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Canterbury is a bustling modern city of venerable age, and a place of pilgrimage for the historically minded. It was the capital of the Iron Age kingdom of the Cantii, the name survives in today's city and in the county of Kent, and then an important Roman town. In AD 602, St. Augustine re-dedicated a deserted Roman church within the city wall, creating Christchurch Cathedral, and Canterbury has been the spiritual capital of England ever since. By c1100 it also had a Norman Castle.
The cathedral was rebuilt between 1170 and 1175, creating the bulk of the present magnificent Gothic building. The nave was rebuilt again in 1380 and the great tower went up in 1500. The shrine of Thomas a Becket, murdered here in 1170, was particularly sumptuous. For 200 years it was, Rome apart, the most popular shrine in Europe, thronged by pilgrims, most of whom travelled from London, as did Chaucer's famous group of 1388. The shrine declined in the 15th century and in 1538 it was wrecked by Henry VIII's officers.
Industry flourished when 16th century Flemish refugees set up a woollen cloth industry, while in the late 17th century Huguenot refugees developed silk weaving. The Weavers' House in the High Street dates from this time, as does St. Dunstan's Street.
Devastating bombing in World War 2 destroyed much of the city's heart, but the cathedral survived, as do many timber-framed buildings of the 16th and 17th centuries. Particularly good are Mercery Lane with overhanging buildings and glimpses of the cathedral, and the tiny butter market outside Christchurch Gate of 1517. Post-war clearance has opened up the area around the medieval walls which run along the Roman lines. Canterbury became a university city in 1962 when the University of Kent was built on a hill to the north.
Information for visitors to Canterbury can be found at the Canterbury Tourism website.
There is a distinctly new look about this little village overlooking the Straits of Dover. St Radigund's church was dedicated by the Bishop of Dover as recently as 1966, its building, like that of the new primary school, made necessary by all the new development that has pretty well overwhelmed the original old village.
One of the new reminders that the place has a history is the old Norman church of St Mary. Now redundant, it seems to have been shouldered aside to dream away its dotage in a rural retirement that has little relevance to the present village that has mushroomed alongside the Folkestone-Dover road. Yet the new church was built with a piece of stone from the ruined St Radigund's Abbey incorporated into it, a nod, at least, in direction of historical continuity, and there have been claims that the Royal Oak pub could date from 1100.
But, for the rest, a few 20th century years of WW2 have left more evidence than all the centuries before. This was the site of a gun battery, 400 feet above the Channel, from which 16-inch guns shelled Occupied France, visible on a clear day from the cliff tops. The site was fortified at a cost of œ2m, with deep underground installations that included a hospital, ammunition store and barrack rooms and consumed thousands of tons of concrete. The site is marked with the Battle of Britain memorial: the figure of a fighter pilot, which was unveiled by the Queen Mother in 1993. The stone base is carved with the crests of 66 RAF squadrons that fought in the Battle in 1940 and there are various other wartime relics still remaining in the vicinity.
The roadside pub, the Valiant Sailor, was there in 1855, in front of the spot known as Steddy Hole. This was the scene of a notorious murder when a Serbian soldier called Dedea Redanies, who was serving with the British Army and stationed at Shorncliffe, killed an eighteen year old Dover girl, Caroline Back, and her sixteen year old sister Maria.
Redanies had courted Caroline for some time and her parents agreed to let her go with him to see his sister in Folkestone on condition that Maria went too. But it seems Caroline gave Redanies cause to suspect she was less serious about him than he was about her and when they reached Steddy Hole, according to his subsequent confession, he stabbed first Maria and the Caroline to death, leaving their bodies there while he went on towards Canterbury, where he was arrested.
The crime caused quite a stir at the time, as did his trial at Maidstone Assizes. His execution on New Year's Day 1857 was witnessed by a crowd of up to 5,000 people filling the street in front of the scaffold, on top of the porter's lodge of Maidstone Prison.
If it had not been for Charles Dickens, the village of Chalk might well have been forgotten by now, absorbed into the sprawl of Gravesend. But whatever else is forgotten about it, Chalk will be remembered for a long time yet as the place where Charles Dickens spent his honeymoon in 1836. His bride, Catherine (Kate) was the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. When they went there, they intended to spend two weeks in the village, but in the event Dickens could only spare one week away from his increasingly demanding work on the first instalments of The Pickwick Papers, the work that really established him as an important literary figure of his time.
