The Broomway is a path over tidal flats near Southend-on-Sea in England, linking the mainland with Foulness Island for at least 600 years. Often shrouded in mist, surrounded by whirpools and quicksand, or simply underwater during high tide, it has claimed countless lives. It has refused all efforts to improve it, finally being replaced with an inland road bridging the otherwise impassable creeks that feed the flats with silt.
Even the Wikipedia article makes it sound impossibly menacing:
The Broomway leaves the mainland at Wakering Stairs, where there is a causeway over the band of soft mud (known as the Black Grounds or blackgrounds) which separates the mainland from the firmer ground of the Maplin Sands. Once upon the Maplin Sands, the Broomway heads approximately 60 degrees (magnetic) towards a navigation beacon known as "the Maypole". This beacon marks the entrance to Havengore Creek. Beyond this point, travellers once had to also wade across the mouths of New England Creek and then Shelford Creek, until both were dammed in the 1920s. From the Maypole the road takes a more northerly route of approximately 50 degrees (magnetic) to the causeway leading to Asplins Head, the first of the surviving highways onto Foulness Island. From Wakering Stairs to Asplins Head is a walk of about one hour.
Since the opening of the bridge to the island, and the loss of the "brooms", the Broomway is now largely unmarked.
The BBC captures the sheer desolation of it, sending a man to brave the tide and report back.
Sixty-six of its dead are buried in the little Foulness churchyard; the other bodies were not recovered. …
Where the road met the sea wall, there was a heavy metal stop-barrier, tagged with a jay-blue graffiti scrawl. A red firing flag drooped at the foot of a tall flagpole. Beyond the stop-barrier was a bank of signs in waspy yellow-and-black type and imperative grammar, detailing bye-laws, tautologically identifying themselves as warnings, indemnifying the MoD against drownings, explosions and mud deaths, offering caveats to the walker, and grudgingly admitting that this was, indeed, the start of a public right of way:
Warning: The Broomway is unmarked and very hazardous to pedestrians.
Warning: Do not approach or touch any object as it may explode and kill you.
