The premier website for SE England - visit Kent today!
The old Roman Watling Street (A2) runs almost arrow-straight between Sittingbourne and Faversham through just two villages, Teynham and Bapchild. Bapchild is much the smaller of the two but although it is a village of relatively little importance to the county generally now, during the 7th and 8th centuries it was important enough for Kings of Kent to hold Councils here. A spring on the outskirts of the village is still known as Becket's Well, although it almost certainly had less to do with the 12th century archbishop than with some much earlier inhabitant who left his name (Bacca, perhaps, or Becca) to the spot that later became the site of a pilgrims' oratory.
The village was on the route of the real Pilgrim's Way, as distinct from the long distance footpath that has been given that name and which follows, roughly, the meanderings of the much easier west-east trade route for tin, wool and other exports bound for the short sea crossings to the Continent from the Kent coast.
As recently as the late 18th century, this would have been one of the more lonely stretches of the Watling Street route between London and Dover and travellers on it were always at risk from footpads and highwaymen. Newspapers regularly reported the activities of these robbers who, according to some accounts, could behave with commendable gallantry. One such report in January 1789 told how a Whitstable man was held up near Bapchild by two men, one armed with a cutlass, the other with a pistol, and robbed of three shillings and sixpence. The robbers were said to have behaved very civilly and to have given their victim fourpence-ha'penny back 'to bear the expenses'.
There was a Saxon church at Bapchild before the present Norman St Lawrence's church was built of rough flints, to which the Tudor brick porch was added. The church is unusual in having its tower, topped by a slender broached spire, at the end of the nave. Inside, the church gives the impression of being over-endowed with fairly massive chalk-block pillars, each carved with a different design, and one of the curiosities of the church is a mammoth's tooth, said to have been found when the church was built and now displayed in a glass case. Today, the village is little more than a few shops and houses on both sides of the road, dwindling to a few scattered cottages and farm buildings on the outskirts.
High on its hill, some eight or nine miles inland from Dover, this little village, which the locals call 'Barson', is remarkable only for its church, which boasts one of the finest examples of Norman architecture and stone sculpture to be found anywhere in England. The exterior walls and doorways of St Nicholas' church are decorated with a profusion of figures of all kinds, ranging from the commonplace to the frankly bizarre. One, over the south door, is said to be a representation of Archbishop Thomas Becket. The carvings are all of 800 years old but they are still capable of capturing the imagination of visitors as they must have done when they were new, about a century after the church was founded by Hugo de Port, a sub-Constable of Dover Castle and, later, a monk at Winchester.
Most famous and most often pictured is the south doorway, with its carvings of Christ in glory giving his blessings, surrounded by a heavenly host and a variety of beasts of all kinds, most of them mythical. All round are small scenes depicting the activities of the manor house community: a minstrel, cellarer, armourer, labourer, miller, etc.
But the artist, or perhaps, artists, had a lively sense of humour, for also depicted are a dog (or perhaps a bear) playing a harp, a monkey riding on the back of a goat with a rabbit over its shoulder, a hare drinking a toast to a partridge, a horse and rider, even a couple kissing and, at the nave north door, two dancing girls, each holding one ear of a severed head.
It really is an extraordinary gallery, especially for such a small church where, in the absence of a tower, the single bell hangs in a yew tree in the yard. It has been suggested that the decorative stonework may have been brought here from a monastery at Hackington, now part of Canterbury. It was begun by Archbishop Baldwin in the 12th century but bitterly opposed by the monks of Christ Church so that after he died during a crusade in 1190 the unfinished monastery was demolished. There is certainly nothing in Kent or Sussex and little anywhere else to compare with the exuberance of the carvings that make this pretty little village unique.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in Kent, Barham has had a ringside seat for the pageant of history. The village lies among the Downs to which it has given its name and it was on those Downs that Romans camped on their way inland from their Thanet landing - William the Conqueror here met the Men of Kent and heard them swear fealty and took delivery of the hostages they surrendered against their fulfilment of that oath.
It was here that William, son of King Stephen, fell from his horse and broke his thigh on his way from Dover to meet the Earl of Flanders, and it was here that King John camped with 50,000 men in preparation for war with France.
Simon de Montfort assembled a huge army on Barham Downs in 1265, during the Barons' War, and in 1422 Henry VI came from his crowning in Paris to be met here by his Barons and Commons and escorted to Canterbury and on to London.
Margaret Duchess of Burgundy met her brother, Edward IV, in a tent on these Downs. Charles I picnicked on them during his return to London with his bride-to-be. During the Civil War, Royalist troops massed here for their attack on Dover Castle, and Charles II was welcomed home here after his long years of exile by the Kentish Regiment of Foot, in 1660.
In 1799, the village witnessed thirty-eight baptisms of infants born in the camp of 18,000 troops waiting to go to Holland and, during the Napoleonic Wars Barham Downs was again covered with the tents of an army awaiting embarkation.
There are those who will tell you that it is on Barham Downs, perhaps in one of the hundred or so burial mounds there, that the legendary lost gold statue that crops up in the lore of towns and villages throughout East Kent, lies buried. Henry VIII took the legend sufficiently seriously to order one of the mounds to be excavated and the diggers did, in fact, find gold-embellished armour.
Broome Park is a 17th century mansion designed by Inigo Jones. It is possible that this was the original of Richard Barham's Tappington Hall in his Ingoldsby Legends. During the 18th century it was the home of Henry Oxenden who, while still at Cambridge, invented an ice-yacht that had four skates, a tablecloth sail and a dragoon sword for a rudder. He tested it satisfactorily and later adapted the idea to a land yacht which he 'sailed' on Barham Downs at speeds, so they say, of up to 30 mph.
In 1911 Sir Charles Oxenden sold Broome Park to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, who made a lot of alterations, one of which was a cupboard built into the panelling of his study in which he could hide whenever he spotted a lady approaching the house, in case she turned out to be another of those suffragettes who besieged him from time to time.
An old wooden bridge called St Helen's crosses the River Medway, but has now been closed to traffic. St Margaret's Church dates back to Norman times. The old village of Barming is almost lost now among the houses and bungalows of 20th century estate development. If it is still to be glimpsed at all it is on the River Medway side of the Maidstone to Tonbridge road, but even there it is something of an 'eye of the beholder' phenomenon. Blame it on the trolley buses that used to turn round at The Bull, at the end of their shuttle service to and from Maidstone. The trolley buses are long-gone now.
St Margaret's Church is surrounded by fields on the hillside that slopes up from the river. Pre-Christian Roman remains were found near the church during the last century, including some apparently elaborate stone coffins. But after the excavators had gloated over them, they rather lost interest and went off to dig elsewhere. The coffins were lost and now no-one knows what became of them.
In 1086, the Domesday Survey distinguished East Barming, around the church, from West Barming, also known as Little Barming, and the two remained separate until the end of the 15th century, by which time the West Barming church was in ruins and the parish could not afford to support its own minister. With no West Barming to compete with, East Barming dropped its qualifying compass point and muddled through another three hundred years until the turnpike road put the village into commuting distance from Maidstone and made it a favourite spot for some of the county town's more moneyed classes to build in.
Barming Heath was chosen as the site for the new county asylum in 1828. The asylum is no longer there, and the site has been partly sold for development, whilst the remainder now houses the Maidstone Hospital.
St Helen's bridge over the river at Barming is the only major wooden bridge over the navigable Medway. Although now closed to vehicular traffic, cars used to drive over it. But it couldn't take a traction engine which attempted the crossing in 1914. The traction engine and its crew were on their way back from to Aylesford from Marden where they lost their way and were directed by a local who evidently had no idea of how much a traction engine weighed, to cross the bridge and go through Barming.
