Walking the Essex coast - Mucking Creek to Shellhaven

I had intended to do a completely different walk but was shafted by the Clintona bus company as the 11 to Basildon failed to arrive in Purfleet. I didn't want to waste a beautiful sunny day so I came up with a plan B and hopped on a train to Stanford-le-Hope. I had to do this walk naked (without a map) but all those hours of planning really paid off as I was able to remember the route.

Mucking is a fairly short walk from the station. There isn't much there apart from the church, now a private house. Apparently it was a really important Saxon transit camp and possibly the name is a mistranslation. Now most of Mucking is a huge landfill site.

There is no access to the coastline west of Mucking Creek , so I followed a footpath from the village through the Stanford Warren nature reserve, home to one of the largest reed beds in Essex. It was crossed by several little streams including the Hassenbrook, which flows in the Thames at Mucking Creek. The whole area has been used for gravel extraction in the past, the lakes are now used by angling clubs.

Once past the last lake, the area opens out in wonderful wild Essex again with two miles of riverside walking past marshes, mudflats, salt marsh and sea wall ending at a locked gate to the Shellhaven oil refinery. Thurrock Council have acquired some of the land and there are some signs of development. Stanford Marshes would make a great country park.

The Thames is quite wide at this point but the tide was low exposing the mudflats. There were a flotilla of little boats at anchor in the mouth of Mucking creek and flocks of wading birds feeding on the flats. After about a mile or so you come the Earls Hope Salt marsh, which is flooded at high tide. It looked quite sandy and attractive but alas lacked anywhere that I could sit.

At this point the footpath continued along the sea wall, but without any indication which side. I chose the side with the river side view which ended at a floodgate. The footpath on the other side of the sea wall ran alongside a railway line leading to the oil refinery and through a weird access gate, over another field and finally over some steps back to the river side. I stopped for lunch by the riverside. The sun, rather unkindly, went behind a huge cloud at that point. It was very peaceful, watching the boats go by. Wild Essex at its best.

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