Badlands and Egrets

If anyone noticed my blog absence yesterday, it was for the best of causes - I was out walking. In this case, around the fine old Kentish town of Faversham (with an amazing parish church, St Mary of Charity, that has to be seen to be believed). As so often with such time-soaked, visually rich and glorious English towns - especially towards the eastern seaboard - there's a dark and seamy netherworld just beneath the rosy surface. Faversham is closely surrounded by council (or ex-) estates that seem all the more squalid and gipsyish for being on the edge of open country. The quaint old streets of Faversham are thick with charity shops, pound shops and suchlike, and walking out of town along Faversham creek takes you through an extraordinary Dickensian marginal world - half of the water, half of the land, with bizarre houseboat-style habitations amid the rotting hulks and beached barges. As the signs of human population dwindle, a bleak, flat estuarine landscape opens up, in which it would be no surprise to see Magwich himself emerging from the mud or being rowed silently down the creek. However, at intervals one of these lands gracefully and redeems the muddy blankness... I blame global warning.