They returned to the honeymoon cottage a year later, however, to help Kate over a rather difficult period of post-natal depression. Later, of course, Dickens was to use the old forge in Lower Higham Road at Chalk as the model for Joe Gargery's forge in Great Expectations. The forge is still there. Mr A Mann, the last of a long line of village blacksmiths who toiled in the forge, retired in November 1953, but the forge remains, albeit in a fairly dilapidated state now.
Another literary association with Chalk is that which Richard Barham gave it in his Legend of the Ingoldsby Penance, which tells how it was that the ghost of the former Sir Ingoldsby Bray, who founded Ingoldsby Abbey alongside the Rochester Road at Gravesend, came to haunt the ruined walls of the vanished abbey.
There is, though, no literature to identify for us the merry little fellow carved in stone over the porch of thechurch of St Mary the Virgin. He has been described as holding a flagon between his thighs and Ireland, in his History of the County of Kent in 1830, supposed the undeniably tipsy-looking figure was an embodiment of the the old custom among villagers of brewing the Whitsuntide strong ale with which to lubricate the seasonal merrymaking, and which was known as Church Ale. It has also been suggested that this is none other than Puck, the mischievous and sometimes pretty lewd little imp whose ancestry can be traced back to pagan mythology.
If a claim of a Challock nurseryman in 1983 had been upheld, the village might well have become world famous. Instead, it continues to lie unnoticed from the A252 between Charing and Chilham, behind the Lees and amid the Forestry Commission's Challock Forest. The claim was made by the local Kent Country Nurseries that it had developed a blue dahlia. So, naturally enough, there was a lot of interest when the nursery catalogue offered its customers blue dahlias. Unfortunately, a claim was lodged against the company under the Trades Description Act alleging the 'blue' dahlia was in fact no such thing and the judgment against the nursery decided that the colour was actually purple and not the blue that gardeners had been trying to develop for a century, almost ever since the dahlia first came to Britain from Mexico in 1804.
Challock is one of two villages in Kent with a church dedicated to the Arabian medics Cosmus and Damian. The other is at Blean, near Canterbury. The church at Challock is well removed from the village - or more correctly the village is well removed from the church, for like several other villages in Kent and elsewhere, Challock was hard hit by the Black Death in the 14th century and the villagers moved away from the old plague-ridden centre of population and started again on a new site, a mile away, leaving their old church where it was.
They might well have lost it during WW2, when it was badly bomb damaged in 1943, but it survived to be largely rebuilt and rededicated in 1958. During rebuilding, a series of wall paintings were added. Roundels depicting scenes from the lives of the two saints were made in 1953 by two students, Rosemary Aldridge and Doreen Lister and other paintings, in the chancel, were added in 1955 by John Ward, RA, the book illustrator. They show scenes from the life of Christ, with the figures in modern dress.
In 1982, a sanctuary chair was stolen from the church but local craftsman David Tomkins made a new one carved from Kent oak which will, in time, no doubt become as much a church antiquity as the lost one was.
Heaven knows what Charing might have looked like today if it had become the Kentish Klondike some of the locals thought it might in George V's silver jubilee year, 1935. That was the year that gold and silver was found in them thar Charing Hills. But there was no gold rush. The quantities turned out to be too small to bother with at half an ounce of gold and twenty-three ounces of silver per ton of clay. So Charing remained the attractive hillside village on the south slopes of the North Downs that it had been for centuries and still is today. The A20 Maidstone-Ashford and Folkestone road cuts through it, separating the main village from a cluster of houses and the railway station on its southern side.
It has always been a much-visited village because it is on the route of the old Pilgrim's Way, which was old long before the Canterbury pilgrims trod it. Archbishops of Canterbury used to stay at the manor house (now Palace Farm, just outside the churchyard) so that it became known as the Archbishop's Palace and it was probably the 14th century Archbishop John Stafford who built the Gate House, the great archway of which alone still stands. The former banqueting hall, where some of the four thousand men and women who travelled with Henry VIII on his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 were entertained, is now a huge barn on the north side of the church. It is still the local custom whenever an Archbishop of Canterbury visits Charing for him to robe at the old palace, by courtesy of the present owner, before he goes into the church.
In 1590, the church of St Peter and Paul was very badly damaged by a fire caused, according to contemporary records, by the discharge of a gun by a Mr Dios while he was out bird shooting. The day was very hot, the wooden shingles on the church roof very dry, and the hot shot started a fire which burned so fiercely that the bells in the steeple melted. When the church was rebuilt, it was equipped with only one bell. But today, the church has six bells, given by Bishop Tufnell in 1878.
Near the church door is a stone commemorating Quarter Master Thomas Loftus of the 52nd Foot Regiment, who was wounded at The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first engagements of the American War of Independence in June 1775. The boy who once rang the former single bell at Charing church was Toby Ward, who wrote his memoirs in 1933, recalling life in the village from 1868. He recorded that his grandfather was the last toll keeper at Charing.