The machine took part of the bridge with it into the river where it became a major tourist attraction for a short time, after which it was winched out and towed away for repairs. Contemporary reports suggest that very little damage was done. The four crewmen all escaped with their lives and the bridge was repaired and back in use four day's later.
Of all Kent villages, few cling more tenaciously to their independent character in the face of pressure from a bloated neighbour than Bearsted does. Maidstone, the county town, has been reaching out towards it since the 1930s and in one direction the estates of both have pretty well joined together. But the old village, around the green, is still as picturesquely villagey as anywhere in the county.
The cricket ground on the green is said to be one of the oldest in Kent and it is surrounded by picturesque old houses. At opposite corners of the green are the White Horse Inn, which overlooks the village sign, and the Royal Oak, behind which is a seven-kiln oast house.
A road separates the pond from the rest of the green and another road separates the pond from more houses. A lychgate-style shelter for the site of the former village pump commemorates Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee and at the opposite end of the green a drinking fountain commemorates the silver jubilee of Elizabeth II.
Tucked away at the end of Church Lane, Holy Cross church is unique in Kent for the stone beasts perched on three corners of the top of its tower. Once generally supposed to be bears (appropriate enough for a village called Bearsted), they are now more usually supposed to represent a lion, a panther, and a griffin, and are probably the work of local stone masons, who had something of a reputation.
Stone quarrying was an important local industry in the 16th century and one of the leading families of masons was the Berties or Bartys. Robert Barty, who died in about 1501, owned a house in Maidstone and farmed in Bearsted and in 1532 Thomas Barty was Master Mason of Winchester Cathedral. Today, that part of the parish that is known as Barty includes the property still known as Barty House, now a private nursing home.
According to local legend, one night of every year the three creatures come down off the tower and stretch their legs in the churchyard before taking up their posts again, but is is difficult to find reliable eye-witnesses to the event!
In the churchyard is the ground-level stump of a Canadian cypress tree which was known as the Mourning Tree. The stump is carved with the date, 1996, when the tree was felled and in the angle formed by two paths that went round it there is a tablet inscribed: 'This tree marks the grave of John Dyke, who was hanged for rick burning in 1830 at the last public hanging at Penenden Heath. Subsequently, it was found that he was not guilty of the crime.'
In fact, years after Dyke was hanged, another man made a deathbed confession to the crime. He was buries on the opposite side of the church, so that the innocent Dyke's unjustly maligned spirit should not be offended by his proximity.
Bearsted cricket club celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1999. A Bearsted team was beaten by a London side, in London, in 1749 and there was certainly a Bearsted cricket club in 1875 because one of its members was the famous Kent cricketer Alfred Mynn, known as Mighty Mynn, the Lion of Kent. He was born in Goudhurst, the son of a gentleman farmer, and trained as an architect. But he devoted most of his life to cricket and became known as the finest all-rounder the game had ever had.
He was an eighteen-stone man, over six feet tall, yet he claimed he ate only bread and drank only beer. He was renowned as a very kindly, good-natured man and when, having neglected his business for the game, he was bankrupted as a result, friends clubbed together to pay his expenses so that he could carry on playing his beloved cricket. Mynn eventually died in London in 1861 and was buried in nearby Thurnham churchyard, but it is on Bearsted green that he is best commemorated, with a village sign which shows him, top-hatted, at the wicket.
Baroness Orczy, creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel, lived with her husband, artist Montague Barstow, at Snowfield in Bearsted. She was something of a character herself. Living like a lady of the manor, she travelled about in a carriage and four and threw tantrums if the local girls did not curtsey and the boys doff their caps when she passed. She lived in Bearsted until her death in 1947.
The poet Edward Thomas lived in Bearsted after he moved there aged twenty three with his wife Helen and son Merfyn, in 1901. The first cottage they rented is now gone and the site lost, probably under the rash of new homes on the Roseacre estate, but they later moved to Ivy Cottage, now Ivy House, which still overlooks The Green just across the road from the pond. Thomas earned a precarious living and very little recognition as a literary drudge until he turned to poetry in 1914.
He was killed in France in 1917 but in those last three years he poured out a great deal of very good poetry that earned him his place in the annuls of Kentish literature. Today, Bearsted has joined the growing number of Kent villages that have their own vineyards. Bearsted's was an orchard in the 1980s but by 1998 was producing 10,000 bottles of wine a year.
In 1705, Bekesbourne featured, if somewhat remotely, in a very odd little story told by Daniel Defoe. His journalistic instincts were so aroused by it that he published a pamphlet entitled: A True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal, the next day after her death, to one Mrs Bargrave, at Canterbury, the 8th September, 1705 - which apparition recommends the perusal of Drelincourt's Book of Consolations against the Fears of Death.
Having relieved himself of the title, Defoe summoned up enough energy to tell the tale, as told to him, of a Mrs Veal of Dover who visited her friend Mrs Bargrave in Canterbury in September 1705. Mrs Bargrave was the daughter of a Bekesbourne yeoman who had cut her off with the proverbial shilling for marrying a second time against his wishes. Her husband was a drunken maltster called Richard Bargrave who ill-treated her and no doubt fully justified the lady's Bekesbourne father in everything he had forecast when he opposed the marriage.
However, on the day of Mrs Veal's visit to her friend Mrs Bargrave, they chatted about a long journey that Mrs Veal said she was about to make. She asked Mrs Bargrave to arrange for a tombstone to be made for her mother's grave, large enough for Mrs Veal's own name to be added to the inscription in due course.
That agreed, Mrs Veal left, saying she was going to visit a cousin while she was there in Canterbury. It was only when Mrs Bargrave later learned that Mrs Veal had, in fact, died in Dover the day before her visit that she began to broadcast her experience.
The story soon circulated and even claimed the attention of Queen Anne and her consort, Prince George of Denmark, who asked a local expert to investigate the odd affair. The investigation revealed nothing to validate the story which, thanks to Mr Defoe's comprehensively titled pamphlet, survives as one of Kent's many ghost stories.
More recently, Bekesbourne was associated with another celebrated story-teller. The 18th century Old Palace was owned by Ian Fleming until 1968, during which time he wrote some of his James Bond books there. The Old Palace was built in the grounds of a palace built for Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1552 and he spent some time there before his imprisonment for treason and martyrdom at the stake in 1556.
In addition, the British film director, Michael Latham Powell (30 September 1905 – 19 February 1990), renowned for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger which produced a series of classic British films. was born in Bekesbourne.
Bekesbourne was once a borough and a limb of the Cinque Port of Hastings and during the two 20th century world wars it hosted a military airfield, but today it is just another of that string of villages threaded together by the Nailbourne stream. St Peter's church stands a little aloof from the rest of the village; a long, low flint and tiled building, the principle feature of interest of which is the Norman doorway on the north side. The village provides a postal address for the privately-owned zoo, Howlett's, which is actually just outside the village.
Benenden remains one of Kent's more tucked-away beauties, with a large village green overlooked from one end by the exceptionally large church and from the other end by some attractive old weatherboard and tile cottages. A notice in the church recalls that it was ruined by 'a storm of thunder and lightning' on December 30, 1672, rebuilt in 1677, and finished in 1678.
Today's village was very largely created by Lord Cranbook in the 1860's. Until then, it was a typical Wealden parish of scattered properties, where the names of such 16th century yeoman farmhouses as Pympne Manor, Mill House, Manor House and The Moat meant more to the locals than the name of Benenden itself did.
