A watery graveyard revisited

Driving Over Lemons, Chris Stewart’s book about Andalucia, is a book I have not read. But I don’t need to.

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The title itself brilliantly encapsulates the incongruity a foreign land can reveal – in this case a place where citrus fruit is so plentiful that car tyres pulp them as if they were no more than windfallen cherry blossom.

Such incongruity came into my mind last summer as I went to explore another foreign land: the past, to paraphrase LP Hartley, and in this case the foreign land of my youth, when, as a teenager, I registered the hulks of abandoned sailing barges, with the sort of zealotry normally reserved for the trainspotter.

The first ever graveyard of barge hulls that I explored, with my father, Richard, was that along the banks of the popular anchorage at Stangate Creek and its adjoining Deadman’s Island on the River Medway in Kent.

Here were barge hulks aplenty and I waded through knee-deep mud to photograph them, retrieve ‘souvenirs’ from them and make a note of names and ports of registry.