The remains of Tollesbury Pier station

My mother's mother's family all come from Tollesbury, a village on the Blackwater estuary in Essex.

Now something of a yachting resort, it was long an insular place. When it featured in Griffith Rhys Jones's Restoration Village series, my mother told me she had been at Sunday school with one of the women featured and that we were distantly related to the other.

The railway did not reach Tollesbury until the 20th century, when it finally found itself at the end of a branch from Kelvedon.

That line extended past the village ending by the estuary mud at a station optimistically called Tollesbury Pier.There were plans for development there, but they never materialised.

This video shows what little remains of Tollesbury Pier station today.

I have faint memories of visiting the site as a very small boy and of there being more traces of the station in place. But as that was more than 50 years ago, it is hardly surprising.