735.5 miles walked in total (11.67 average)
Katie and I were walking at 9.20 am this morning, having parked by the Old House at Home pub at Chidham. We had to walk a couple of hundred yards along the road until we found the footpath that led out to the sea and which then stayed true to the coastline all day.
At Prinsted, we stumbled upon a group of Sea Scouts with their compasses practising their triangulation. It all sounded a bit complicated to me, but I think Katie knew what they were up to. But then, she is an engineer!
The path around Thorney Island is very well protected. The island itself is entirely Ministry of Defence owned and there are electronic gates to get on and off the island with a manned barrier on the road which runs down the middle of the island. We pressed the intercom and were let in with no worries at all. The cameras at the gate were trained on us though and we obviously looked like proper walkers and no threat to national security!
Halfway down the east side of the island is a small church with two quite separate graveyards. The first one is full of 1940 graves and the names were all German. The older churchyard had graves dating back to 1729 and one had a skull and crossbones on it, something I've not seen before.
As we followed the path around the island, we saw a few twitchers - one tattooed chap with bovver boots on was cycling around, but kept stopping to make notes in his book. He pointed out a peregrine falcon to us which apparently had "put the grey plover up" and we saw a swarm of dunlins along the shore. We spotted lots of cormorants all day too.
We said goodbye to the man and carried on past a patrol vehicle with two chaps wearing all the camouflage outfit. They could see where we were going and that we were heading out to the west gate along the path. So, when we got to the gate and couldn't get through it, it came as something of a surprise that these blokes hadn't mentioned to us that the gate is no longer used. I got on the intercom again and had quite an interesting chat with an MOD representative, but Katie took over when I began to get a bit overwrought and informed the man that I wasn't going to walk back to the east gate for another three hours. We were told that there were signs on the east gate stating that the west gate wasn't in use. I (politely) pointed out that there was no sign and, furthermore, if there had been a sign and we'd seen it, we would never have attempted to walk around the island. Gggrrr!
Katie (who is much more of a diplomat than I'll ever be) asked the jobsworth if we could effectively trespass and walk along the tarmac track back to the middle of the island and join the road to get out to Emsworth. After a brief pause, he assured us that this would be ok. Humph!
So we followed the road off the island through Emsworth Marina and out to find a pub. It was a shame about this slight altercation, although we did have a bit of a giggle about it as we carried on. We really enjoyed the walk today around the island - it was very bracing and we felt completely invigorated from our exercise.
Roll on the next time!
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