Wallasea Island, Essex - 26th December 2023

Stuart Bowditch Podcasts

It had been several years since I was on Wallasea Island, so I was pleased to be back in one of my old haunts. I went with a very good friend that I was visiting over the festive period and we decided to go and watch the sunrise over Foulness Island, which is itself somewhere I have recorded and made work. https://essexmeme.fandom.com/wiki/Essexmeme_Wiki We arrived just as the gate to the RSPB reserve was opening (luck!) and parked up and made the half an hour trek along the sea wall to School House Viewpoint, the most easterly point of the island. The last time I was here the conveyor belt that was in place to unload earth extracted from beneath London during the construction of Crossrail was still in place. The tunnelled material was used to landscape the interior of Wallasea Island before the sea wall was breached to let the sea in and develop the area as a wetland for wading birds. For the Essexmeme project in 2014 we interviewed a farmer on Foulness Island who was incredulous... 'We've been trying to keep the sea out for hundreds of years, and now they want to let it back in!' The scheme was certainly working as there were plenty of birds within earshot including Green Winged Teal, Stone Curlew, Meadow Pipit, Black Bellied Plover, Curlew, Oystercatcher, Redshank, Water Pipit and Canada Goose.