Another local man, a surgeon called Charles Wilkes who died in 1873 aged 70, is remembered by the Wilkes Memorial Hall in Ashford, and he had a brother, Rev William Wilkes, who became a Fellow and secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society and earned as his memorial a cooking apple which was named after him.
On Charing Hill, which rears above the village on the north side, was one of the several secret hideouts dug and fitted out for a proposed British resistance movement if the Germans had invaded Kent during 1940.
At the foot of the North Downs, and just off the A28 south west of Canterbury, the village boasts a nice mixture of old and new, from the roadside 18th century cottages beside the 11th century Artichoke Inn to the bungalows nearer the river. The river Stour divides just outside the village to provide two courses through it. In the past, those streams were sources of water power for local mills, and today one of them still provides some of the water that is essential to the manufacture of paper at the Wiggins Teape paper mill.
Paper making has been a major occupation in Chartham for more than six hundred years, although the present mill was opened in 1949. In 1793, an advertisement in the London General Evening Post advertised the Chartham Mills for sale, as 'New-built by Peter Arder, lately deceased'. William Weatherly bought the mills in 1798 and it was a nephew of his who later introduced straw into paper-making technology for the first time. In 1939, the Chartham mill was a strategic war-time site producing all the tracing paper Britain needed, which was rather a lot at the time because tracing paper is a necessary tool of designers, whether they are making tanks or inventing radar. The mills were destroyed by fire in 1857 and rebuilt in 1860, and Wiggins Teape rebuilt and re-equipped the mill again in 1949.
On the A2, this is a busy town on the River Medway with a history of ship-building. It was first used as safer anchorage than Portsmouth by Henry VIII and was developed by Elizabeth I against the Armada, when a large arsenal and dockyard were built. Chatham prospered, but in 1667 the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and burnt the English fleet. In response, forts were built along the river. The Napoleonic Wars saw further dockyard expansion and Nelson's HMS Victory was launched there.
As a child, the novelist Charles Dickens lived in Chatham where his father worked in the Navy Pay Office. Chatham remained England's prime naval dockyard throughout the 19th century, and with the arrival of cement and engineering industries, became the largest industrial centre in Kent. Today, the dockyard is now an important tourist attraction run as a living museum with flags, sails and rope made in the time-honoured way.
Additional information about Chatham and the other Medway Towns can be found at the Historic Medway, Medway Borough Council and City of Rochester websites.
With a population of more than 800, this village enjoys an outstanding view across the Kentish Weald. Tenterden Church is clearly seen to the south east and the Surrey hills to the west. St Michael's Church has a 14th century tower and a west door dating back to 1616. The naive was rebuilt in 1780-82 following a fire.
With Sutton Valence and East Sutton, Chart Sutton is one of the Three Suttons, triplet parishes, occupying an east-west strip of countryside that tumbles down a steep hillside into The Weald. It is a modest enough little village of some two hundred and fifty homes, with nothing very much to boast about except superb views and one or two interesting former inhabitants.
Sydney Wooderson - the miler who ran in the Munich Olympics in 1938, Sir Edward Hayle - who took part in the Royalist rising in Kent in 1648, acquired Norton Court at Chart Sutton in 1960, Stephen Norton - 14th century bell-founder, who built Norman Court.
If it lacks a school (which the proprietor of Underhill independent school will surely deny that it does) and a resident vicar of its own, at least it still has a shop and post office, which is more than many villages can say now. It has a couple of pubs, and a village hall and quite a lot of village organisations, for its size, as well as those, like the Three Suttons Society, it shares with its sibling Suttons. There used to be a village school. It was opened for the first time in October 1865 with four boys and two girls - although the schoolmistress at the time, Miss Martin, did record in the new school log-book that it was very wet. By the spring of 1866, there were 55 pupils at the school.
St Michael's Church was burned to ashes in April 1779, yet by November 1782 it had been rebuilt and was again being used for services, which says something for the resourcefulness of a small community, and not a little about the resources of some of the wealthier members of that community.
From a few houses and bungalows alongside the road linking Whitstable with Canterbury through woods and the little community of Tyler Hill, now near neighbours of the University of Kent at Canterbury campus, Chestfield has burgeoned into a recognisable village of some significance in the last thirty or forty years.
Indeed, what rail travellers used to know as Swalecliffe Halt is now Chestfield & Swalecliffe station, relegating the older village on the other side of the Thanet Way and the railway line into second place. The new parish that was created in 1988 includes much of the older village and extends south into what remains of the ancient Forest of Blean.
