Mill Creek

Where the walk meets the coast at Mill Creek, look out across the marsh: a low raised line of scrub runs away to one side, and a double row of old timber posts marches across the saltings.

These are the bones of the Crab and Winkle – the line of the pier extension, the last stretch of railway that once dropped from the village to a pier on the Blackwater, carrying passengers towards a resort and packet station that were never really built. The extension closed as early as 1921, and what time and tide had left of it was finished off when the pier was blown up in 1940 as a wartime defence. The embankment and the posts are all that remain, a railway slowly returning to marsh. It is a fine place for birds, too – marsh and hen harriers, short-eared owls and merlin work this rough grazing in winter. The creek’s name reaches back further still, to a medieval Tollesbury that counted a mill among its salt-pans and oyster layings.