Forget Dover, try Great Yarmouth or Newcastle instead for your ferry escape

Deck Talk: Time to bring back some niche ferry crossings

As the great getaway unravelled in spectacularly miserable style at the weekend, someone named Florence kindly composed the following on Twitter:

“When Simon Calder’s trending, your holiday is over / The queues are never ending and you see too much of Dover.”

Whatever your view of the cause of the queues to leave Kent by ferry, the reality is that creating a hard EU border at Dover (and, for Eurotunnel, Folkestone) has sharply increased the time it takes for motorists to get through French frontier formalities.

Before Brexit the assumption was that anyone who had the right to be in the UK also had the right to be in the rest of the European Union. The British government has asked for that no longer to apply, and we “third-country nationals” must therefore be stamped in and out of the EU.

Many other ports are available – and, judging from Brittany Ferries data, increasingly popular. The western Channel operator, which sails from Portsmouth, Poole and Plymouth, has seen a surge in bookings – some for next weekend, others for next year. Border controls are not “juxtaposed” (with French officials in the UK and British staff in France) outside southeast Kent, and with modest numbers of traveller queues on arrival are not excessive.

I wonder if some of the historic connections between Britain and Continental Europe might be brought back? Sheerness, on Kent’s Isle of Sheppey, was linked with Flushing in the western corner of the Netherlands until relatively recently. What others could be reinstated? A question for Nicky Gardner, co-editor of Hidden Europe, whose knowledge of terrestrial travel is galactic in its scale and depth.

Even in the 1970s, she says, the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company weighed anchor at Felixstowe in Suffolk thrice daily for the eight-hour crossing to Rotterdam – “a journey which ended with an uplifting cruise up the Nieuwe Waterweg to arrive in the very heart of one of Europe’s greatest ports”.

The same line had a thrice-weekly link from Felixstowe to the equally fine city of Antwerp – departing at 4pm and arriving next morning at 8am. “Felixstowe also had a weekly direct ferry to Helsinki at that time, also taking cars plus drivers and passengers,” says Nicky.

“Of other minor ports in the early 1970s, there was Immingham to both Amsterdam and Gothenburg, with the Friday evening departure from Immingham actually sailing to Sweden via Amsterdam.

“What a nice, relaxed way to spend a weekend as a prelude to exploring Sweden.”

Norfolk Line, which is now part of DFDS, lived up to its county name in the early 1980s with a three-times-daily link from Great Yarmouth to Scheveningen – the seaside resort adjoining The Hague in the Netherlands.

“These were unusually small car ferries, the MV Duke of Norfolk, MV Duke of Holland and MV Duchess of Holland, all under 1,000 tons,” says Nicky.

Further north, Newcastle had departures to to Oslo, Bergen, Esbjerg, Hamburg and many more – and in the 1980s there was even a weekly car ferry direct from Aberdeen to Hanstholm on the Danish coast, not to mention frequent services from Aberdeen to Norway.

“Perhaps the queues on the M20 and the Dover woes will act as cue for a renaissance of smaller ports,” says Nicky.

“Living in Berlin, and having family in Scotland, I’d love to see a direct link from Germany’s Baltic coast to, say, the River Tay.

“Inverness would suit me even better. And if it takes three days with stops along the way in Malmo [Sweden] and Kristiansand [Norway], I’d be a very happy bunny.”

Let’s hope. Just keep an eye on Twitter.