It may have been just that tucked-away character that attracted three young teachers from Wycombe Abbey school to it when they came in search of somewhere to open their new girls boarding school in 1924. In fact, they found Hemsted, the old manor house that was owned for four hundred years by the Guldeford family and which was visited by Elizabeth I in August 1573, when she stayed there as a guest of Sir Thomas Guldeford and his wife Elizabeth. Before she left, she commemorated the visit by planting a walnut tree, but that is now longer there, having fallen down in 1857. The last of the Guldeford owners sold the house to Admiral of the Fleet Sir John (Foulweather Jack) Norris in 1718. The house was modernised during and after Sir John's ownership and in 1766 it was inherited by his grandson, another John, whose second wife was pretty Kitty Fisher, a local girl who wiggled her way into high society's drawing rooms by way of several of its bedchambers.
Born Catherine Maria, she was a milliner of humble parentage whose social climbing brought her to the attention of pamphleteers and also of painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose model she was. Her amorous adventures brought her to the attention of others, too, including (he claimed) Casanova himself during the time he spent in London. However, after her marriage it seems she settled happily enough into the role of mistress of Hemsted. She was well regarded by local folk, very generous to the poor and, splendid horsewoman that she was, preferred to jump the gates when she went out riding rather than have gates opened for her. Unhappily, she died of smallpox only four months after her marriage and was buried, according to her own wishes, dressed in her best ball gown, in the local church.
Hemsted was rebuilt again in 1860 by Gaythorne Hardy, later Lord Cranbrook, and when Lord Rothermere bought it in 1912 he made more alterations, leaving the old house much as it is today. It is said that cattle urine and small shot was used to 'age' some of the new stonework he added. Now, Hemsted house Benenden School, one of the top private girls schools in the country which numbers Princess Anne among its old girls.
Benenden was also the home of Edward Gower Wenman, who was born there in 1803. He became a wheelwright and a noted cricketer who first played for Kent at Lords in 1828 against Marylebone. In 1834 he and another Benenden man, Richard Mills, played against eleven players from the Isle of Oxney in south Kent and scored 198 runs between them, defeating the entire Oxney XI which scored only 132 runs.
After William Cobbett took one of his Rural Rides hereabouts he wrote a testimonial to the 'singular humanity' of the people of Benenden. He was particularly impressed with the bench which was provided for the village stocks, 'so that the patient, while he is receiving the benefit of the remedy, is not exposed to the danger of catching cold by sitting on the ground.
Perhaps it was another manifestation of that 'singular humanity' that enabled Benenden to play host to the chest hospital which was established there by the Post Office in 1905 to give free medicine and treatment to tuberculosis victims among its staff. Since 1937, all Civil Service members, their wives and children have been admitted too and a new block was built in 1981, although nowadays, tuberculosis having been vanquished, patients are sufferers from a wide range of chest and respiratory illnesses.
The two Kent cathedrals, Canterbury and Rochester, as well as many humbler churches and large houses throughout the county, are embellished with Bethersden marble. The Village's own church of St Margaret has none, apart from that which paves the south porch. But then, Bethersden would have known better than most that the local stone was not real marble at all, even though it could be fashioned and polished to look very like it.
It fact, it is a product of a geological curiosity. At some period, it seems, this area was some kind of crustacean Sargasso Sea, to which a particular species of water snail resorted for what no doubt seemed good reasons at the time. The creatures died there in their millions and their shells were compressed into a rock strata during a million years or so, to be quarried as Bethersden marble in a very few short centuries.
The local people had a more practical use for it than mere interior decoration. They laid slabs of their mock marble across the sticky Wealden clay fields to make causeways, across which, pack horses loaded with raw wool and finished woollen goods could pick their way to the markets that made the local industry one of the richest in England for four hundred years.
The stone is no longer quarried and Bethersden has lost its textile industry. Not much more than a hamlet now, it is still an attractive place, with a short street lined with typically Wealden weatherboarded houses and several old hall houses.
Once it was the home of that Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet, who whiled away a term of imprisonment by philosophising that 'stone walls do not a prison make.' Those mfamous lines begin the last verse of his poem: To Althea, from prison.
He earned the opportunity for such ruminations in April 1642 after he was imprisoned in the gatehouse of Westminster Palace for trying to deliver to both Houses of Parliament the Kent Petition. The petition had been drawn up by the county's leading gentry in the name of the knights, gentry and commonalty of the county of Kent, urging a 'good understanding' between King and Parliament so that law-abiding people could abide by the laws of both and not have to choose to offend one or the other. Four months later, Civil War broke out.
Lovelace's loyalty to Charles I led him so deeply into debt that he had to sell all his lands in and around Bethersden where the church, however, is still custodian of a number of family memorials. After several slumberous centuries, Bethersden found fleeting fame in 1985 through the local engineering company of W & D Cole, which supplied new gates and railings for St Paul's Cathedral in London.
The clock on the tower of the 13th century sandstone church of St Lawrence, Bidborough, looks over the neighbouring rooftops away into a beguiling distance, and it is well worth the effort of climbing up the worn sandstone steps to the churchyard just for the windy top of the world peace and quiet to be found there.
The clock itself dates only from 1851, but it is remarkable for its long pendulum which reaches almost to the floor of the tower inside the church, where anyone who can syncronise their eye movements to the steady swing of the big round weight on the end may read the inscription:
When as a child I laughed and wept, time crept. When as a youth I dreamed and talked, time walked. When I became a full grown man, time ran. And later, as I older grew, time flew. Soon I shall find when travelling on, time gone. Will Christ have saved my soul by then? Amen
Nearby, on an adjoining tower wall is a memorial brass to Albert Peter Thurston (1881-1946) who lived in the parish for forty-two years. He was a pioneer in flying from 1902 and the first doctor of science in Aeronautics, founder of the first aeronautical laboratory in the country at the East London (Queen Mary) College. He also initiated the metal construction of aircraft. A memorial post-script adds, on a slightly reproachful note, perhaps, 'Buried at Over Wallop, Hants.'
Among the many other memorials are several to members of the Hardinge family, and under the Holy Table there is a pre-Reformation alter stone dating from 1218, with an Anglo-French inscription and five crosses.
The window in the tower, behind the sweeping pendulum, is a memorial to 'those men of Bidborough who gave their lives for the country in the Great War 1914-1918,' and the north aisle west window is particularly admired for the beauty lent to it when the setting sun shines through the coloured glass.
Bidborough was the home of Kew Gardens curator William Dallimore in 1955, and he identified a rare variety of chestnut tree which grows in and around the village. Now it is known as the Bidborough chestnut - or Aesculus Dallimorei Sealy.
In 1970 the opening of the village's new £30,000 community centre by Lord McFadzean, chairman of British Insulated Callender Cables, recalled that the site was given for the previous village hall fifty years before Sir Tom Callender himself.
If there is such a thing as a 'typical' village, Biddenden is probably what most people would like to think was just that. It began, inauspiciously enough, as one of the many 'dens' or manorial outbacks where the manors of east and north Kent kept their hogs and cut their timber. But it was already affording a degree of personal prosperity to the Chulkhurst family when their daughters, Eliza and Mary, were born in about 1100 and gave the village its abiding fame.
The girls were England's first recorded Siamese twins, joined together at shoulder and hip, and they lived together in the fullest possible sense for more than thirty years. When one of them was taken ill and died, the other refused to allow surgeons to separate her from her dead sister, saying that they had come into the world together and would leave it the same way. She died a few hours later.
They left land, later to be known as Bread and Cheese lands, income from which was to pay for a dole of bread, cheese and ale (later to be paid in tea) which is still distributed to local pensioners on Easter Monday, together with a commemorative biscuit on which is stamped a representation of the two Maids, who also feature on the very distinctive village sign.
