A visit to site

One Monday in September 2006, I got up as usual at 3:30 in the morning, but instead of heading North to Scunthorpe, I headed East to Kent. As dawn broke, I arrived at the little hamlet of Broomfield and parked outside the church where my father is buried. He died thirty years ago, and I stood in the churchyard telling him about my latest adventure. He had also been keenly interested in railways, but had never seen a computer. Steam engines had been gone from the railways for over ten years when he died, but at that time, personal computers were barely capable of playing moon-lander games. Two years after his death, I bought myself a ZX81. More than anything else, I really wish that I could have shown him some of the wonders that we have in our world nowadays.

About an hour later, I parked the car again, this time in an earth car-park beside the mainline station at Shepherdswell. There were a few commuters on the platform, but otherwise the station was empty enough for me to wander around and take photos. I walked up the Eythorne road to the level crossing, and found a footpath that took me into the woods that now cover the high embankment, and managed to find my way down to where the engine shed used to be. I went back round the long way to the car, and then into the East Kent Light Railway station, now open, which I had first visited ten years ago, when I had been a competitor at a sprint race at Lydden circuit. It didn't seem to have changed, although the small steam engines parked the tight curve had gone.

It was now late enough in the morning to check into the bed and breakfast at Coldred and unload the bicycle from the back of the car, I set out on my first foray, riding, and then walking, along the remains of the Guilford branch, excited to find that there were still sleepers underfoot in places. To my right was an embankment, and I had doubts over whether the sleepers I was bumping over were really the track bed, but after scrambling up the slope and finding no signs of a formation on the top, I remembered that in the Lawson-Finch and Garrett book's description of the line, there was mention of a natural formation that ran alongside the line. Supposing that the shuttle radar had taken the hieght sample in this area from the top of the embankment? The land would then appear to be more than ten feet higher than it actually was. But there hadn't been any such formation mentioned at Elvington, so it still didn't explain my most puzzling mystery of the digital data.

I reached Eythorne and found that in yet another area, I had made an incorrect assumption. I had taken the level crossing there as one of my datum points, where the track was to be at the same hieght as the surrounding ground, but as soon as I arrived there, I realised that the road had been built up to cross the railway line, which itself was on an embankment through the meadows. Again, though, I had the dilemna of deciding whether the satellite hieght for that spot was of the general land, or of the highest point, such as the railway line. I decided that it was too difficult a problem to solve on an empty stomach. After lunch in a pub at the top of the hill, I rode along to the site of Tilmanstone colliery, now a giant industrial estate, and went down past the demolished bridge to the level crossing. Once again, I found that the road had been raised to cross the railway line on it's embankment.

I set off northwards along the trackbed, once again finding old sleepers still mouldering in the ground.

I don't know why I should have felt so elated at finding such visible signs so readily. Perhaps it was because I knew that most lines were dismantled so thoroughly that not even the ballast remained. The East Kent Light Railway seemed determined not to fade away too easily.

After a while, I reached the footpath, and, pushing through some bramble bushes and thick twigs, found myself staring at the brick platform of Elvington halt.

I hadn't been able to take the bike with me, so I scrambled back out into the daylight, wheeled the bike into a grassy field behind the platform, and then saw, to the North of me, the answer to the mystery of the mountains of Elvington. The colliery spoil tips had been bulldozed all across the landscape, and the shuttle radar had blindly picked up the new ground level.

However, it did reassure me that the SRTM data and my markers were reasonably accurate. And, at Elvington, I now knew that the platform was at the ground level, just as in the model.

I scrambled up the scree slope, dragging the bike with me, and rode around the top for a while, unable to clearly determine whether the line lay underneath the spoil.

It was now late afternoon, and I had at least solved the single most disturbing question that had brought me all the way here. I left the depressing sea of grey behind me and rode through ELvington village and back down the hill to Eythorne.

I spent the remaining four days ranging up and down the line, delighted to find quite visible remnants of it at Eastry and Richborough Castle, at Wingham Engineering where rails still ran through the large works, and at Poison Cross, where the apparent twin tracks emerging from the farm suggested that the books had been wrong, and the loop commenced before both of the roads, instead of between them (see The puzzle of Poison Cross). I filled up the camera card each day, and downloaded the photos each evening onto the laptop, and at the end of that week, returned to Wiltshire knowing that I did at least have enough knowledge of the actual ground to use the digital data. Over the next few weeks I huddled over the laptop each evening after work, laying track and shaping odd pieces of land until they seemed to fit the photos in the books. In other places where the books had only descriptions, I decided that I could only guess, but at least I now had a memory of the landscape to help me.