Not that Chestfield is all that new. It was mentioned in a Saxon charter, although the Domesday survey recorded only eight cottages there. At that time it was held by a Norman knight and was known as Chestwill, remaining in the possession of a family of that name into the 1400s. It changed very little until the 1920s, when a developer called George Reeves moved into the Manor and oversaw the development of the place until he died in 1941.
Today, the little Tudor village is very much developed, with a large playing field area and many new homes. The story of the village is told on a lectern-like board on the village green, near the double-sided village sign. The first village sign was erected by Chestfield Society and passed to the parish council when that came into being in 1988. It was replaced in 1993 jointly by the society and the council and each of them is acknowledged on one of the two faces of the sign.
Apart from a few houses opposite the church, there is very little else to identify Chevening as anything more than a tiny hamlet. Even the 13th century church, St Botolph's with its 16th century tower, seems to stand respectfully to one side of the lane leading to the house that is Chevening's reason for being. The house, which stands in a magnificent park, was built in the first half of the 17th century for Lord Dacre, partly by Inigo Jones, although it was remodelled and altered in the 18th century.
It was bought by ancestors of Earl Stanhope in 1717 and was left to the nation in 1967 by the 7th Earl on condition that it was occupied by the Prime Minister of the day, a Cabinet Minister or a descendant of George VI. The 115-room Georgian mansion was prepared as a home for Prince Charles at a cost of more than œ1m but rumour has it that when he saw the decorations he declared: 'Good gracious no, how awful!' and declined the offer out of hand. After the Prince's rejection, the house became the official residence of the Foreign Secretary and Lord Carrington was the first occupant in that office.
Probably the most distinguished - certainly the most distinctive - member of the Stanhope family was Lady Hester Stanhope. Born in 1776, she was the eldest daughter of Charles Viscount Mahon, son of the second Lord Stanhope and another Lady Hester, who was the daughter of Lord Chatham - 'The Great Commoner' - and sister of William Pitt the Younger.
When Charles inherited the Chevening estate in 1786 he was regarded as something of an eccentric, although there was nothing very eccentric about the iron Stanhope printing press that he invented, nor his screw-propelled steamship. He was way ahead of his time with his mechanical calculating machine which just about set the seal on his reputation for eccentricity. As though to justify what others thought of him, he removed the Stanhope coat of arms from Chevening's gates, renamed it Democracy Hall and called himself Citizen Stanhope - all at a time when most of the English upper classes were keeping an apprehensive eye on events in France.
After her mother died and he father remarried, the young Lady Hester grew up to be exceptionally free-thinking for a woman of her time. Neither Kent nor London nor even England could satisfy her lively mind and after her uncle William Pitt died she travelled in the Near and Middle East, where no European woman had ever before travelled alone. She dressed as a Turkish man and made several daring expeditions into the desert, where she became known to Bedouin Arabs as the Queen of the Desert.
She finally settled in a former monastery among the Lebanon mountains where, abandoned by her friends and family in England, she surrendered her British citizenship and lived the life of an increasingly impoverished recluse. She died, almost completely alone, having been finally deserted even by her servants, in June 1839.
There is known to have been a church at Chevening in 1122 although the first known priest took office in 1262. The present church is 13th century, with a tower that was added later, in about 1500.
It would be very easy to suppose that nothing much ever happens in Chiddingstone. Perhaps it doesn't. It looks that sort of place, although that is not to say it is not one of the most attractive little villages in Kent, and the National Trust acknowledged that in a thoroughly practical way when it acquired the whole place, lock, stock and barrel - well, church, pub and houses - in 1939.
The character of Chiddingstone is wholly Kentish. Its little main street is overlooked by 16th and 17th century houses with half-timbered and tile-hung frontages, and by lovely old St Mary's Church, built of richly honey-coloured sandstone with a big 17th century timbered porch.
The most commanding of the houses opposite the church is the old Castle Inn which dates certainly from 1637 and probably a century or two before that. The main road used to continue straight past the inn, where the wrought iron gates are now, and past the 'castle', then known as High Street House. But the 19th century squire who fancied a castle rather than a mere house to live in had the road diverted so that the hoipoloi could be kept fashionably at arms length.
Now the road bends to leave the village by following the grounds of Chiddingstone Castle, the old manor house of the Streatfield family, remodelled into the present castellated mansion early in the 19th century. The first Chiddingstone Streatfield was an Elizabethan ironmaster, and the family remained squires and patrons of the village for 450 years.
