(Svalbard)…In August, I strolled up, after taking my shoes off, to the bar of the Mellageret and ordered a drink, and thus doing so, I claimed a Travel Superlative, that of having a beer in the world’s most northerly pub. I’d also done this in the world’s most northerly settlement, Ny-Ålesund in the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard. Generally, everything here, is the “Most Northerly this” or “Most Northerly that.”
The accolades start as you land at Longyearbyen Airport, the world’s most northerly scheduled-flight airport at 78° 14’ 50’N (from now on, W’sMN will stand in for this superlative). The records continue as you enter Longyearbyen—named after an American miner, John Munroe Longyear, from Lansing, Mich.—which is the W’sMN settlement with more than 1,000 residents. Longyearbyen, approximately 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 600 miles south of the North Pole, is light for every minute of the summer, which is the time to come.
Spend a couple of days here and then embark on one of the adventure cruises that go northwards in search of whales, seals, glaciers, misty fjords and, most stunning of all, Polar bears. I saw five, all fat, lazy and contented, lying on ice packs high above an easy meal of a dead Fin whale. The name that I knew the region by when I was young, Spitsbergen, is in fact one part of the island group of Svalbard. The W’sMN spot I have now been to is 80° 00’ 3’N, a little atoll (and, yes, you can have atolls in cold places, as well as in warm) called Moffen Island.
Anchored 1,000 feet from the shore (being a wildlife refuge, this is a legal requirement). I gazed at the walruses wobbling down the stony beach towards the sea, which on the day I was there registered 2°C. If you want to be an official Svalbard Polar Bear, and have a certificate to prove it, you need to go swimming in this water, which I did for exactly five strokes. The water on your skin resembles a thousand knife pricks.
One Brit crazier than me, Lewis Gordon Pugh, recently swam for two-thirds of a mile in water like this, ice bobbing close by, but he is trained and has a unique way of raising his core body temperature. His swim took him just a shade under 19 minutes, when any time more than one minute in water that cold can have irreversible effects. Three seconds was plenty for me, but that dot of water by an old burial site called Gravesnet is now the W’sMN spot in which I’ve gone swimming, smashing my previous record of the public swimming baths in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, at a measly 64° 11’ 27’N.
Anyway, let’s get back to Ny-Ålesund. It is predominantly a research station, but it is permanent, with 150 inhabitants during the summer, 30 during the winter. It has a store, a post office, an abandoned steam train ideal for photographs and the W’sMN Arctic marine laboratory. It is not a temporary community, and it is not formed of heated tents, which other upstart claimants claim makes them the W’sMN settlement.
Do not believe them. And what makes Ny-Ålesund the winner is that it acts like a town, with residents chatting on street corners, shoppers sharing jokes with the clerk in the store and friends sharing a pint—well, at least they can the two summer evenings a week (one in winter) the pub is open. Life can be felt here. Stories are told. One I heard at the pub was when I started chatting with Mehmet, a Turk from Istanbul. He told me a great tale about Ny-Ålesund. The famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, left from here in a zeppelin (you can see the tower from which this craft was tethered) to be the first man to reach the North Pole. This was in May 1926. Earlier that year an American, Richard Evelyn Byrd, claimed he had reached the pole, but his data was confused and his achievement doubted. Amundsen went with an American explorer called Lincoln Ellsworth and an Italian pilot called Umberto Nobile, who brought along a crew. Nobile told Amundsen and Ellsworth not to wear furs because of their weight and to bring small Norwegian and American flags, which they intended to leave at the pole, for the same reason. When Nobile arrived, he and his crew were decked out in heavy furs, which infuriated Amundsen, but not as much as he became when he realized that the heavy crate he believed was full of technical equipment actually contained a massive Italian flag that fluttered down to cover the pole for, seemingly, acres: The W’sMN con trick.
No con trick from me. While Amundsen et al only floated over the North Pole, rather than landing there or taking sleds and dogs, I actually walked all the way on foot to the pub. A little to the south is another town, Barentsburg, which is on the same fjord, Isfjord, as Longyearbyen, which, incidentally, is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a climate-controlled underground warehouse that is off limits to most and in which have been deposited seeds of every plant known to science. Its building was completed last year. Barentsburg, a Russian-Ukrainian mining community that is fascinating to wander in but very rough around the edges to look at, does not provide such an easy life, so it seemed to me.