The ceremony of distributing the dole was not always a very decorous one. In 1682 the Rector, the Rev Giles Hinton, reported to Archbishop Sancroft, 'even to this time (the custom) is with much disorder and indecency observed.' After that, the bread and cheese (but no more ale) was doled out in the church porch until the end of the 17th century, and then from the old workhouse.
After the Chulkhurst twins had lived and died, Biddenden shared the Wealden woollen wealth and a 14th century building boom bequeathed later centuries such local features as Standen, a fine old timbered house about a mile outside the village, and Biddenden Place, home of Sir John de Mayney early in the 13th century, as well as the picturesque weavers' cottages and other old houses between the small triangular village green and the church. The Red Lion inn in the High Street is said to have been built by an Agincourt veteran in 1415, and a hundred yards north of the village green is the Old Cloth Hall.
This is the core of the village, where the pavement is of ancient slabs of Bethersden marble. Like all Wealden villages, Biddenden was practically cut off every winter and sometimes throughout the year when any prolonged rain would turn the roads into a morass of mud. As recently as 1807 the Rev Edward Nares recorded that even with four horses harnessed to his carriage he could travel no more than three miles from his rectory.
In the 15th century the local weavers laid causeways of Bethersden marble along which packhorse trains could carry their loads of wool, and some remnants of those causeways are still to be found across fields and beside roads. Vane Court was once owned by a former King of Siam, and Great Batchelor was the home of Gervase Adlard (or Allard) who was Captain and Admiral of the Navy in 1272.
The little East Kent village of Bilsington takes its name from Bilswip's tun - Bilswip being a queen and abbess who owned the manor which, in 1243, belonged to two sisters and was divided into Bilsington Superior and Bilsington Inferior. St Augustine's Priory (Bilsington Superior) was built by Sir John Mansell, among whose many high offices was that of Henry III's Lord Chief Justice, and it provided shelter for pilgrims travelling to Canterbury. But the board and lodgings fees paid by the 'tourists' were evidently not the only source of the Priory's income because in 1437 the Prior was pardoned for his part in the local wool smuggling industry. He was also 'exonerated from all claim for the recovery of the King's Jewels'. It seems that Henry V left his war chest at the Priory, from which it was never recovered.
Court Lodge, immediately west of the church, from which it was separated by a moat, was the administrative centre of Bilsington Inferior. Like so many of its kind, after the Dissolution of the Priory became a farmhouse and gradually declined into ruin. It was a reputed hideout for the notorious 19th century Aldington Gang of smugglers but in 1906 it was partly restored and the red brick house that adopted its name was added to it.
In former times, the owner of the Manor of Bilsington was required to carry the last dish of the second course to the king's table and to present him with three maple cups at a coronation, a tradition that was discontinued after George IV's reign. In 1825 the house became the property of William Cosway, a baker's son who became secretary to Vice-Admiral Collingwood and who served aboard the Royal Sovereign at the Battle of Trafalgar. Sir William was a supporter of the Reform Bill and in June 1834, when Lady Cosway and their children were at Brighton, he left London on the Criterion Coach to join them. He was travelling on the outside of the coach when the horses bolted on London Bridge. The runaway coach overturned and he was thrown off and killed. He was 50 years old. Other supporters of the Bill met in Canterbury and resolved to commemorate him, as a result of which, in June 1835, work began on building a monument in Mill Field, Bilsington.
Built of Kentish ragstone, the 52 foot high obelisk became a landmark for shipping and during WW2 it had to be removed for security reasons. After the war, however, it was replaced and was struck by lightning in October 1967. It would have cost £5,000 to repair it and the village decided that Sir William's memory could be adequately preserved by the inscribed base of the monument alone. But Bilsington is not much more than a church, a pub, and a village hall and it missed its obelisk and in 1998 it gave a grateful welcome to a national lottery grant of £83,500 towards the cost of restoring the Cosway memorial and providing a footpath as the village millennium project.
Off the A28, near Margate. A relatively quiet Thanet resort with cliffs and bays on the north coast, Birchington is the burial place of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Near by stands Quex House, a fine Regency building with lovely period rooms. Adjoining the house is the Powell-Cotton Museum displaying the magnificent African and Oriental collections of the Victorian explorer and anthropologist. Quex Park is dominated by an extraordinary bell tower with a peal of 12 bells.
For nearly 600 years the Nevill family has owned land at Birling, ever since the manor came into the family by marriage in 1435. They came to England with the Conqueror and the present Marquess of Abergavenny traces his title back to Sir Ralph Nevill, sixth son of the first Earl of Westmorland, who was summoned to the English Parliament of 1450-1472 as the first Baron Bergavenny. Since then, the family has given England many famous sons, including that Richard Nevill, Earl of Warwick, who became known as Warwick the Kingmaker after his nephew won the War of the Roses and became Edward IV.
During her progress through Kent in 1573, Queen Elizabeth I stayed at Birling as the guest of one of the Lords Bergavenny. First to use the new form of the title, Abergavenny instead of Bergavenny, was William, 14th Baron, who died in 1745.
The Hon Rev William Nevill built Birling Manor in the late 1830s, having become vicar of Birling in 1816. He became the fourth Earl of Abergavenny in in 1845 and his three daughters, Caroline, Henrietta Augusta and Isobel, wood-carved the 10ft high imitation 15th century font cover of the church. The manor was destroyed by fire in 1917, but the compact little village centre around the church still includes the old forge and the village inn, which changed its name from the Bull to the Nevill Bull in 1953 in memory of Michael Nevill who was killed in WW2. The Nevill family crest features a bull's head and two chained silver bulls for supporters.
Artist Rowland Hilder's mother came from Birling. His father, Rowland Hilder, was under-butler at Birling Manor and after their marriage, Mr and Mrs Hilder emigrated to the United States in 1904. It was there, in 1905, that young Rowland was born. The family came back to England and to Birling several times, and Rowland studied art at Goldsmith's College in London. Birling is now another of those 'dormitory villages' with no school and, since 1947, no village store or Post Office.
Often dismissed in a sentence or two by guide books, Bishopsbourne is a recluse of a village set back from the main A2 Dover road. Yet it might well have become a famous venue in the 1970s if its people had not been so very adamant that they wanted no such thing. Today's villagers like it the way it is and when, in 1972, the owner of Charlton Park proposed to allow a pop festival to be held in the grounds, there was violent protest. In the event, the opponents of the idea won the day although the organisers announced that that had decided the site was not, after all, suitable.
Charlton Park, an elegant 16th century manor, was often visited by George IV during his romance with Lady Conyngham. The house had a varied career after it was taken over by the Army during WW2 and a 16 inch gun was mounted on a railway carriage nearby to bombard France, although it was not actually fired very often because it did almost as much damage to local houses as it could expect to do to its target area. After the war the house was used by the Dr Bernardo organisation as a home for some of their children. Lt Col Michael Underwood took it over from Dr Bernardo's in in 1970 and restored it. He sold it to George de Chabris, the Canadian financier and Liberal party benefactor.
The village had been chosen as the home of other celebrities before that. Theologian Richard Hooker, who died in 1600, once lived here and Joseph Conrad lived and wrote in the house known as Oswalds, near the church, where he was a neighbour and some time collaborator with Ford Madox Ford. Later, Alec Waugh and another writer. Jocelyn Brooks, also lived in the village. At one time, Sir Horace Mann, a great Kent cricketer, had a house here.