At the other end of the group of buildings which also includes the Post Office and general store, a clearly marked footpath leads off to the great boulder known as The Chiding Stone, which is variously believed to have been used as a Saxon land boundary, a Druidical alter, and a place to which neighbours brought their grievances to be aired in public and where the declared culprits were 'chided' and sent home with the proverbial flea in their ear as a warning to behave themselves better in future.
There is no irrefutable evidence that it was ever used for any of those purposes. At the same time, there is no reason why it should not, at different times, have been used for all of them.
More can be found about this village at this Chiddingstone link.
Off the A28 near Canterbury, narrow lanes climb up through Kentish hills to open out unexpectedly into Chilham's village square, one of Kent's showpieces and often used as a film set. Chilham is used to visitors; for 350 years, after Thomas a Becket's murder, travellers used to pass through on the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester and London to his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Today the North Downs Way passes through the town.
Best appreciated out of season, its square is a delightfully haphazard mix of gabled, half-timbered houses, shops and inns dating from the late Middle Ages. Some were refaced in brick in the 18th century. Streets lead down from the corners, each lined with more old houses, some of them overhanging. At either end of the square are the church and the castle. St. Mary's stands behind the 15th century White Horse Inn, built in flint and stone and dominated by its perpendicular west tower.
King John gave Chilham to his bastard son Richard, who married a Dover girl, and it was at the castle that John stayed when he came to meet Stephen Langton, the Papal choice for Archbishop of Canterbury against John's own favourite, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich.
Only the keep of that castle still stands today. It was Sir Dudley Digges, James I's Master of the Rolls, who built the present Jacobean house, reputedly designed by Inigo Jones, in 1616.The castle grounds are terraced and feature a mile-long avenue of Spanish chestnut trees and a lovely lakeside walk. The inner park, around the mansion, was refashioned by Capability Brown in 1777.
The owner now is the 13th Viscount Massereene and Ferrard, a member of the Skeffington family that traces its origins clear back to the Norman Conquest. The grounds and the old keep are open to the public at specified times and are the scene, on occasion, of medieval-style jousting and falconry displays, and other such tourist attractions. The famous heronry in the deer park dates from the 13th century and it is said that if the herons do not return to nest there by St Valentine's Day each year, unspecified but dire misfortunes will befall the castle's owner.
The first bombs of WW2 fell in Chilham, though not on the village itself and not on the house either.
For those who can bear to tear themselves away from such a perfect time-warp village there is, on the east bank of the river Stour below the castle, the so-called Julliberrie's Grave - a long burrow, 150ft by 7ft high, which some say marks the burial place of one of Julius Caesar's captains, others that it is very much older than that.
Chilham Castle is reputed to be haunted by several ghosts, and the present owner has exploited them by offering 'ghost tours' of the old keep. He keeps to himself, however, the Grey Lady that is said to wander up and down the Jacobean house stairs, claiming cannily that he himself has never seen her.
There is little enough today to suggest the Cliffe was once a town of some size and importance, apart from St Helen's Church, which is quite out of proportion to anything a casual inspection of the village might suggest was needed there. But during the 16th century, Cliffe was a considerable town and at that it may well have declined by then from much earlier even greater size and importance. Perhaps, in fact, it was not physically bigger than it is now, because there has been quite a lot of 20th century building and what was 'big' in medieval and Saxon times would seem small now.
However, if this really ere the Cloveshoo of Saxon times then it was here that no fewer than seven Saxon councils were held between the years AD 742 and AD 824, and here that synods of the church drew up the rules for better government of the church that provided a framework for centuries to come. It is claimed, too, that the Magna Carta was drafted in 1215 before the final document was taken to Runnymede for King John to sign.
Early in its career, Cliffe village was a farm of the monks of Christ's Church at Canterbury, with a 14th century population of about three thousand people. But then in 1520 there was a great fire which marked the beginning of a decline until by the middle of the 19th century the population was only about nine hundred.
Then, in 1824, the Higham to Strood canal was begun and labourers flocked to the area from far and wide to help with the digging. Cliffe was quite close by and for a time there was no shortage of work for able-bodies villagers. The canal project flopped rather badly and was, in any case, overtaken by the development of the railways, but all the hard work that had gone into digging the canal was not wasted, because the same line was used by South Eastern Railway which opened in 1845 and brought a branch line to Cliffe in 1882.
The branch line came to meet the demands of the cement works which had brought another string to the bow of village prosperity during the 19th century. The first cement factory was built there in 1868, and after an explosives factory was built nearby in 1901 the population again soared to over three thousand.
