At last, a book to chart history of secret island (From Echo)

At last, a book to chart history of secret island

11:30pm Friday 1st October 2010 in Memories By Tom King

ARMAGEDDON came to a corner of south Essex in the Seventies. The victim was Wallasea and the island was systematically obliterated.

Wallasea Island is four miles long by one mile wide. Over the course of six years, three bulldozers levelled the surface, eliminating all traces of history.

The machines pulverised Roman industrial sites and decimated the Saxon settlement on the north-west of the island. They removed all traces of centuries old farmsteads.

The ancient pattern of dykes and culverts were filled in. Wallasea was bulldozed back into the Stone Age, although it was a version of the era that would never attract TV’s Time Team.

“There’s simply nothing left for archaeologists to work on,” says Hilary Hunter, from the RSPB.

The transformation proceeded without challenge from conservationists. Indeed, nobody at the time seems even to have noticed, far less cared.

The Seventies was the era of factory, or prairie, farming. All over Essex, ancient woods and hedgerows were ripped up to create vast open fields.

“All the stress, from government downward, was on increasing food production,” says Hilary.

The bulldozers’ legacy was a remarkable landscape in its own way, possibly England’s largest prairie.

Stand on the island’s northern seawall, looking south, and the entire view to the horizon is utterly flat and, crops apart, featureless. There are no buildings or trees and not so much as a molehill to break the flatness.

The few people who live here are confined to the cluster of boatyards and farm buildings on the north-west tip.

If anyone in the nuclear weapons research facility on neighbouring Foulness wants to know how a place looks like after a bomb has dropped, all they need do is look over the water at Wallasea.

Yet this 20th century landscape has proved more transient than the one it replaced. For the second time, Wallasea is the subject of a man-made makeover. The bulldozers are back.

In 2006 the northern seawall was breached as the first stage of a project to return the island to its pristine marshland condition.

The RSPB now manages the island for the benefit of wildlife, a balanced ecology, and human visitors.

Wallasea is also gaining something completely new, a history. The story of this remote island has never been told in print before.

One of Hilary’s projects has been to redress this. She has talked to people whose memories of Wallasea stretch back to before the Second World War, and checked out reference in the Essex Record Office which stretch back before the Domesday Book.

“We plan to put the results into a book, and regular history walks and tours will form part of the visitor experience of the island,” Hilary says.

“But there must be many more people who have memories or knowledge of the island, and we’d like to hear from them, too, before we go to press.”

Right now, far more is known about the history of this remote place than ever before, thanks to Hilary’s researches.

Most revealingly, it seems to have been a far more bustling place in days of yore. King’s boatyard, which manufactured motor torpedo vessels during the Second World War, employed several hundred people.

A fleet of large rowing boats dubbed “overlanders”, ferried workers across from the Dengie peninsula on the other side of the River Crouch.

There was another key type of inhabitant. Like other backwater Essex islands, Wallasea raised fine horses. Hilary has discovered young horses were shipped across to the island, where they grew strong and healthy on the grazing. They were then ferried to the Dengie peninsula and sold in Southminster horse fair.

“Wallasea horses were very popular as London carriage horses,” Hilary says.

An auction bill for one of the Wallasea farmhouses, dated 1928, indicates another source of prosperity. This one farm boasted 17 oyster pits. The oysters would have been shipped to Burnham-on-Crouch railway station and shipped for consumption in London restaurants.

The estate agent paints a glowing picture of the Wallasea land as “a deep, rich, alluvial soil of great productiveness, being very fine, cool-bottomed old pastureland”.

Yet even as these glowing words were being written, Wallasea, in common with farming everywhere in Essex, was in decline. The downward slope can be measured by the fortunes of the island’s school.

In the mid-19th century, the school had 150 pupils. By the Forties it had two – the headteacher’s own children!

The final blow arrived with the 1953 floods, which simply rolled over Wallasea, drowning two people.

Little known and desolate, Wallasea was ripe for agricultural redevelopment. It is clear why nobody objected to the annihilation of Wallasea’s past.

There was nobody there. By the Seventies, hardly anyone outside the farming community ever set foot on the island, from one year to the next. Now the prairie is vanishing. The whole of Wallasea is now a nature sanctury with inlets and marshy lagoons being restored. Eventually, the island, restored to sea marsh, will look as it did before humans set foot on it.

Yet the island will be entering a fresh phase of its history. Some 15km of track will allow walkers and cyclists to roam every part of Wallasea.

“The island will be fully accessible for the first time in its history,” Hilary says. That could be the biggest transformation of all.

If you have any memories of Wallasea, call Hilary Hunter on 01268 498626 or e-mail tom.king@nqe.com