On the Banks of the Thames

My second Brompton ride from the edge of the Freedom Pass zone started from Upminster. The C2C train that I took from West Ham to Upminster had helpful posters everywhere telling you just where you could and couldn't go with your Freedom Pass so I knew I was safe.

In South Ockenden the roadworks that had blocked my progress last time out had been completed so I had the pleasure of cycling along Fen Lane past the golf club. I don't know what the workers were doing here for all those weeks but it involved digging up the road for more than a mile and refilling it very badly.

Bulphan church

A few miles of flat open farmland took me to the village of Bulphan where the small church was open. I sat on a bench outside and drank coffee, then went south towards Orsett. Sitting by the church it was possible to imagine I was in a small country village, but as soon as I turned down Church Lane I found a ribbon development of oversized detached houses, some of them in the process of construction. Orsett had suffered a similar fate, but here there were snowdrops in the churchyard.

Just outside Orsett a cycle path appeared, though I couldn't see why. I followed it down into Thurrock and then went through the quiet back streets of Grays down to the River Thames.

A cycle path runs along the sea wall for a few miles, and then turns into a public footpath with a series of small sets of steps to traverse. As long as you can you can carry your bike over the steps it's all perfectly cyclable. Every inch of the sea wall is spray painted, and I met a couple of pairs of graffiti artists as I made my way along under the QE2 bridge. And then there were the Stressers.

I was nearly at Purfleet, where the footpath crosses the railway before returning to the river at the Rainham Marshes RSPB reserve when I saw the signs and the huge machines blocking the path. It would have been a long way back, but the man in the first van couldn't have been more helpful, guiding me past the machines, helping to carry my bag, enlisting his mates to help. But I was lucky. If I'd come from the other direction there were loads of very serious signs that I might have been expected to have noticed. They're going to be working there for 6 months, testing the piling on the sea wall.

I stopped for coffee and a cake at the the RSPB reserve, a wonderful patch of open marshland that you glimpse from the Eurostar or the A13, then carried on along the river past the artificial hills of the huge landfill site behind Coldharbour Point. The Ingrebourne River  meets the Thames here, near where the concrete barges built in WW2 as part of D-Day preparations were towed in 1953 to help shore up the flood defences here. 

From here to Upminster I followed the Ingrebourne Trail which stays close to the river and away from the road apart from one section through Rainham. This was a very flat ride on a very sunny day at the end of January.

Route on AllTrails is here.