The village is a scatter of houses on the hills north of Canterbury amid the dwindled remains of the ancient Forest of Blean, the former domain of royal huntsmen and later a haunt of smugglers.The forest once wooded the whole area between the Great Stour east of Canterbury and the sea. Blean Woods, the surviving part of the forest, is a nature reserve managed as coppice with a wide variety of woodland plants and animals, and includes the belt of trees south of Seasalter. The name of this strung-out village lining the road between Canterbury and Whitstable was taken directly from the forest, which once surrounded it. The parish is more grandly titled St Cosmus and St Damian in the Blean.
Bonnington is one of those scattered Romney Marsh villages with a little church, said to be the oldest on the Marsh, remote from all habitation along a lane that leads out of the parish, across the Royal Military Canal. The church dedication, to Sir Rumwold is odd, to say the least. The saint had nothing at all to do with Kent, having been born, during the 7th century, in Northampton, the son of the King of Mercia. He was denied any opportunity to travel from there because, although he distinguished himself by preaching a sermon to his parents on his second day, he died on the third.
However, thiis was the child-saint whose image was one of the wonders of Boxley Abbey, near Maidstone, and which was unaccountably lost after its 'miraculous' properties were publicly exposed in 1538. It was, however, another image of the saint that, in 1282 played a part in the downfall of Sir Alured Denne of Bonnington Hall.
The tale is told in The Lay of St Romwold (or the Blasphemer's Warning), one of the Ingoldsby Legends, how Sir Alured earned a rebuke from the saint for swearing on his wedding day.He mended his ways until, at a royal feast, some ice cream made his tooth ache and, forgetting the little saint's warning, he swore fluently. At that point (so the legend asserts) St Romwold appeared in a window and Sir Alured's bride disappeared in a puff of perfume, leaving only her clothes behind to console her tardily repentant husband.
The church of St Peter and St Paul is reckoned to be about 800 years old and was possibly built on the site of a Roman temple by monks of Leeds Abbey. The Norman tower is the oldest part of the present church and its most eye-catching feature is the fairly elaborate carving around the west door. The parish, though, was founded in 1160 when the first vicar was appointed, and today, Borden is an undisturbed little village about a mile south-west of Sittingbourne, from which it has managed to very positively separate. The approach from Sittingbourne takes the visitor past several modern homes but where the road bends past the church, old farm buildings and some picturesque timbered cottages give a glimpse of the old village.
In 1802 the bells of Borden church were carted to Milton for shipment to the Whitechapel foundry to be recast and six months later they were rehung and rung. But before that, bells for the church were cast more or less in situ by the Wilnar brothers, Henry and John, both of whom are buried in the churchyard. Their bell-founding gave rise to one of those entertaining legends that abound in Kent villages. It was said that the Devil once paid a visit to Borden, where he was so incensed by the ringing of the church bells that he went up to the belfry and hurled one of the bells down. It fell into a nearby field which swallowed it up, leaving a hollow to mark the spot. Like most legends, there was a grain of fact among the fiction. In 1959, a ploughman in Boundary Field, the site of the legendary hollow, was responsible for the discovery of what is now believed to have been the Wilnar brothers' bell-casting pit.
The pleasant large modern village developed around the railway station between the North Downs and the Kentish orchards. The beautiful gardens of Great Comp lie just to the east. The village had its beginnings at the crossroads of the Gravesend-Tonbridge and Maidstone-Sevenoaks roads and it was natural that such a spot would attract innkeepers and other businessmen to set up shop there to serve the travelling public.
The Red Lion was, in fact, established there in 1586, the Black Horse in 1592. The Bull has been there since 1733 and the Fox and Hounds since 1827. The Rock has been there since 1872 and was a Friends Meeting House before it was converted into a public house. But it was the arrival of the railway in 1874 that began the big expansion of Borough Green. In 1877 much of the Tomlyn family's Yew Trees Farm was bought by the Beehive Shoe company of Northampton, and it was not long after that that the land was being parcelled off into small plots on which homes were built.
The railway gave new residents easy access to London and the sprawl continued. After being part in the old Wrotham borough and later Wrotham urban district, and part in Ightham, Borough Green became an independent civil parish in 1934 and is now part of the Tonbridge and Malling borough.
The village is best known for the Institution to which it gave its name. Now there are Borstal Institutions all over the country. The original was the first attempt to separate boys from men in the British prison system, and also the first attempt to cure wrongdoers instead of only punishing them. It was opened in 1904 in what had been a military prison since 1876. Today the Institution is still there, bur Borstal House behind St Matthew's Church was demolished in the 1960s and now there is a modern estate on the site.
Much less well known than the Institution but, in their way, more remarkable, are the Borstal Lamps. The story of how they came to be in St Matthew's Church was told by Donald Maxwell, author and Royal Academician, who although born in London in 1877 lived for many years in Kent and did much of his writing here, before he died at Goddington in 1936.
He told the story of the lamps in his book Unknown Kent, published in 1921. On a visit to Damascus just before WW1 he visited the Street Called Straight of Biblical renown, where he ordered from a lamp maker seven brass lamps to take back with him to hang in the church at Borstal. As it happened, he had to return to England without the lamps, fully intending to return to collect them. But in the meantime, the war began and he could not make the trip. He resigned himself to never seeing the finished set of lamps.
However, after the war was over, Mr Maxwell went back to Damascus hoping he might be able to order another set for the church. He went to the same shop where he found the same lamp maker who told him there was no need for him to have more lamps made. He could have the ones he had originally ordered. He led the Englishman to a deep cellar of his house where he showed him the lamps he had hidden away there for safekeeping throughout the war years, during which the occupying Turks had taken such things for war materials. So Mr Maxwell brought home his lamps at last and they were duly dedicated and hang now in the church. Each of the lamps is individually hand-made and unique, and they bear testimony to the honesty and the faith of the un-named Damascus lamp maker.
Alphabetically, at least, the first of the four Boughtons in Kent, the others being Boughton under Blean, near Faversham, Boughton Malherbe, between Maidstone and Ashford, and Boughton Monchelsea, near Maidstone. This one is north of Ashford and is pronounced 'Borton Alluf'. At different times it has also been known as Boughton next Wye and Boughton in the Bush.
According to Judith Glover, in her book The Place Names of Kent, the word began as Old English boc tun, literally meaning beech farmstead, but because the early books were handcut into beechwood 'pages' it came also to mean a book or, more precisely, a charter. Thus, Boughton Aluph was a farmstead or manor granted by very early charter to the Aluph family, whose connection with the village, incidentally, lasted less than a century.
The village today surrounds a large green, most of which is occupied by a cricket field and pavilion. The houses are of all ages and styles - weatherboard, brick, stucco, and even one of green corrugated iron. The most magnificent green-side building is the red-brick Flying Horse Inn.
The local pronunciation is 'Bortun Mallerby', but today only a church and some scattered farm buildings remain of the village that once supported the great mansion of the Wotton family. Successive Wotton's held various high offices and left a heritage of legends about themselves and their times. The family stemmed from that Nicholas Wotton who settled in Kent during the reign of Elizabeth I after a prosperous City career that included being twice Lord Mayor. He married a Kent heiress whose family owned Boughton Place. Among the descendents of that union was a Dean of Canterbury and York and that Sir Henry Wotton, diplomat and poet who was born at Boughton Malherbe Place in 1568.
Another Thomas, who was jailed on a charge trumped-up by friends to prevent him joining the ill-fated rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt in 1554 against Queen Mary's plan to marry Philip, heir to the Spanish throne. As a result, Wotton was able to continue in Royal favour and inherit the Boughton estate where in 1573 he entertained Elizabeth I during her Progress through Kent.
