Kent Holiday Day 5

Today was the end of our short stay in Kent, but we decided to do a bit more sightseeing before we headed for home.

We checked out of our caravan before 10am and started by visiting Slough Fort, which is on the edge of the holiday park. 

Here are some photos.

Slough Fort is a Victorian Artillery Fort overlooking the Thames Estuary. This mid-19th century Fort in Allhallows Kent was built to tackle the rise of French Ironclad Ships and guard a vulnerable stretch of the river Thames.

Two  28 ton, 9.1 inch calibre guns were added in 1906. You can see where they were mounted.

The front of the D-shaped fort was constructed from granite and the rear (here) of Kentish ragstone.

This is a Vickers Mk6 3.7 inch Anti-Aircraft gun.

We returned to our car, parked near reception and set off to visit Chatham Maritime.

We parked in the big car park for the Chatham Dockside shopping centre and walked to the edge of the River Medway to see the view across. Here we could see Upnor Castle and the end of the High Street we had walked down on Tuesday.

Here we found in a splendid old red-brick pumphouse the Copper Rivet Distillery.

They have a small showroom and shop and we enjoyed hearing about the distillery.

We came away with a bottle of their Dockyard Gin to take home.

While Dawn did some shopping at the retail centre...

...I went for a little walk around the south side of the Marina.

We then did another walk I had found online using a path around St. Mary's Island. The development on the island is managed by the Chatham Maritime Trust.

This was our route.

We had great views across the Medway of the route of our walk on Tuesday morning (see here). 

At the start we passed the pumphouse building again.

We passed the marina...

...and crossed to St Mary's Island at the lock.

We were able to track our walk all along the edge of the river from Lower Upnor to Hoo Marina.

The blue crane is a local landmark by the path round the island.

Looking back up-river here we could se Rochester Castle and Cathedral.

We watched a heron fishing in the shallows. Look! He's caught a fish!.

Yes that's Hoo marina over there.

But now we could see something we couldn't see on our walk on Tueday - In the distance is Darnet Fort in the middle of the river, part of the defenses of Chatham.

Here we could see the remains of Cockham Wood artillery fort.

"This red brick wall on the shore of the Medway is gradually being eroded by the tide. Now a rather unassuming relic, these were once an important part of the country’s defences. This strategic location not far from the mouth of the Medway was designed to protect nearby Chatham dockyard after the devastating Dutch raid of 1667. In 1669 an artillery fort known as Cockham Wood was built here (with

another across the river at Gillingham). The archways you can see are the remains of a gun platform where 44 guns pointed out into the river. However the guns were never fired and the fort fell into disrepair."

Further out in the river from Hoo marina is the island of Hoo Ness which has a jetty on the end. Beyond that is Gillingham.

We reached Finsborough Ness where we turned inland. Here we saw Sam Holland's Mariners, commissioned for the Millenium. Two mariners pulling on stainless steel sails – an old Jack Tar figure representing the past life of the river and a young woman in a wetsuit representing the future of the river. The mast symbolises the turning point of the Millennium.

The paths and the developments are all immaculately kept.

A the south side of the island we walked along the waters edge back towards our starting point. We started out on this path to find it only took us part way along - we needed to be on the one below.

Back at the marina we walked past the historic boats moored at the eastern end.

Then we had lunch at Zizzis before heading for home at about 2:20pm.

Apart from a short hold-up for the Dartford Tunnel, we were again luckt with the traffic and were home by 4:10pm.

Here is our bottle of gin.

We had a taste... delicious!

You can see more details of our 2.7 mile walk around St Mary's Island here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here) and more of my photos here on Flickr.