page_title: Riverside Country Park
section_title: Horrid Hill
hierarchical_section_title: Riverside Country Park / History / Horrid Hill
caption_attribution_description: English: Horrid Hill Horrid Hill was an island until a causeway was built to allow a small horse-drawn railway to carry wagonloads of chalk, quarried from Twydall chalk pit, to the cement works. Warship hulks containing French prisoners of war were moored here during the Napoleonic Wars. It is now part of Riverside Country Park. Seen at low-tide, with groynes helping protect the peninsula. Isle of Grain Power Station seen in background on righthand side.
context_page_description: Riverside Country Park is a large coastal public park, situated alongside the River Medway estuary between Gillingham and Rainham. The park covers about 100 hectares - approximately 247 acres. There are a variety of natural habitats within the park, including mudflats and salt marsh, ponds and reed-beds, grassland and scrub, which provide a haven for wildlife.
context_section_description: In the 1860s, Alfred Castle used to moor his vessels in Sharp's Green Bay (see more later), to collect chalk from a nearby quarry in Twydall, before heading across the water to his two cement works on Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey. The chalk was carted to the barges from the quarry, then the barges would be loaded at low tide, as the draught (draft (hull) of the vessel would require more water under the keel to float off the mud. Due to tidal constraints, the barges were loaded by hand.  Castle later built a wooden jetty further down the channel leading to a small peninsula in the river. This then allowed the barges to load at high and low tides. Later, to improve the speed of loading, he built a narrow gauge horse-drawn railway from the quarry to the new wooden jetty. Trucks on the railway had side-tippers, so could just tip their loads into the barges. The chalk was then transported to Queenborough via seven barges, owned by Alfred and his brother James. The works produced 400 tons of cement a week.
  In 1890, Joseph Wilders and Franic Joseph Carey were searching for a coastal site of their own cement works. An agreement was made with Alfred Castle to use the eastern side of the peninsula. The new works required some land reclamation, by constructing an extension to the existing causeway and extending the railway out to the works on the island. It was one of the smallest cement works on record. A wharf of timber and concrete was also built to enable barges to unload coke and clay. When the works were fully operational, Carey and Wilders employed a minimum of men who were on a shift system. It was a very bleak place to work, especially during the winter months. It gained the nickname Horrid Hill 
  The cement works closed in 1910, but chalk was still quarried and supplied the cement works in Queenborough for many years. The last vessel to berth there was a barge, the "Dick Turpin", which subsequently ran aground in the estuary off Horrid Hill in 1913. Some of its cargo of Dundee marmalade jars can still be recovered in the River Medway.
caption: The ruins of the cement works at Horrid Hill
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