Another Wotton, Katherine, was courted as a young girl by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, but refused him because he charged what she regarded as too high a price for painting her portrait. She later married a Dutch nobleman and, when he died in 1660, she married a soldier who she also outlived. After the Wottons, the house was inherited by the Earl of Chesterfield and it was the 4th Earl - he who introduced the Gregorian calendar in England in 1742 and was accused of robbing common folk of eleven days of their lives - who plundered Boughton Malherbe Place for his great house near Park Lane in London.
Ironically, the London house has quite disappeared while Boughton Malherbe Place became a farmhouse which remains, having since been owned by the son of Galfredus Mann, once MP for Sandwich and known as The King of Cricket. One of his more memorable oddities was a game of cricket played on horseback which he promoted in 1800.
It was at Boughton Malherbe in 1574 that seventeen-year-old Mildred Norrington, known as the Pythoness of Westwell, was tried before Thomas Wotton and George Darrell. Mildred's 'possession by the Devil' attracted a lot of interest in Kent at the time. She was a servant girl in Westwell where prayerful efforts were made to cast out the devil who, however, roared his defiance at the lot of them and became so violent that poor Mildred had to be held down by four strong men. When he calmed enough to speak rationally, he blamed an old woman called Alice, who also lived in Westwell, saying that he had lived at the old woman's house, shut up in a bottle, until the woman had sent him to Mildred, with instructions to kill the girl because she did not love his mistress, Alice. After more prayers, the Devil was finally persuaded to evacuate the girl's body and leave her in peace. Later, though, Mildred confessed that she had faked the whole 'possession' and gave a demonstration to show that she could do it at will.
The Old Rectory at Boughton Malherbe is supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a hunch-back monk, and there is a story that a former rector who lived there used to give lodgings to passing tramps, just to test the reputation of the house's haunted room. According to the story, none ever stayed more than an hour or two in the room.
This village, with a population of more than 1,700, lies on a ridge overlooking the Weald of Kent. St Peter's church has 13th century work and the late medieval lychgate is one of the oldest in England. To the north of the church is Boughton Monchelsea Place, an Elizabethan battlemented manor house. Off the A229, near Maidstone, this is a modern hilltop village with views right over the Weald. The church and lovely Boughton Monchelsea Place perch halfway down steep Quarry Hills. Boughton Monchelsea Place, a splendid battlemented manor house, was built in 1567 and restored in Regency times. It is set in lovely grounds with a deer park.
Until the 1930s, Boughton Monchelsea was still a small stone-quarrying community a little way out of Maidstone, where the great excitements were likely to be the daily departure of the teams of great horses bringing the stone up from the quarries, or once a year wagons bringing hop-pickers in to the neighbourhood hop gardens. Boughton Monchelsea is bigger now, the quarrying is finished and the hop-pickers come no more. But it is still one of the more pleasant county town satellites and still very much a village, in spite of all the new growth.
What the Romans, whose villa remains were excavated in 1841, called the place, we don't know. But we do know that the family that gave its name to this particular Boughton died out in 1287 with William de Montchensie, who was prematurely interred in Wales during the under-mining of a rebellious castle. His daughter, Dionysia, owned the first known French grammar book written in English, made for her by Walter de Bibbesworth of Herefordshire. It is now in the British Museum.
It is said that on the proverbial clear day, it is possible to stand at the 15th century lychgate of St Peter's Church - a lychgate, incidentally, that claims to be one of the oldest in England - and see right across the Weald to the South Downs beyond.
Boughton Place is still there and open to visitors. It has had a number of notable owners in its long history, including Robert Rudston, who forfeited it to the Crown for his part in the Kentish Rebellion of 1554. He was imprisoned in the Tower, but after his release he was permitted to buy back the estate for two-thirds of the price he had originally paid for it just four years before.
Boughton Mount is now a school for handicapped children, but one of its former owners, John Braddick, was a West Indian trader who made a fortune and was suspected of keeping slaves in the cellars of the house before he took them to London to sell them. The house was also the home of George Foster Clarke, founder of the Maidstone factory that became famous for its custard powder and other culinary delicacies.
This is the only one of the four Kentish Boughton's that is not distinguished by a family name. The 'under Blean' refers to its geographical situation - or, more accurately, south of - the old Forest of Blean. Unlike the others, it is the only one that is commonly known simply as Boughton - logically enough since the forest has long since dwindled away into a few whisps of scattered woodland.
Until 1976 this was one of a string of traffic tormented A2 Dover Road villages. Like the others, it grew up along the great Watling Street highway after travelling habits forsook the much older Pilgrims Way, beside which Boughton's church of St Peter and St Paul was built, a mile away from the present village at Boughton Street.
The main street is lined with attractive houses of all ages - like the big old timbered houses that introduce the village to arrivals from the Faversham end, and the 15th century White Horse Inn opposite - from medieval to Victorian and modern, some virtually at the roadside, some, like those at the Queen's Head end looking down haughtily from a-top a grassy bank.
To the north of Maidstone, below the North Downs, is a small, pleasant village of weatherboarded and red brick cottages. The 13th century All Saints' Church retains part of an earlier Norman church. The remains of Boxley Abbey can be found to the west of the village. Boxley has links with the poet Tennyson. His works, In Memoriam, The Brook, and Prologue to the Princess, are all associated with the village. The parish includes the village and two suburbs, Grove Green and Walderslade.
Today Boxley lives in retirement along a narrow lane, not so much at the foot of the North Downs as ankle-high on them. There are a few houses, a pub, the church and the abbey remains, and just discreetly distanced from everything else, Boxley House Hotel which attracts a number of visitors because of its reputation for being haunted by the ghost of a former butler who hanged himself after being accused of theft. The House was the home of the Maidstone brewery family Styles from 1865 until 1945, after which it became a boys school. In 1966 plans for a zoo there were turned down and in 1967 it became Boxley Country Club and later the hotel it is now.
Boxley Abbey was once famous, and later notorious, for its miraculous Rood of Grace and its wondrous statue of St Rumwold. The two were, for pilgrims trekking to Canterbury, rather like the lions of Longleat or the old cars at Beaulieu - an attraction not to be missed by anyone passing that way. The Rood was a figure of Christ on the cross, made of wood, wire, paste and paper, so that it could move and even weep most realistically in the incensed dimness of the Abbey. The statue was reputed to be movable only by anyone who lived a pure life, the degree of purity being judged by the weight of the donation handed to the monk in charge who could, if suitably motivated, operate a discreet ratchet to assist the pious pilgrim's efforts.
Like the lions and the old cars, the two marvels were big money earners for the abbey, but their secrets were revealed to a gawping public in Maidstone marketplace before the Rood was taken off to publicly burned in St Paul's churchyard in London after the abbey was closed in 1538. The mechanical statue of St Rumwold escaped a similar fate by being lost, probably when it fell off the back of a wagon on its way to London. It was, after all, a nice piece of timber if nothing more. What remains of the old abbey is now a private house inside the abbey walls and a fine 13th century tithe barn, two hundred feet long.
It was at Brasted Place that Prince Louis, later Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who gave so much trouble to so much of Europe until the Duke of Wellington put in the boot once and for all at Waterloo, dreamed of re-conquering France. He drilled his handful of zealots in the splendid parkland around the house at Brasted and in August 1840 decided the time had come to take his little band of fifty-six followers and fulfil his destiny. They crossed the Channel to Boulogne, but were immediately rounded up with the minimum of fuss and imprisoned.
