Wycke Lane Intersection
As the extension skirted the edge of the village it met the lanes that are still here today. The walk turns down towards Wycke Lane and its "No Through Road", following footpaths that run where the railway's builders once had to thread their single track between farms and homes on the approach to the pier.
Wycke Lane has not always carried that name. Older Tollesbury is said to have known it as Spitzbergen Lane, a memento of one of the strangest chapters in the district's story. In 1906 Dr John Henry Salter, the celebrated doctor and diarist of neighbouring Tolleshunt D'Arcy, became a director of the Spitzbergen Exploration Company, a venture that sent expeditions to the Arctic archipelago now called Svalbard in search of gold, marble and mineral riches. The scheme drew in local men and local money, and for a while the far-off Arctic gripped these quiet Blackwater villages. That a Tollesbury lane should end up named for an island near the top of the world is a reminder that even a small Essex village had its dreamers and its distant adventures.