeriness of the tale when walking the lonely footpaths around the estuary.
Weirdness abounds in this place, and you don’t have to go far to find it. Just a couple of miles to the south of Maldon, you can witness an ancient and petrified Oak grove, reputed to be 900 years old, and which was said to once have been a sacred enclosure of local druids, and to the north beyond Salcott Creek and Cobmarsh Island, where in the summer the saltings are purple with sea lavender, many folk have witnessed a ghostly Roman centurion walking across the Strood, an ancient tidal causeway, which links Mersea Island to the mainland.
This swampy coast also contains a barge graveyard, a melancholy site where many old Thames barges were sunk at the end of their useful lives, and if you travel out to the furthest extremity of the southern bank of the river, you will come to the unique and atmospheric seventh century chapel of St Peter’s at Bradwell-Juxta-Mare. This early medieval church is still in use and holds special Celtic style services in honour of the religious settlements founder, St Cedd of Lindisfarne. Cedd (pronounced Keth) was a prominent member of the old-style Celtic church, which eventually lost its power to Rome at the Synod of Whitby, where Cedd held the role of interpreter.
This small and isolated church, standing like a sentinel at the mouth of the Blackwater seeps both history and mystery. This is where Cedd converted the pagan East Saxons. Folklore ebbs and flows on the tide here, with mysterious lights, demonic entities, equine ghosts and shimmering spirits of Centurions from the scant remains of the Roman shore fort of Othona. Personal memories linger here in this lonely land, where the strange plaintive cry of the Curlew and the squeaking cacophony of the Oystercatcher are the songs of the saline shore. Fleeting memories flood back of family days out exploring the old church, picnicking by the saltmarsh and sometimes on the sandy beach beyond. The old church was built from the stone remains of Othona, and for centuries was used variously as a barn, cattle shed, and coast guard look out. It was also secretly used as a store for the illicit cargoes of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Essex smugglers.
An early nineteenth century haunted cottage hides in a wooded copse just beyond the sea wall, where wildfowler and fisherman Walter Linnet once lived with his family, harvesting the Dengie Flats in true Victorian hunter gatherer style. Living close to the harsh frill of the land in his traditional Essex weatherboard cottage, he and his wife raised a family in this tiny abode. These days it is a bird hide, where folk come to watch the wildfowl, rather than shoot them. As a child this spot intrigued me. As a young man I came back here numerous times to investigate the ghostly activity and to enter the folkloric magical realms of the land itself. I even heard the invisible ghostly galloping horse one moonlit night.
The Bradwell shoreline also contains a relic from the recent past. The nuclear power station still looms large on the very edge of the estuary. The station began generating electricity in 1962, and I can recall the first time I was consciously aware of the site. It was one of those moments at school that many of my generation would have witnessed, where the conversation turned to the end of the world, and one lad said that his father had told him that Bradwell nuclear power station would kill us all instantly when it was blown up. A couple of years later I watched the BBC TV apocalyptic nuclear war drama Threads. This incredibly bleak story terrified me, but I kept watching right to the end, with a mixture of dread, horror and fascination. Bradwell power station remained an apocalyptic cold war nightmare in my life for many years. The station began decommissioning in 2002 and has recently been clothed in a huge bright white weatherproof cladding, which has apparently made it safe. However, it has also bestowed the landscape with a brutalist dystopian monument, which ironically, perfectly enshrines the insanity of humanity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
On the opposite side of the wide estuary lies Mersea Island, and a particularly personal chapter of unfolding horror. During my childhood and into my youth I read a lot of books about ghosts and ghost sightings, and one of my favourites was a little book, published in 1973, called Essex Ghosts by James Wentworth Day. The book contains a wealth of folklore and traditional Essex dialect from Mersea Island and the surrounding coast, and this small work led me to some of Wentworth Day’s other works, and these were among the first books that introduced me to folklore, natural history, witchcraft, and a sense of place. Wentworth Day’s prose was sublime –
As for the islands of the Essex coast, the long, luminous marshes,
the saltings purple with sea lavender, these, the lonely places of sea-mystery…
However, Wentworth Day was a High Tory, with extreme racist and homophobic views. As a teenager coming to terms with my own sexuality, I found this both shocking and unhelpful, to say the least. He once described himself as ‘an antediluvian, a reactionary, an out-of-date ’.
My personal teenage folklore narrative had taken a very sinister turn. Nuclear annihilation, the dystopian future of Threads and rural fascism, all within the confines of one beautifully small and peaceful Essex estuary.
Wentworth Day was very much a social product of his time and class. I still read his books with fascination, as they truly offer a poetic glimpse into his world of wildfowling and ghost hunting, alongside the folklore, dialect and mystery of the Essex shore (plus many other areas of Britain). However, I believe that we need to call out discrimination in all its ugly forms, and unfortunately Wentworth Day had some of the most extreme views about race and homosexuality, which have no place in a civilised society.
I believe that the antidote to all this teenage angst was, and will always be the peace and stark beauty of these lonely and isolated landscapes, such as the Blackwater estuary. Where the grey sea laps at the wild edge of a land of immense diversity. Essex has received a mixed review over recent years, often misunderstood, the stereotypes are well known in popular culture. However, the new towns and sprawl of London’s suburbia contrast superbly with the lonely saltmarsh, muddy creeks and the rivers which cut the land deeply. Each incoming tide can bring fresh perspectives, the perennial ebb and flow, reflecting life, death and rebirth, and maybe the wisdom and inspiration to re-discover the past, and our place within it.
For more eerie tales, click the book cover below
"Thoroughly steeped in a sense of place...all in all it's a cracking book, and a must be for would-be marsh wizards, psych geographers and folklorists alike" The Enquiring Eye
“This book will be read in the decades to come, still delivering stabs of wonder and delight” David Southwell.
@HooklandGuide
Photographs and words © Alex Langstone. Illustrations © Paul Atlas-Saunders.