I would not be surprised if it was abandoned in the next decade, a decision that would probably have more to do with the commodity markets, rather than the desire of people to live there. A statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stands in the central square beneath a stylized mural of three strong women workers and a sign on the hillside that in Russian says “Peace to the World,” the—you guessed it—W’sMN mountainside message. But the Lenin statue here will have to make do with second place, for there also is a statue of him in the now-abandoned town of Pyramiden, 50 miles to the north. Hardly anyone goes there now.
Cruise ships do stop in Barentsburg, though, and it is worth seeing. Some of the prettier buildings are deemed unsafe following a 2008 earthquake, and the wooden walkways that crisscross the town are not for the unsure of foot, but there exists here a definite atmosphere of adventure and “otherness.”
A bar—inside a hotel that surely has seen better days—is compelling in a let’s-go-back-in-time manner and offers a curiously inscrutable menu that includes “soup noodles ‘Rolton’ in assortment” for 20 Norwegian kronor (NK), “cappuccino ‘MacCoffee’ in assortment, 12.5 grams” for 15NK, “dry rings of calamaries (sic), 18 grams” for 8NK and “bus trip: port—birch grove—port” for 50NK that I did make serious enquiries about but was told I’d already missed that day’s exciting itinerary. Shame, that, as it might just have been the World’s Most Northerly Birch Grove Adventure, and who would not want to pay the equivalent of $7 to see the World’s Smallest Tree, all of them no more than two inches in height.

(England)…When we saw the danger warnings and little red shields peppered across the shooting range of Shorne Marshes, my friend Alex Carlisle and I, and sometimes Paul Obey and Clive Gilby, would know it was time to gather our belongings and get ready to disembark. Emerging from a tunnel, the train swept along the Thames & Medway Canal, which came right up to the train track’s side, and we stepped out at the tiny Kent station of Higham, which was not in Higham at all, rather in Lower Higham, a hamlet in that it did not possess a church. The station was an Edwardian, one-story building that dragged along the platform, with a ticket office that was never open and no railways employer that I ever saw.
I felt some connection with the railways, albeit a very tenuous one. I have had three grandfathers, and of the two that I met, one worked for the railways all his working life. My mother would tell me of how he worked half a day on Christmas Day, every year. Throughout my life there have never been trains on Christmas Day, though I rather feel that I would have loved to have taken one and wander around Higham on any December twenty-fifth, especially to the end of Church Street, where there was a church, all on its own, a mile from Lower Higham. The frost would have been crisp on the stalks of grass, and there would have been few other people around. Perhaps a woman wearing a headscarf would poke a head over a hedge, or a man would be seen tapping a walking stick against a low wall and walking a dog. Even watching an idling car, it exhaust-pipe fumes crystallising in the air, would take on a quiet beauty and otherworldly fascination.
When Granddad Barton died, his wife, my Nan Barton, took us on summer holidays on the train with heavily discounted tickets that came through my granddad’s working associations and her continued membership of the Old Southeronians of the British Transport Pensioners’ Federation. My uncle Mike Polglaze, the husband of my Dad’s eldest sister, ran for a while the Bluebell Railway steam train that went from Sheffield Park to Kingscote via Horsted Keynes along the Kent-East Sussex border. My father grew up in Sussex, while the rest of my family are from Kent, true Kentishmen and women, born to the west of the River Medway that divides our county and us from the Men of Kent born to its east. Polglaze is a Cornish name, but then Uncle Mike married into our family. In his attic, he had a scaled model train, with steam trains, tunnels, lakes, switches, stations, hillocks, deer, passengers, station employees and short-trousered schoolchildren holding little notebooks to record train numbers.
The River Medway flows into and out of the Weir Wood Reservoir, one of its earliest tributaries touching Kingscote station, before taking on steam and flowing all the way to the beginnings of the English Channel along the Thames Estuary just beyond the bishopric of Rochester. The Medway’s flow is responsible for the flooding and drying of the Isle of Grain, also known as the Hoo Peninsula, on which at its beginnings lie Higham and the neighbouring village of Cliffe. On the same parcel of land is Allhallows-on-Sea, where my Aunt Glad and Uncle Frank lived after moving from Northwest London; during World War II they operated a bacon-and-eggs café in Harrow and were blown across the road by a German bomb. The family legend states that Aunt Glad was still holding the frying pan when she recovered her senses on the other side of the road.