Today, the High Street is still picturesque with weatherboard houses, despite a lot of new building. The old St James' Day (July 25) tradition of blessing the apples in churches has lapsed now and so has the apparently purely local tradition referred to by Edward Hasted, that required the rector to distribute every year a mutton pie and a loaf of bread to as many as chose to demand it, at the cost of about £15 per year.
When Mr Pickwick and his friends walked from Rochester to Cobham, they did so 'through a deep and shady wood' from which they emerged 'upon an open park with an ancient hall displaying the quaint and picturesque architecture of Elizabeth's time, where large herds of deer cropped fresh grass'. That was Cobham Park, and today's visitors need not strain their imaginations too far to see it in very similar light.
When, after half an hour's walking, the Dickensian trio came to Cobham village, Mr Pickwick was moved to exclaim that this was 'one of the prettiest and desirable places of residence' he had ever met with. That, too, is an opinion shared by hundreds of tourists who seek out thus most attractive North Kent village today. Cobham has never forgotten the Charles Dickens was a frequent visitor himself, and the Old Leather Bottle Inn is self-consciously Dickensian in appearance and associations.
The village snuggles up to the gate of Cobham Hall, the former 17th century home of the Earls of Darnley but now, since 1957, a girls public school. It was taken over the the old Ministry of Works in 1955 and is now administered by Cobham Hall Heritage Trust under the chairmanship of the present Earl of Darnley, with the help of the National Trust. It is open, in part, to the public during school holidays and occasionally for special functions. Much of the wooded deer park is freely accessible to all.
Behind the 14th century church of St Mary Magdalene, which, incidentally, claims to have more memorial brasses than any other church in England, is 16th century Cobham College and almshouses, and the Darnley Arms, reputedly pf 12th century origin, has a tunnel linking it with the church. The Ship Inn is said to have been built with timbers salvaged from a vessel which sank off Sheerness, and at the west end of the village 17th century red-brick Owletts is another National Trust Property.
A Darnley heir, the Hon Ivo Bligh, later 8th Earl, occupies a unique place in English cricketing lore. He was a cricketer of note in his youth and he played for Kent from 1877-1883, after which ill-health ended his active career, although he was twice after that President of Kent County Cricket Club and also President of the MCC in 1900.
Does Cooling deserve to be included among Kent's villages? There is, certainly, very little of it, although it gives the impression of a tiny community that is stirring itself in its landscape of orchards and cornfields, with distant views of the River Thames where it begins to spread into the estuary, and waking up to the fact that there may be more to life than dreams of better days. Once, of course, it existed to serve the needs of the the owners of Cooling Castle and the estate that supported it, and the village declined with the importance of the 'big house'.
Old St James' church was closed at the end of 1976 and declared redundant in 1979, although it is still well looked after. Its most famous feature is the group of thirteen graves of members of the Comport family, which died out en masse in the 1770s. They inspired Dickens to have Pip in Great Expectations, speak of 'five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, arranged in a neat row', the graves of five little brothers of his.
There is very little remaining of the fortifications that earned the name of 'castle' for the manor house that Henry de Yvele, one of the great builders of his day, completed for Sir John Cobham in 1385. At the time, French pirates were raiding the Thames and Medway coastlines, burning riverside villages like Cooling all the way to Gravesend. To protect the house and also to offer some resistance to the pirates, the king's permission was sought and given to fortify the house and the great gateway was built by a man called Thomas Comp, at a cost of no less than £8
When Sir John died in 1408, the house was inherited by his daughter who survived three husbands before she married 'that warrior of renown' Sir John Oldcastle, a Lollard leader and, therefore, a kind of early socialist, believing that church wealth should be distributed among the poor. The Archbishop of Canterbury did not share Sir John's views and a summons for the Squire of Cooling's arrest was delivered to the castle. Sir John escaped but was eventually caught, tried in London, hanged and burned before a large crowd outside St Giles' Hospital in London on Christmas Day 1417.
Sir John is usually supposed to have been the model for Shakespeare's Falstaff. His widow married for the fifth time and in 1554 the castle was captured by Sir Thomas Wyatt. But it was not much used after about 1580 and the present house was built in about 1670, on the site of the original Saxon manor. Today, only the great roadside gateway and a few remnants of the walls remain as a crumbling but undeniably picturesque memorial to the fortifications, but the house remains in private occupation.
Immediately adjoining it is the 16th century tithe barn, a listed building which has been beautifully restored and is now available for functions of all kinds. Part of the building is equipped and licensed for the conduct of weddings. It is, certainly, a very pleasant venue for a joyful occasion, although it does seem a pity that only a few yards away the rather lovely old St James' church has to watch one of its traditional functions usurped in this way.
