What the tide still brings in, sixty years after the last cargo.
The working coast around the Isle of Sheppey was a busy commercial corridor until the late 1960s. The freight has gone; the things the freight left behind have not. A long walk along the foreshore with a man who has been collecting them for forty-one years.
We meet at the top of the slipway just after seven in the morning, while the tide is still on its way out. The man I have come to walk with is in his sixty-eighth year, dressed for weather that is not, this morning, particularly threatening, and carrying a canvas bag of the kind that fishermen used to carry their tools in. The bag is, he tells me before we have walked twenty yards, the same bag he has been using since the early 1990s. He has rewaxed it twice. He expects, at this rate, to wear it out by about 2034.
We are walking along a stretch of foreshore that, until 1967, served as the working margin of a small but active port. The coast around Sheerness was, for the best part of a century before that, a place where things were unloaded — coal, timber, cement, the contents of small coastal freighters that worked the route between the Medway, the Thames, and the southern North Sea ports. The freight is, by 2026, almost entirely gone. The coast is, in its outward appearance, a leisure coast. The walkers and the dog-walkers and the occasional fisherman would not, on a casual visit, guess that this was ever anything else.
The things the freight left behind, however, are still here. The man I am walking with has spent forty-one years finding them. He is not, he wants me to make clear, a treasure hunter. He does not use a metal detector. He does not dig. He walks the foreshore at low tide, looks at what is on the surface, and picks up the small fraction of what he sees that interests him. The rest he leaves. The next tide will, in many cases, take it back out and bring it back in somewhere else.
What is on the surface
The first thing I notice, walking with him, is how much I would have missed. The foreshore, to my untrained eye, looks like wet shingle. He stops, perhaps once every fifty yards, and picks something up. Sometimes he hands it to me to look at; sometimes he puts it in the canvas bag; sometimes he turns it over in his fingers for a few seconds, looks at it, and puts it back. I cannot, on this morning's walk, predict which of the three he will do with any given object.
What he picks up in the first hour: a small piece of green glass, evidently bottle glass, with a maker's mark on it that he recognises as belonging to a Kent glassworks that closed in the 1950s. A flat piece of corroded brass, perhaps four inches long, that he thinks is a fitting from the cabin door of a small barge. Two clay-pipe stems of a type he says are extremely common on this stretch but which he picks up anyway because they are, he says, "what the coast was made of." A piece of slate with two drill-holes that he is, on inspection, not sure about. He puts it in the bag and tells me he will look at it again under better light at home.
"What you walk past is more interesting than what you pick up. The bag is for things I want to think about later. The foreshore is for the rest."
What he has at home
The man's house — which we visit at the end of the walk, for tea — is, predictably and not predictably, full. The predictable part: he has, in a small back room, the kind of orderly collection of foreshore finds that one would expect from forty-one years of careful walking. Wooden trays of clay pipes by century. A small shelf of glass bottle-seals catalogued by the maker. A box of brass fittings annotated in his own handwriting. A drawer of objects he has not yet identified, which he refers to as his "to-do" drawer and which is, he admits, never empty for long.
The not-predictable part: the collection is, by his own description, not really for him. He has, in the past decade, donated significant portions of it to two regional museums and one university research project. He has, he estimates, given away rather more material than he currently owns. He continues to walk the foreshore not because he is accumulating but because the walking is the practice. The objects, once they have been identified and catalogued, are mostly given away.
What the coast used to do
The history of the working coast around Sheerness is, in its broad outlines, well documented. The town had a dockyard from the late seventeenth century until 1960. The commercial port handled, at its peak, several hundred vessels a year. The post-war decline was rapid, and the closure of the dockyard left the town with a long economic adjustment that, in some respects, has still not finished.
The history of the working coast in its small, particular details — the maker of a brass fitting, the date of a clay pipe, the colour of a piece of bottle glass — is much less well documented. This is the history that the man I am walking with has spent forty-one years assembling. He does not, when I ask him why, give me a complicated answer. He says: somebody had to. The official histories have the dockyard and the trade routes. They do not have the small things the trade left in the mud.
What the next tide will bring
We finish the walk just before nine, at the point on the foreshore where the man tells me he turns back on most mornings. The tide is, by this time, beginning to come in. The objects we have not picked up are about to be moved. Some will come back to this stretch of foreshore tomorrow. Some will be deposited a hundred yards down the coast. Some will not come back at all.
He tells me, on the way back to the slipway, that he expects to keep walking for another five or six years. After that, he says, his knees will start to disagree with the slope of the shingle, and he will hand the routine over to a younger walker he has been informally mentoring. The younger walker is, at present, in her late thirties, and she has been coming out on alternate Saturday mornings for the past two years. She is, he says, picking it up.
I leave the slipway with three small objects he has insisted I take: a clay pipe stem, a fragment of green glass, and the piece of slate he is unsure about. The slate, when I look at it again that evening under better light, is — I am fairly sure — a slate roofing tile that has been adapted, at some point, to be used as a small weight or counterbalance for something I do not, on a single evening's looking, manage to identify. I put it on my desk. I will, I expect, look at it again next week. The coast, the man assures me when I email to thank him, will still be there.