Louis was tried and sentenced to permanent confinement in a fortress, but he escaped and returned to Britain in 1846, and was back in France two years later to become at first President of the second Republic and later Emperor of France in 1852. Twenty years later after The Fall of The Empire he and his Empress Eugenie were back in England, at Chislehurst, where he died in January 1873.
A former Rector of Brasted, a Mr Skinner, who did not live there, wrote in 1788 that the parish appeared to be remarkably healthy, its inhabitants very quiet, good sort of people, rather less polished and perhaps less corrupted than might be expected so near the capital. Brasted is, in fact, about 25 miles from London.
Nearby there are several lovely old houses, including Brasted Place, which is one of the only two Kent houses designed by Robert Adam. The other is at Mersham-le-Hatch, near Ashford. Built in the Palladian style in 1784 for John Turton, who was George III's physician, it was later altered with French Renaissance style additions.
Bredgar is one of those hideaway Downland villages, 350 feet up on the north slopes of the North Downs. The M2 has cut away the north end of the village, which is roughly bisected by the B2163 Sittingbourne-Hollingbourne road, with a nucleus formed by the pond and the church. The typically Downland flint church of St John the Baptist at Bredgar has drawn the village round it for something like 800 years and looks set to do so for many more years yet. There has been a church here certainly since the 11th century although the present one is mainly late 14th century, probably on the site of an earlier wooden one. Its tower doorway is one of those that are distinguished by surviving Norman stone decoration, probably preserved from an older building.
Buildings around the church and pond include several prominent old timber houses and behind trees near the pond lies the College which was founded by Robert de Bradegar in 1393. In his Second Kentish Patchwork, Kent author Robert Goodsall quoted a Kentish Gazette story of July 1768 about a Mr Cary, a shoemaker from Leeds, near Hollingbourne, who was returning from a Bredgar feast when he was stopped by footpads and robbed of eight guineas, fifteen shillings and sixpence. The story concluded: 'It was thought they dogged him from Bredgar.'
The main claim to fame of the village currently, is the Bredgar and Wormshill Light Railway, a privately owned light railway with two narrow-gauge steam locomotives and other attractions. The working museum is the result of the passion shared by two brothers for collecting and restoring narrow-gauge steam engines.
The North Downs, more than anywhere else in Kent, delight in conducting travellers on rambling tours of their pleasures, punctuating the route with secretive signposts that hide their clues among wayside foliage or take almost audible delight in repeating again and again that your destination is still the same distance from the next junction as it was from the last.
It is a phenomenon the traveller through the Downs will experience often and some of the approaches to Bredhurst will demonstrate it very well. Having found it, there may well be a temptation to wonder if it was really worth the trouble. There is little enough to see apart from the Bull Inn, which has been there since Tudor times, and its neighbouring group of old cottages, opposite the school (founded in 1866), and a straggle of mainly relatively new and some very modern houses in and immediately around the village itself.
Bredhurst Manor was acquired by the Treasury under orders from Edward III and given to the chapel founded by King Stephen which Edward completed. John of Gaunt bought it in 1379 and Richard II gave it to Sir Simon Burley in 1384. He lost it, however, after he was accused of high treason in 1390 and by 1551 the manor had passed into the ownership of Sir Thomas Cheney. When the local Kemsley family took it over later in the 16th century, Isabel Kemsley stipulated that her son John should hold 'a drinking' in the village on All Saints' Day. That particular tradition was continued until the 19th century, by which time the manor had come into the possession of the Romilly family. Their ownership ended when the widow of the fourth Baron Romilly, William Guy Gospard Romilly (who died in 1983), sold it.
St Peter's church at Bredhurst squats among woodland, just properly aloof from its congregation, with an adequate area for car parking bitten out of the woods and an additional detached churchyard on the opposite side of the lane. It is a typically Downland flint church, apparently unsure whether it is most proud of its 13th century origins or its 19th century additions, including the little bellcote with its two bells.
Despite its size - the population of Bredhurst in 1990 was just 330 - the village is very much alive and thriving. It has had its own parish council since 1975 and in 1998 it welcomed news of the success of its campaign to keep heavy lorries - working on the twin projects of M2 widening and Channel Tunnel rail link building - out of the village centre.
The main street of the village has been described as one of the finest in England. There are several very attractive old timbered houses, as well as a number of newer ones that have almost completed the amalgamation of Brenchley with neighbouring Matfield. A feature of the 13th century church of All Saints is the avenue of four hundred year-old yews which, according to records of 18th century Brenchley were then kept clipped by men who were paid a quart of beer per tree for their labour. The Kentish rebel leader Wat Tyler is said to have lived in a cottage near Brenchley before he led revolting peasants to air their grievances to young Richard II in London in 1381.
The Old Palace, bought by Tonbridge rural council in 1960, and now a row of much-restored half-timbered cottages near the village centre, was once the home of Nell Gwynn's son, George Beauclerk, Duke of St Albans. Just outside the village is Brattles Grange, a 16th century house where Kent historian William Lambarde lived for a time.
Brenchley was one of the iron-founding centres of The Weald where industrial prosperity was succeeded by the agricultural well-being that depended upon the local orchards and hop gardens.
In the Romney Marsh village of Brenzett lived a fairly remarkable man called Capt John Noel, who had been the official photographer with the Everest expedition that tackled the north face of the then unconquered mountain in 1922 and then in 1924. Capt Noel was, in fact, also one of the last to see George Mallory and Andrew Irvine that day in June 1924 when they left the main party in their bid for the mist-shrouded summit from which they never returned.
That 1924 expedition disproved the belief, commonly held by climbers until then, that men could not live above 24,000 feet without extra oxygen. Members of the team reached a new record height of 27,000 feet and Capt Noel himself won a record by living and working at 23,000 feet for two and a half weeks without supplementary oxygen. Afterwards, he travelled the world lecturing and exhibiting some of the photographs he took on that expedition, and he lived to share the excitement of that June 1953 Coronation Day news that a Commonwealth expedition had conquered the mountain at last.
In 1823, William Cobbett, on one of his Rural Rides, wrote that he found Brenzett a miserable place where he had difficulty getting a rasher of bacon for breakfast and had to go without an egg altogether. But he did comment that the surrounding farmlands looked to him to be full of sheep and cattle 'fatting', as he called it and fields loaded with corn.
It hasn't changed all that much in 178 years. Between times, Rudyard Kipling found Brenzett and seemed to enjoy the solitude of its Romney Marsh remoteness which, presumably, inspired him to write:
I've lost my mind for to cut and run
On a Marsh that was old when Kings begun
Oh, Romney Level and Brenzett reeds
I reckon you know what my mind needs
Brenzett is a crossroads village on the A259 between Old Romney and Appledore. The only really significant building is St Eanswith's church: an old grey rubble-walled building, the oldest parts of which date from the 12th century. Very few Kent churches, even here on the Marsh where time never seems to have quite the same relevance as it does elsewhere, cling to the names of Saxon saints like St Eanswith. She was a grand-daughter of King Ethelbert who welcomed Augustine's little band of missionaries to Kent in AD 597, and the founder, in AD 630, of the first nunnery in England at Folkestone.
The first miracle accredited to her was performed during the building of the nunnery when one of the beams was cut too short by a carpenter andshe caused it to be extended to the right length by the power of prayer alone.The village is also home to an aeronautical museum, just a short distance outside the village centre.
Villagers of Bridge made world-wide headlines in the 1960s and 1970s during their fourteen year campaign for a bypass that would take the A2 London-Dover traffic out of their village. It all began in January 1962 when pensioner George Smith walked to the village to buy sweets and cigarettes for friends at the local hospital. As he left the shop he was knocked down and killed. The incident was the last straw for villagers who had been predicting some such tragedy as a result of the ever-increasing and increasingly heavy traffic that was thundering along the A2, right through the middle of the Bridge.
