Thames Estuary

this summer...

We went out to the Monsell Forts in the Thames Estuary.

And this is anti-aircraft gun batteries they built actually in the middle of the Thames Estuary.

People might recognise when I explain they look like these War of the World tripods.

and they were connected by gangways and on top of them they would have anti-aircraft guns because the shore-based batteries could not reach out to the middle of the River Thames so they needed to cover that area because the german aircraft would fly up the thames to london yeah so and that was a very interesting day out uh we caught a boat from the end of uh southend pier and uh went out to yeah the red sands fort it was called and we sailed around there for a little bit and then We went over to the Kent side of the Thames to the SS Richard Montgomery.

Yeah, that's what that is famous for.

So, yeah, I've...

I've done a lot of work around the Thames Estuary area, sort of documenting the forts both on the Essex side and the Kent side.

Spitfires numbered closer to 900.

And when the accounting was done, when the smoke cleared over Kent and Sussex and the Thames estuary, the Hurricane had shot down approximately 55% of all the Luftwaffe's losses during the entire battle.

55%, the Spitfire gets the legend.

The hurricane won the battle.

They put him in chains.

They take him to Tilbury Point in the Thames estuary.

They hang him again from a gibbet as a warning to all other pirates.

And he swung in the wind while his body decomposed.

this stuff? Well, I've had an interest since I was quite young, really.

My first... experiences more ghostly shall we say paranormal rather than anything else but um never really had an interest i was a young kid but something happened when i was about 10 11 years old which really began my interest i was um i grew up in essex in the uk and not far from where we live was a very large country park in the middle of the park was cold house fort which was a fort that was built originally in napoleonic times was built bigger in the first world war and then built up again in the second world war Now, it sits on the edge of the Thames, Thames Estuary, so it's obviously guarding the Thames coming into London.

And by, we're talking about the early 80s here, it was abandoned, closed down.

But there was corrugated iron all around the outside of it.

He was known for leading his men into battle with a great deal of screaming and swearing.

Gillingham is situated on the banks of the River Medway, close to where it flows out into the Thames Estuary and the sea.

Throughout its long history this has made it of great importance as a maritime settlement.

For many hundreds of years, Gillingham shared an important dockyard with its neighbouring town of Chatham.

The only, my description of it was just like, well, it used to be like a lime quarry that had various other things that were going on there where the main thing, my understanding is it's like, if you look at the heavy industry of this particular area, I guess this sort of 20 mile radius area.

it seemed to have for quite a long time just been like well there's a lot of chalk I guess and you dig up the chalk and like burn it and then you end up with lime and you can make cement and stuff so if you look at like beading cement works I assume that that's there for that reason because it's also in a quarry and if you look at like it's like when we went camping up on Changtumi Ring and you kind of like see cement works but like looking at that like yeah this is like a very strange like kind of blot on the landscape which is like and there's like some various other like weird quarries and things like so I imagine it's like fairly kind of like um it's near the sea it's easy to transport and it's like got a lot of you know whatever it is that you need to transport around like so south of england you can go up to you know um thames estuary and you can bring if you know if you need to build more houses or factories in london i guess you can bring water or whatever like presumably like all the lime water that's in these bungaroosh walls around yeah which is like like mostly more to like all water soluble as well which is great stuff I don't know if we mentioned the guy coming, the surveyor coming along to, like, knock on the water.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We definitely spoke

He was witnessed by a woman with his bottom half bare on the Two Tree Island near South End-on-Sea.

It's a beautiful local park where you can walk along the marsh on the Thames Estuary right there in Essex.

Yeah, everybody knows it.

It's great.