Ghosts of the Medway marshes

The speaker at our July meeting was Adam Taylor, a non-member who approached us a few months ago. He is a keen canoeist who has paddled in pristine waters all over the world from Canada to Finland, but the area he most likes to explore is the muddy marshland of the Medway estuary, and this was the subject of his talk. Nowadays it seems a quiet place with its own distinctive flora and fauna, but in the past it was very much a working region, made famous in Dickens’s Great Expectations, and ghosts of that time remain, many now half submerged. Ships would line up here on the way to port and passengers would at times be quarantined on the islands. Those who died were buried there and to this day there is a cemetery island that releases occasional coffins as the coastline erodes. There are the ruins of ambitious forts, a site that was once a pub on an island and the wreck of a First World War German submarine. Mr Taylor’s sophisticated presentation illustrated all of this with photos, maps, plans and animations, and included a recording of the sound of the wildlife you can expect to hear as a visitor. Many thanks to him for giving us an insight into this watery wonderland.

You can find a video of the whole of the talk on our YouTube channel at youtu.be/MB_I2HY4_fM. You can see still photos from the evening at www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720318522682.

In other news, David Saxby made an appearance for the first time since he gave us a talk on his experiences in prison, Lord Mendrick made one of his very rare visits, spending most the of year as he does teaching the children of the wealthy in Malaya, and Aidan Rothnie has exchanged his pencil moustache for a soup-strainer. All the stories, as they break.