Authority promised a bypass would be built, but was carefully non-committal about exactly when. Then in 1963, two lories and a bus collided in the main street and the campaign for a bypass gathered momentum. By 1964 the villagers decided the time had come for action and they blocked the street by walking in it, causing delays for Easter traffic.
There were other demonstrations, too, until in 1969 they held the first of a series of sit-down protests - actually sitting down in the road, en masse, forcing traffic to a complete halt. Of course, they were moved, but when in 1972 a meat truck demolished a shop, trapping a young girl and killing the driver, the villagers repeated their sit-down protest, this time with 300 of them filling the road.
Later that year, more than a thousand people joined in yet another similar demonstration and closed the village street to all traffic for an hour. The tail-back was impressive and it showed what could be done - what the villagers vowed would be done, too, as often as it took to get the action they demanded.
Until the completion of the M2, the A2 was, after all, one of Britain's major highways, linking London with Dover and the Continental mainland even though, in those days, it was little more than a country lane in places. Repeated disruptions of this kind had to be avoided if carriers and tourists, both British and Continental, were not to be angered by delays, and trade affected.
This time the Government promised urgent action and work began on the bypass the following year. The village victory over Government delays inspired a theatrical performance called The Road Show scripted by Peter Watson of Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre Company, which toured the South-East during 1977. By that time, life in the village had returned to something like the residents were prepared to accept as normal. It was a very famous victory indeed.
The village takes its name from the bridges that, for centuries, have crossed the Little Stour (also known as the Nailbourne) and were responsible for the settlement that grew up at this crossing point along the old Roman Dover-London road. Apart from the present 18th century bridge, which is not an intrusive feature, the most prominent village building is the church, which retains Norman details among its much restored fabric. Bridge was formerly the manor of Blackmansbury which, until the Reformation, was one of the many possessions of St Augustine's Abbey at Canterbury.
Bridge House was built during the 17th century by Sir Arnold Braems, a Royalist who made his fortune developing Dover seafront - and lost it building Bridge House. At the time, it was one of the largest houses in East Kent, with an avenue of trees lining the path from the house to nearby St Peter's church. His son, Walter, inherited the estate and after he died in 1692 his widow sold it to a John Taylor, who demolished most of the house. What remained was later bought by the Marquis of Conyngham and became part of the Bifrons estate.
A more recent resident was Count Louis Zborowski, the multi-millionaire racing car driver and miniature railway enthusiast. He was partly responsible for the famous Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway and almost wholly responsible for the Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang cars made at least as famous by the Disney film of the same name. He drove for the Aston Martin Company in Europe and the USA and was killed in 1924, when he was only 29, while competing in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
Other notable local houses include Higham Park in its spectacular 17th century landscape park and gardens, which are open to the public on specified days throughout the summer.
Of all the many interesting features of the Romney Marsh villages, the wooden belfry of St Augustine's Church at Brookland is surely the most remarked upon. It is, certainly a curiosity, a great wooden octagonal pyramid in the churchyard, apart from the church itself, commanding attention on the approach road to the village. It is taller than the church and topped by a winged dragon weather vane that makes it even taller.
All sorts of tales are told about why the belfry should be alongside the church instead of, as more usually, on top of it. The most likely prosaic explanation is the its builders, in the 13th or 14th century, recognized that the reclaimed marshland on which the church stood would not support the extra weight of the bells. So they hung them in the churchyard were they were later enclosed in the rather odd shingled three-tier structure we see today.
Much more popular, though, is the local story that the belfry did, once, stand on the tower and that, the village having relaxed its morals somewhat, the church was so shaken (literally) one day when a young virgin came to ask the vicar to marry her to one of the local lads, that the belfry toppled down and has remained earthbound ever since. St Augustine's Church is also famous for its circular lead font, which is generally supposed to have been carried back to Brookland as spoils of war from one of the many raids on France during the 13th and 14th centuries.
Like many of the Romney Marsh villages, Brookland used to be noted for its medieval Passion Plays, and the Brookland players not only entertained their own villagers but also travelled to give performances in other towns and villages on the Marsh. These plays were all based on Bible stories and while some were common to all, several groups of players developed their own specialisations. Later, Brookland also became a centre for Romney Marsh sports and games meetings, and no doubt the old Kentish games of Bat and Trap and goal-running were played there.
Brookland lies on the Rye road and could hardly have escaped involvement in the Romney Marsh smuggling trade if it had wanted to. In fact, its villagers engages in the trade as enthusiastically as practically anyone else in this part of Kent, although the village featured rather more prominently than it might have wished in one encounter between smugglers and the forces of law in 1821, when the notorious Aldington Gang, known as The Blues, fought a pitched battle with Preventivemen just outside the village.
On that occasion, as on previous ones, Brookland's Dr Ralph Hougham of Pear Tree House was called upon to tend the wounds on both sides. Doctoring wounded smugglers with the necessary discretion - and, no doubt, for the appropriate rewards - was part of the common experience of medical men, especially in the Romney Marsh villages and towns, for centuries. Dr Hougham carried about with him a specially made tooled leather wallet containing medicines and instruments so that he was always prepared for just such emergencies.
This picturesque hamlet lies to the south east of Leeds Castle. The 12th century church, St Margaret's, is the resting place of several notable people including Frederick Hollands, a county cricketer from 1849-1859, bell-founder Joseph Hatch, the Wykeham-Martin family and members as of the Fairfax family, both of Leeds Castle. A 1,000 year-old yew tree stands in its churchyard. Broomfield was also the home of George Broadbridge, a protestant martyr, burned to death for his faith in 1555.
Burham moved inland about a mile during the 19th century after whatever prosperity it had stopped coming from its river frontage and began to be provided by the new cement works. From very small beginnings, Burham grew rapidly to house a population of about 500 in 1851 to almost 2,000 by 1990. It was during this period of growth that the old waterside church became too small and too distant and a rather grand new one was built, for the 'new' village.
It lasted less than a hundred years, however, whereas that old one, down by the waterside, is still standing and was restored in 1956 after being disused for many years. In its churchyard is a rather curious stone with a twisted face on it, and the words:
Behold Burham's Belle, a delight
With her curls assymetric and tight
Let us hope her biz
Was as straight as her Phiz
And she kept, like her Nose, to the Right
Most of the houses built for the cement workers have been cleared away now and replaced by modern houses for today's migrant workers. Great Culland House lasted from 1592 until 1953 and then it was pulled down. While it lasted, though, the French Ambassador to Elizabeth I stayed there to be near his friend Sir Walter Raleigh who was staying at nearby Aylesford Friary. The old house, though gone, is not forgotten, nor will be while the great dog or man-powered wooden treadmill which used to draw water from the nearby well, remains preserved outside Maidstone museum.
Burmarsh is one of the earliest known Romney Marsh settlements. The manor of Burmarsh was given to St Augustine's Priory at Canterbury before 1066 and there is still a farm called Abbott's Court north of the village. Although much of the present All Saints' church is Norman, the chancel may once have been a Saxon chapel. A memorial tablet inside the church commemorates Edward Coleman, the first veterinary surgeon-general to the British Army cavalry.
Next to the churchyard is that other indispensable feature of any Kentish village, the inn - in this case the Shepherd and Crook. A wholly appropriate designation for a village that, like all Romney marsh villages, still dwells upon the days when the famous flocks of sheep were the true Lords of the Levels even though, today, much of the former pasture has surrendered to the plough.