The Isle of Grain

Perched on the edge of the Medway about 15 miles from Rochester is the Isle of Grain, a mass of wild marshes and pastures and great industrial infrastructure. Redshanks, curlews and egrets circle and dive around turbines, tunnels and tanks. The enormous chimney of the gas turbine power station stretches up into the enormous sky.

In 1629, Thomas Johnson, the father of British botany, came to Grain and wrote of its bleakness. ‘Seeing nothing which could afford us any pleasure,’ he wrote, despairingly, ‘there was not a village near, nor the smoke of a chimney in sight, nor the barking of a dog, those usual signs of inhabitants, to raise our languid minds to any kind of hope.’

Most popular

Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

Grain was still ‘wild and unexplored’ when Joseph Conrad wrote about the place in his autobiography, The Mirror of the Sea.