Residents nickname this Thamesside spot Allhallows-on-Mud, for that is what one generally sees. It’s also the inspiration for the name of this blog. Opposite Higham Station was a thin, disused quarry. Trees had secured footholds on its far side, and these were the haunts of Little owls, which would pop up out of holes at twilight before flying no more than ten yards to a viewing perch. If any of us had some money, we would stop off at a corner shop where we had to shout in order for the owner to appear.
A little more than twenty-five miles from the centre of London, Higham was a hamlet of ghosts. Church Road was the long lane that led from station to church and the start of Higham Marshes. Half way down was an apple orchard, the fruit of which often spilt into the road and our haversacks. Once we climbed in, only to run when we heard the farmer’s yell, something I thought only happened in old films. Turtle doves cooed from electricity wires as we scarpered to the end of the road, where St. Mary’s Church appeared at the bottom of a very slight slope. A Kentish flint wall surrounded it. It was never open, and a little later it was announced abandoned. Just before the church, the road forked in two, with both branches quickly ending. The fork to the right led to a footpath that skirted the ruins of a Benedictine priory founded in 1148. Its first prioress was Mary, daughter of King Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror. Stephen is buried just down the road in Faversham. Also down the road and much, much closer is a small settlement called Lillechurch that was the priory’s first site. Parts of it are said to remain in the walls of houses there.
We were all inwardly pleased to learn of the scandal that befell Higham Priory. In the early 16th century, when it was dissolved, it was found that two of its nuns had had children with the hamlet’s vicar, Bardefelde. Income came in from various sources including an annual three-day fayre, the permission for which came from Henry III, but at its end, financial irregularities were seen to have been commonplace. To appease the locals, alms of twelve pence a year were given over to the poor of Higham, while the other remaining funds seemed to have been invested into priories in Cambridge and Dartford, where I was born. That John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester and the man responsible for the dissolvement of Higham Priory, had a sister who was a nun in Dartford might neither be here nor there. Later, Henry VIII executed Fisher, who refused to acknowledge the king as the head of the new English church.
On the other side of Higham is Gad’s Hill Place, the home Charles Dickens bought when fame came his way, a place mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry IV. Taking the left fork, we would cross a branch of the rail line that took us to Higham, walk beneath two lines of pylons and emerge out on the marshes. The landscape is so flat that the large Thames tankers, coming down from the nearby jetties of Tilbury and West Thurrock on the other side of the river in Essex, passing in sight of the memorial to the Powhatan Indian princess Pocahontas, who died in and is supposedly buried in Gravesend, the name given to the place where at last ran out the bodies, dead from the great bubonic plagues of the medieval era, in need of burial space.
After passing by the rookeries that made the trees appear pockmarked and dying, the flat grasses would begin of Lapwing and Common curlew nests. Thin dykes spliced the land at right angles, and Barrow Hill, rising to a mighty five feet above sea level, stood to the right, rutted by sheep that during our years there one year were no longer there.Puncturing our slow walk to the levees on the Thames were Whimbrel, Grey heron, Stonechat and Winchat. On the other side, only a few feet of rounded stones dividing the walkway on top of the levee from the river, at least at high tide, were Purple sandpiper, Ringed plover, Redshank and Greenshank, as well as, on the other side of the river, Coalhouse Fort, built in 1874 to protect the estuary from French invasion. Farther on, we used to search for fossils in the chalk around the Martello tower of Cliffe Fort, one of many rectangular structures built in the century earlier to guard as against other Europeans, this time the Dutch, who were more successful in terrorising the riverside inhabitants.
Alex would always find the best fossils. Martello towers were named after the Corsican village of Mortella (somehow the vowels got twisted) on San Fiorenzo Bay, whose towers, originally constructed by the Genoese, so impressed the British besiegers, who in 1794 with two warships of the latest design fought long and hard to subdue a spot guarded by only 33 men. When it was taken, a study was made of this new defence and orders followed by Acts of Parliament soon materialised. Today, San Fiorenzo goes by the name of Saint-Florent, almost directly due south of Genoa and on the other side of the Cap Corse peninsula from Bastia, the second town of Corsica.