6
The Essex Naturalist
Natural history
As far as natural history goes, I fear that more has been lost than has survived.
The marshes were drained quite early but remained as grazing marsh until fairly
recently and small areas near Tilbury Fort and the power station still survive.
Once they would have been grazed by cattle and sheep, now horses are more
prevalent. Much of the marshes and the higher land is now arable. Old
photographs show the area to have had more trees than now. These would have
been elms before the (inset of Dutch Elm disease. Many great stumps can still be
seen and there is an abundance of elm suckers in the hedgerows. Huge quarries,
later filled with London's household rubbish which arrives in convoys of trucks
and by barge, scar the landscape. These were later landscaped, but the result is a
totally different scene to what existed before. Much of the marshes east of
Tilbury Power Station ate covered by a deep layer of fly-ash, the by-product of
coal combustion.
Only in a few places has the rich flora and fauna of this ravaged countryside
survived. There are a few small areas of Saltmarsh and remnants of the once
extensive grazing marshes. The old drainage ditches are still there, but many
now criss-cross ploughed fields where unfortunately the marginal vegetation is
cut and they are periodically dredged. Run-off from agricultural fertilisers and
other chemicals must also adversely affect them. Of the pastures on gravel
terrace hills, there are still one or two remarkable survivors which I shall come
to later. The Mar Dyke is still there but Bulphan Fen has long been drained.
Orsett Heath is a golf course, but on its fringes many rare species still hang on.
Despite all these drastic changes, nature is resilient and quick to make use of
opportunities. Abandoned quarries have quickly been colonised by plants and
invertebrates from surviving natural areas. Even the fly-ash east of Tilbury
Power Station has been colonised by several interesting plants and insects.
This is not a neat and tidy landscape. Few stockbrokers would consider living
here; fences fall down, there is fly-tipping, abandoned cats, graffiti and small
holdings. Perhaps it is this air of general neglect and untidiness that has helped a
lot of the wildlife to survive until the present time.
Parts of the Tilbury area have been known by botanists for many years. There
are lists in Gibson (1862) for Tilbury Fort and the coastal areas have long been
visited by bird-watchers. The Thurrock Natural History Society has been active
in the area since 1970 and in 1980 published a useful summary of some of the
more interesting sites in the area. Nevertheless, it has emerged in the last few
years that a great deal has been overlooked especially as far as the invertebrates
are concerned. Until recently the area held one of Britain's rarest plants, the
Hartwort Tordylium maximum which survived into the 1980s along Fort Road
near Tilbury Fort. It was first found there in 1875 but was destroyed by pipe-
laying in the 1980s. The plant now only survives on Hadleigh Downs in one
small area. White Horehound Marrubium vulgare was recorded in Gibson from