During WW1 the local pub, the Horseshoe, caught fire. Firemen from Cliffe galloped to the scene but there was not enough water in the nearby pond to save the building which had to be entirely rebuilt. Today, renamed the Horseshoe and Castle, it is back in the business of providing a cheerful centre for the little community. Perhaps, who knows, one day it will be necessary to bring the church out of retirement, too.
Cowden is pretty well as far west as it is possible to travel without leaving Kent. Indeed, parts of the parish straddle the Kent Water (further south it is the Kent Ditch) which forms the border with East Sussex and Surrey where the three counties meet. It's an attractive little village, centred around a 13th century (although much altered in 1884) church of St Mary Magdalene with its slender, wooden shingled spire, bomb-damaged during WW2 and since re-shingled. The spire is barely perceptibly out of perpendicular, but is enough to have allowed some long-forgotten grudge to be expressed:
Cowden church, crooked steeple,
Lying priest, deceitful people
The church is, typically for this part of the county, built of sandstone, its tower and steeple massively timber-framed inside. The old bells were recast and rehung in 1911 to commemorate the rein of Edward VII and a sixth bell was added at the Coronation of George V.
One of the stained glass windows, given to the church in 1947, celebrates 'the remarkable preservation of this village during the years1939-45' and features figures of St Bridget (representing the women of the parish), St Nicholas (for the sailors), St George (the soldiers and airmen) and St Mary Magdalene (the church's patron saint), all the company of Sir Walstan (the farmer bishop of Worcester 1062-95 representing the local farmers). Below them are 20th century figures: a sailor, soldier, airman, a nurse and others making up a representative group of WW2 characters, all turned towards a Christ-figure whose protection they seek.
This is old Wealden iron country, recalled by the cast iron memorial slab in the church, to John Bottinge, dated 1622. This was a time when the area was producing guns for the Army and navy, as well as much more humble domestic and agricultural ware. Cowden had its own blast furnace in 1573 and during the 17th century it had two. The air of prosperity the place must have breathed in those days lingers still.
The Romans would have found British iron workers plundering the local orestone when they built their London-Lewes road across what is now the garden of Waystrode Manor. The first owners of the manor received it from King John in 1208. Crippenden Manor, built in about 1607, was once the home of another ironmaster, Richard Tichbourne.
Another member of the Tichbourne family, Robert, presented a Londoners' petition to the House of Commons in 1649, in favour of the execution of Charles I. He was one of the Commissioners who, in 1651, prepared the way for the union with Scotland and he was knighted in 1655 by Cromwell and made a peer in 1657. After the Restoration he was arrested and sentenced to death, but he was reprieved, imprisoned in Dover Castle and died, in 1682, in the Tower of London. The family, however, did not die out in Cowden until 1708, when John Tichbourne was buried there.
This village retains an assortment of typically Kentish cottages of either ragstone or timber-clad construction despite having greatly enlarged since the 1960's. A replica beacon pole and coat of arms celebrates the role that the village played as a signal bonfire site for many hundreds of years. The population is more than 3,900. It could be said that Coxheath owed its existence as a village to a war. Until 1756, it was still just open heath, one of the last true wildernesses left in Kent, frequented only by smugglers and highwaymen and other lawless refuge seekers.
At the start of the Seven Years War, though, it suddenly became a huge military camp, with 12,000 Hanoverian and Hessian troops quartered there. Its former sinister reputation soon gave way to a new one - for the number of duels to be fought there, usually over the ladies of nearby Maidstone. The county town had mixed views about the camp. The business community was inclined, on the whole, to be forbearing about the disadvantages, but feelings ran high once or twice between Maidstone Corporation and the military authorities about which should exercise the right to punish soldiers who misbehaved themselves in the town's confines.
The camp was the scene of several big reviews of troops by visiting dignitaries, including one by the King himself, George III, and his Queen Charlotte in 1778. The king made it an occasion to knight the Mayor of Maidstone, William Bishop, before he left, which probably did something to reduce the friction.
During the Napoleonic invasion scare, the heath was one of a network of sites for warning beacons, but after Waterloo and the defeat Napoleon in 1825 Parliament closed the camp. By then, it was too late for the heath simply to revert to it's old wild state and the area was enclosed and the development of Coxheath village began. Since then, there has been rapid growth which has almost totally overlaid any trace of the older buildings. The old workhouse, built in 1838 for a Coxheath Union that included fifteen neighbouring or nearby parishes, was incorporated into Linton Hospital, though this, in the mid 1990s, was finally closed and demolished.
