Until a causeway was built to Foulness in the twentieth century, the only regular route on and off the island was the Broomway: a right of way running not along the coast but out across the open tidal sands of Maplin Sands, roughly a mile offshore at its furthest point, marked along its length by brooms (bundles of twigs lashed to poles) driven into the mud to guide travellers between the tides. It is one of the oldest documented rights of way in England, and has a serious claim to being the most dangerous, with a death toll built up over centuries that most local historians and the route's own modern guides describe as running into the hundreds, though no single comprehensive count exists.
The danger was never the walk itself in good conditions, since the sand is firm and the route direct. It was the combination of an incoming tide that returns across several miles of flat sand faster than a person can outrun it, and a fog that can descend on the estuary with almost no warning and erase every landmark, including the brooms themselves, within minutes. Travellers caught by either have historically had no recourse: no high ground exists between the mainland and the island, and the tide, once it turns, closes the route from multiple directions simultaneously. The writer Robert Macfarlane, who walked the Broomway and wrote about it at length in The Old Ways (2012), describes it as one of the most disorientating landscapes he encountered anywhere in his research. This was not because of any specific incident, but because of the sheer, featureless scale of the sand and sky once the mainland drops out of sight.
Given that history, it is not surprising that the Broomway has accumulated a body of tradition about figures glimpsed walking the sands who turn out, on approach, not to be there. It is a category of story common to disorientating, historically lethal landscapes generally, and one that needs no supernatural explanation beyond the genuine, well-documented fact that people really have died out there, in conditions exactly suited to producing exactly this kind of half-seen figure.
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