Faversham sits at the head of a winding, tidal creek on the north coast of Kent. Once renowned for the manufacture of explosives, this small, historic town is now better known as the home of the Shepherd Neame Brewery.
This walk starts close to the Shepherd Neame brewery, where Bridge Street spans the upper reaches of the creek. Close to the bridge, on Conduit Street, a crooked, wooden-framed warehouse dates back to 1475. The building is now used by Faversham Sea Cadets and has been renamed Training Ship Hazard.
The former swing bridge is narrow, and it’s operational days are long gone, although there is ongoing speculation about restoring both the bridge and the lock gates hidden below. The upstream creek, once lined with busy wharves, is now heavily silted – a refuge for nature, if not commerce.
Faversham Creek
The Two Creeks Circular Walk starts once we’re over the bridge, following a path along Faversham Creek. The road gives way to a rough path, and we’re then forced to detour around an industrial estate and a private, creekside housing development.
This was the site of Pollock’s Shipyard, established in 1916 on the site of a former brickyard which had served the London market. The creek is narrow, so large ships had to be launched sideways into the creek, creating quite a splash, and drawing large crowds of spectators. The shipyard closed in 1970 and it’s hard to imagine that some 1,200 boats were built here, some of them up to 1,000 tonnes.
Having skirted the estate, and back at the creek, the emptiness of Ham Marshes stretches out before us. On the other side of the creek, Standard Quay and Iron Wharf Boat Yard are lined with a colourful confusion of houseboats, dominated by the Oyster Bay House, a former warehouse.
The boat yard on the other bank is well worth exploring on another walk. If doing so, make time for Quint’s Retreat, a quirky caravan café overlooking the creek, at the far end of the boatyard.
Our creekside path follows the seawall, a narrow strip of saltmarsh to one side, with extensive, low-lying, rough pasture to the other. The path, during winter, is muddy and slippery.
At low tide the creek is unnavigable to shipping, but winter waders make the most of the rich mud, their bills probing a marine buffet of worms, shellfish, and crustaceans.
The path passes a modern waterworks sitting low on the oppositive bank. The smooth curvature of its treatment tanks is offset by an abandoned wooden barge, lying half engulfed in the mud below, slowly sliding into disintegration.
The Shipwright’s Arms
Passing the gutted, skeletal shell of another abandoned vessel, the path reaches the remote tip of the peninsula. There’s a small boatyard here, a sailmakers, and most importantly, The Shipwright’s Arms. This small, cosy pub offers a warm welcome, amid dark rooms of wood and brick, cluttered with paintings, books and curios. It’s worth the walk and hard to leave, but we had more to explore.
Oare Creek
The path now follows Oare Creek, towards the village of Oare on the outskirts of Faversham. The footpath skirts the private, ramshackle moorings which line the creek, before joining a creekside lane.
There’s a wooden building here, with a barrel-vaulted roof of corrugated iron, which once served as a saltpetre store for the inland Marsh Gunpowder Works. Little remains of the works, with the area extensively reworked by gravel extraction.
The lane follows a seawall, which cuts across the former head of the creek, forming an inland lagoon. This wall seems to have been constructed for a tramway, linking Marsh Gunpowder Works with other inland works.
At the head of the creek, The Café by the Creek offers more sustenance, and a choice of routes. One can walk back to Faversham, or one can follow the western bank of Oare Creek out to the Swale and Oare Marshes Nature Reserve. We chose to carry on.
This path, which is part of the Saxon Shore Way, soon leaves the moorings at the head of the creek. On a wet winter’s day the way ahead was thick with glutinous mud, and the inland flood meadows lay half-submerged.
Across the creek, boats huddled around their moorings, becalmed on thick slopes of silt, perhaps wary of the small cluster of unwanted boats dumped next to our path. Little more than stripped shells, their hulls are now encrusted with lichen, their colour fading into the landscape.
The path soon reaches the spot where Oare Creek meets Faversham Creek, and they flow on together towards the Swale. Across the creek, the Shipwright’s Arms is barely visible, tucked away below the seawall and the barnlike, sail-making business. There was once a coastguard station based at this remote spot, back when a coastguard’s job was to search for smugglers, rather than save lives. They often lived on old wooden ships, permanently moored in the shallows, and would use smaller rowing boats for inspections, and if need-be, chases.
The path curves around a section of saltmarsh and a small hulk assemblage, where perhaps a dozen boats of different ages lie abandoned and decaying. It’s possible to walk out to the hulks, but you’ll need to retrace your steps to get back to the path.
Oare Marshes
Shortly afterwards, the path branches, with one path following the creek and the other heading inland, following an old seawall. Until the late nineteenth century, this was as far as a walker could go, the landscape beyond would have been tidal saltmarsh and mudflats, which has since been reclaimed, forming what is now Oare Marshes.
The Ordinance Survey map of 1865 shows another coastguard station here, number 25. This would have been a lonely posting, the coastguard’s home a worn out barge or ship, beached high on the saltmarsh.
The creek widens and meets the Swale, the wide channel that separates the Isle of Sheppey and mainland Kent. There’s a wooden bird hide here, overlooking the mudflats, which offered us brief but welcome respite from an icy, in-your-face wind. There’s little other shelter out here.
The path now follows the Swale westwards, and soon reaches a causeway, which dips down from the seawall and out across the mud towards Sheppey. Edged with bladder wrack, the causeway stretches as far as the deepwater channel and used to serve the Harty Ferry. Dating back to at least 1774, records indicate that the last ferry ran in 1941, after which the service was wound up, with the ferry boat considered unseaworthy.
With the light fading we headed inland, following the narrow Church Road to Faversham. Others were also using the lane, locals drawn out in the hope of seeing the owls that form part of the rich wildlife of Oare Marshes. One or two were carrying huge camera lenses, but most were happily surveying the landscape with bare eyes or binoculars, their voices a low murmur.
A fireball over Faversham
We didn’t see any owls, but on the outskirts of Faversham we did witness a fireball streaking across the night sky – a meteor flaring and silently exploding high in the atmosphere. With time to kill we sought sustenance in a pub and I found a website that records meteor sightings across the world. Munching crisps and sipping beer, I hit the red ‘Report a fireball’ button to note our observation, and became one of 75 people who’d shared the sighting, with most reports submitted from Belgium and the Netherlands. If you zoom in on the map you can still spot my lonely avatar, forever stuck in Faversham, staring at a fireball in the sky.
More information
Thank you to Liza S for joining me on this walk in January 2024.
The walking distance is roughly 13km or 8 miles.
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