Coxheath did not become an independent parish until 1964 and might never have been more than a neat but somewhat characterless community of predominately twentieth century estate-style homes and shops but for the imagination and energy of one of its former residents, who had the idea of inaugurating the first World Custard Pie Championships as a feature of a village fete.
The attraction of teams of people throwing silent movie style custard pies at each other was irresistible and the event won international notice. Then, in 1982, the originator, Mike Fitzgerald, moved to the other side of Maidstone and took the championships with him. Now they are adding to the reputation of another equally 20th century residential village, Ditton.
W of Tenterden, off the A229, Cranbrook is known as the 'Capital of the Kentish Weald', this delightful little village, lies among gentle hills near the headwaters of the River Crane. Built from the profits of the cloth trade, and was once an important centre of the woollen industry. It derived its name from the crane birds which frequented the local stream. The town has weatherboarded and brick-and-timber houses and a church with a tall tower. Cranbrook is dominated by the restored 1814 seven-storey Union Mill, the largest working windmill in England.
The village's losses and gains pretty much cancel each other out over the last century or so. The railway station has gone and so have the tracks. You wouldn't know now that there had ever been a rail service to the town. Several of the old pubs have given way to other kinds of trades. The tanyard has gone, replaced by a car park, so has the ropewalk, now a housing estate.
As already mentioned, this was once the capital of the Wealden woollen industry and for three hundred years it was one of the wealthiest and largest towns in Kent. When Queen Elizabeth I stayed at the George Hotel during her Royal Progress through Kent in 1573 the people of Cranbrook were able to present her with a silver gilt cup, and according to a dubious but persistent tradition, they rolled out a length of Kentish broadcloth a mile long so that Her Majesty could walk dryshod from Cranbrook to nearby Coursehorne Manor.
Cranbrook itself is L-shaped, with the church at the angle. Another local tradition claims that the figure of Father Time on the church tower comes down once a year to cut the grass in the churchyard, but the vicar will tell you he has never seen any evidence of it.
It was to Cranbrook, during the last century, that John Calcott Horsley RA came to live and George and Frederick Hardy, Thomas Webster and George O'Neil formed The Cranbrook Art Colony, which produced many of the best selling pictures of their day. Horsley himself was drawing master to Queen Victoria's children and is credited with the 'invention' of Christmas cards.
If you should see a church miswent
Then you must go to Cuxton in Kent
The old couplet refers to the curiosity of the Cuxton church alignment, on a south-west axis instead of the more usual east-west one. There could be several reasons for it, but one suggestion is that the church was built on the foundations of an existing Roman chapel or shrine which did not have the normal Christian church alignment. There was certainly a Roman villa nearby. In fact, the area around the church has probably been more or less continuously inhabited for about 250,000 years. In 1962, archaeological excavations at Cuxton uncovered some 200,000 year-old bones of an elephant that once stomped around these parts, together with a great many flint hand axes and chips left over from their manufacture. There were some human bones, too, dating from about the first century AD.
The first known rector of the church at Cuxton was a man called Thomas who was appointed in about 1185, and it was from that date that the village numbered the years to its 800th anniversary which it celebrated with a nine-day Festival in June and July 1985. Its most famous Rector, though, was William Laud, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I. He only stayed at Cuxton for a few months in 1610, and very probably was tempted to wish he had spent the rest of his life there in quiet obscurity when he was executed by Cromwell's Parliamentarians in 1645.
For centuries the most notable building in the parish was Whorne's Place, built in the late 15th century by Sir William Whorne, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1487. It was subsequently enlarged and antiquary and historian Sir John Marsham had a particularly fine library in the old stable block. Now, the railway line runs through the site of that stable block and an overgrown and barely discernable brick gateway beside the southern approach to the village is all that remains of the once great house.
Another lost curiosity of Cuxton is the grey marble pyramid that used to stand inside St Michael's Church. It was built by the wife of Richard Coosens, JP, who was buried there in 1779. Margaret Coosens died in 1783, obsessed by the fear that she might by buried while in some kind of trance and not actually dead. So she had the pyramid built with a small chamber with a glass door covered by a green silk curtain. The door was locked, but the key was inside where Margaret lay in her unfastened coffin, dressed in scarlet satin ready to return to the world if her fear proved to be justified. By 1868, though, it was reckoned the lady really was well and truly deceased, and the coffin was removed and buried in the churchyard.
The 19th century cement manufacturing boom along the banks of the river Medway brought a population explosion to villages like Cuxton and there has been another, commuter-based expansion sine WW2. From being home to something over 550 people in 1901, Cuxton had a population of twice that by 1961 and now more than twice that again.