After a long winter in lockdown, two artists, Carol Donaldson and Stephen Turner, are set to escape to the North Kent Marshes in a small inflatable boat called Magwitch, named after the prisoner in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations who was imprisoned in a hulk on the Medway Estuary at Stangate Creek. Unlike the ‘real’ Magwitch, they have no plans to escape abroad, but rather they will stay to study the wetlands and wildlife on their own doorstep, camping in remote locations for five days in May 2021.

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Stephen Turner, whose work explores our difficult relationship with nature and Carol Donaldson, who wrote the book ‘On the Marshes’ will embark from the Queens Stairs in the Historic Dockyard, Chatham, their route guided by tide and current and by meetings with marshland dwellers as they progress toward a landscape of seeping ooze beyond Folly Point, to Horrid Hill, Bedlams Bottom, Ladies Hole and Barksore Marsh – all part of the last wilderness in south east England.