The deadliest path in Britain: From quicksand to missing bodies

To take the plunge, you’ll have to dodge quicksand, bombs and high tides along the Broomway trail

Wakering Stairs offers one starting point for the Broomway path (Tori Ferenc/Washington Post)

The ramblers call it the deadliest walk in Britain, the “most perilous path”, and so for some it is as irresistible as a siren’s song.

A yellow sign with a stark exclamation point at the trailhead announces that this ancient right of way – first recorded in the 15th century – is “hazardous to pedestrians”.

We are sceptical. We are city people. But we look up the records and read that 100 people have died here over the centuries.

Truth be told, the many warnings stir the bowels, especially the caution of “unexploded objects”. The path crosses a still-active military test-firing zone, pelted with bombs since long-gone boys slaughtered each other in the trenches in the First World War.

On marine charts, the fabled, infamous Broomway trail is shown traversing a nebulous grey shoal, half land, half sea, not entirely here nor there. One can only venture onto the path at low tide. At high water, the Broomway disappears – abracadabra, thanks to the moon – to become the North Sea again.

The path is marked on the maps by a confident straight line just north of the mouth of the mighty River Thames and its estuary, running for six miles through a vast delta called the Maplin Sands.

Hikers led by Brian Dawson turn around at Asplins Head along the Broomway path (Tori Ferenc/Washington Post)

The word “sand” doesn’t sound so bad? But skimming the travel essays and local histories, one discovers some of these sands are the quicksand ones, far from shore.

Then there is the equally disturbing caution of the “Black Grounds”, closer to land, described as a kind of jellied pudding of mud that swallows people and animals.

So, please, let’s avoid those spots.

One of the charts advises, “seek local guidance”, and that is what we do.

We meet Brian Dawson at the entrance. Dawson is 76, with one new knee, awaiting a second. He herds us half-dozen ramblers in rubber boots into a tight flock and, clucking about the tides, says: “Can’t wait. Let’s go. We’ll turn back if the wind picks up.”

So we begin: out onto the wooden wattling of the Wakering Stairs, down a descending causeway built of sticks and stones that transitions the walker from the low marshlands of Foulness Island onto the Maplin Sands.

Dawson is pleased with the first 100 yards. “The walking’s good, the sand is hard, but please keep up with me,” he says. “Don’t go wandering.”

We cling to him like barnacles.

The path is called the Broomway, Dawson explains, because walking the Sand Bar at low tide was once the only way to get to Foulness Island without a boat, and farmers erected a line of rushes and reeds as signposts to help them get back and forth from market.

Toni Dawson, wife of guide Brian Dawson, and the writer head back before the tide comes in along the Broomway path (Tori Ferenc/Washington Post)

There are few brooms now.

“The path goes out to sea – and then? It just disappears,” says Jim Mackenzie, 66, a retired computer engineer and one of our group, grinning with the oddness of it.

The word ‘sand’ doesn’t sound so bad? But skimming the travel essays and local histories, one discovers some of these sands are the quicksand ones, far from shore

There is a metaphor there, he says.

Even at low tide, the sand is covered by six inches of briny, swirly water. We navigate over long braids of eel grass, scuttling crabs, the odd blue mussels and small bait fish, trapped.

The sea floor is solid enough – but still a little needy. The muck tugs at our boots, then reluctantly lets go, and our progress sounds like suction cups applied and released, over and over: pluck, pluck, pluck!

It is tiring and spooky and sublime.

Once away from land, gazing out, it is hard to tell where open water begins and sands end.

We could understand how a person without GPS or a compass could become disoriented if a fog rolled in. We were guppies in a milky white fishbowl.

“I like something peculiar – and this is it,” says Jan Knight, 46, a retired military man turned teacher who came out for the hike.

In the far distance, towards the sea, we can see the wind turbines off the Essex coast, spinning like children’s pinwheels along the horizon. There are also tankers, freighters and cruise ships plying the Oaze Deep and The Warp channels. The ships appear and then recede into the haze.

Towards land, on Foulness Island – today owned and guarded by Britain’s Defence Ministry – one glimpses faint objects, towers and scaffolds. They look like Cold War ruins. “All very hush-hush,” says our guide Dawson. He points to one: “That’s an ejection-seat tester” – to test catapulting a pilot out of a failing military aircraft.

Hikers Jim Mackenzie (left) and Tim Fraser explore the Broomway path (Tori Ferenc/Washington Post) (Washington Post photo by Tori Ferenc)

We slosh on and arrive at a marker for Havengore Creek. It stands there like a battered cross at Calvary, salt-pocked and tilting. There is no creek at low tide, but there will be again soon.

Dawson tells us that as the tide returns and the North Sea races to cover the Broomway, the metabolism of the pathway quickly changes from benign to malevolent.

Even at dead low tide, the sand is covered by six inches of briny, swirly water. We navigate over long braids of eel grass, scuttling crabs, the odd blue mussels and small bait fish, trapped

“The tide comes in faster than a man can run,” Dawson warns. “It comes in from all directions.”

In minutes, sea up to your calves, then thighs, then hips.

“Can you swim two miles against a current?” Dawson asks.

An account at a parliamentary hearing noted the deaths of three young men who ventured onto the sands to shoot waterfowl but were lost in the mist in January 1969.

“Exactly how they died will probably never be known,” the record concludes. “Richard Pinch’s body was discovered on the outer edge of the sands in March. Andrew Bull’s body was found closer in to land in June, and Robin Perry’s body has never been found.”

At the first waypoint of the walk along the Broomway path in England is an old telegraph pole (Tori Ferenc/Washington Post) (Washington Post photo by Tori Ferenc)

On our trek, though, with an eye on the tide charts, mobile phones tracking our positions, and Dawson guiding us along, it all feels fine.

Why would people want to do the Broomway?

There is no need anymore. There is a bridge to Foulness Island, built in 1922, maintained by the military.

A local farmer and historian, Peter Carr, tells us the islanders are tough and resilient, but their culture is fading away – the school, church, pub, post office are all shuttered. Homes are abandoned. About 150 people, mostly farmers and pensioners, remain.

“When people call, we tell them, ‘There’s nothing here!’ And I think that’s why they want to come,” Dawson says.

The esteemed nature writer Robert Macfarlane hiked the Broomway for his 2013 book, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. He recalled “the walk out to the sea as a soft lunacy, a passage to beyond this world.”

Exactly how they died will probably never be known. Richard Pinch’s body was discovered on the outer edge of the sands in March. Andrew Bull’s body was found closer in to land in June, and Robin Perry’s body has never been found

Macfarlane confessed it might not be the most perilous journey, but it was “the unearthliest path I have ever walked.”

Paul Carter, a veteran hiker, wrote on a walking website that the Broomway was “like nothing else I have experienced in this country”.

It is barely 40 miles from London.

At the halfway point of our three-hour hike, Asplins Head, we stop and drink tea from our thermoses and nibble biscuits before turning back. We are in the middle of nowhere. Our feet in the salt.

Britain is a nation of walkers, and this is a fine place to admire the view.

© The Washington Post