My wife is on holiday this week, so once again we drove to Minster to begin a walk.
Minster is in the far east of Kent and was once on the coast of the Isle of Thanet facing mainland Kent across the Wantsum Channel. Now the area is low-lying farmland and marshes and the River Stour runs through it from Pegwell Bay (just south of Ramsgate) to Canterbury and beyond. This is where St Augustine arrived in England, and the stone for building Canterbury Cathedral was taken up the river to the town of Fordwich, which served as a river port for Canterbury.
This area - the Monkton Marshes and Minster Marshes - is the perfect place to walk without seeing a soul. And even if there should be someone around, they can be seen miles away... literally!
From Minster, we did a circuit through Monkton and Gore Street and joined the Stour at Plucks Gutter. Then we simply followed the river all the way back to Minster.
Actually, it wasn't quite as simple as I'd expected. I walked along the north bank of the river a couple of years ago and I remembered the path being moderately clear. Today though, there were a great many nettles and my wife was wearing shorts. She was very quickly stung a lot!
She said that rubbing dock leaves on her legs didn't help.
Photos from the riverbank:
More photos from the riverbank. We saw a lot of cattle which, happily, were all on the other side of the river.
A rickety old bridge leading to a patch of nettles!
It can probably be seen from the photos that there isn't much of a path here. In fact, a long distance path called the Stour Valley Walk runs along the opposite bank, so that's what the few walkers who do come this way would tend to use. But it's on this rarely walked path that St Augustine trod... although I'm not exactly sure how anyone knows...
Here's a photo of me - just to prove I was there too.
I said the area is flat, however, the OS map shows a number of named hills, including Coxon's Hill (5m), Docker Hill (5m) and Boxlees Hill (3m)!
And finally: the riverside section was the only bit of this route that I'd done before so about half of today's walk was new to me and has therefore been added to my Kent Walks map. This is the updated version: