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There is a memorial on the corner of High Street and Church Street at Eastchurch, facing the 15th century parish church. It is of Portland Stone on face and carved like an aeroplane wing on the other, and carved with aeroplanes and other motifs as well as the names of aviation pioneers who first flew from here.
For this was where British aviation took off and moved out of the minority eccentricity that is was in the first years of the last century towards the major industry it has since become. Stone Pett Farm was where the early airfield was. Short Brothers set up their airfield factory there before they moved to Rochester and made their name with their famous flying boats and other aircraft.
Some notable early aviators who first became airborne at Eastchurch included Winston Churchill, who learned to fly there, Charles Stewart Rolls (half of the famous Rolls-Royce team) who made an historic two-mile flight from Eastchurch airfield round the church tower and back, and later became the first man to fly across the English Channel and back again, and Cecil Grace, who was killed in a flying accident there in 1910.
The Aero Club of Great Britain (later the Royal Aero Club) was founded at nearby Leysdown but then moved to Eastchurch where the Short Bothers bought 4,000 acres of Sheppey marshland and built the first British aircraft factory. Now that the flying field at Eastchurch has gone, the biggest ingle concentration of residents is inside the open prison at nearby Standford Hill.
This rural village, with a population of about 1,300, stands on steeply rising ground on the south bank of the River Medway, south west of Maidstone, and is known for its hops and fruit. Parliamentary troops marched over the 14th century bridge in 1648 and captured Maidstone from the Royalists. The bridge with its five arches is said to be the finest medieval bridge in the south of England. A cross in the churchyard of the ancient parish church commemorates 43 hop pickers who died of cholera in 1849. Two former vicars of the church were sons of William Wilberforce who helped to abolish slavery. His wife is also buried there, as is the artist Donald Maxwell.
The 14th century ragstone bridge across the river Medway at East Farleigh is generally reckoned to be the oldest medieval bridge in south-east England. Interesting and picturesque it may be. Convenient, however, it is not. At its southern end the road curves through forty-five degrees which, together with the hump of the bridge itself, creates problems for cars coming across the bridge, which is not wide enough for two vehicles to pass on it. The railway line, with a level crossing, cuts across the approach to the bridge on the north side, so one way and another it is far from an ideal river crossing point for modern traffic.
The bridge featured prominently in the Civil War Battle of Maidstone, when Royalists tried to hold the town against Parliamentary forces led by General Fairfax. The Royalists, who assembled on Penenden Heath (then just outside Maidstone but now part of it) knew the Roundheads were at Rochester and the expected the attack to come from north or west of the town. Instead, Fairfax sent his men round the town, crossing the river Medway by way of East Farleigh Bridge and then swooping up from the south to win the day.
The East Farleigh village sign features the bridge and the river and also three oast kilns and fruiting hop bine. Once across the river, the road climbs steeply and from the top there is a splendid view across the valley, the sides of which were, until the last few years, thickly clothed in hop gardens, now largely replaced by fruit trees.
In St Mary's churchyard there is cross to the memory of forty-three hop-pickers who died of cholera at East Farleigh in 1849. Edith Cavell, the nurse who was accused of spying and was shot by the Germans in Brussels in 1915, nursed typhoid victims at East Farleigh during the time she was a young probationary nurse at Maidstone in 1896.
If Malling Abbey had not been built where it is, no doubt East Malling would have remained the only Malling. As it is, the abbey gathered people around it into a separate village that became Town Malling (now West Malling) and left the older settlement to the east very much the junior partner.
What helped East Malling retain its individuality in the shadow of its big brother West Malling was the stream that runs through the village. Once it turned no fewer than six water wheels which powered the stones that ground flour for its own inhabitants and also for those of the abbey and their dependants. But as time went by, East Malling mills developed an economic importance as the flour was traded over a greater area than the immediate vicinity.
At one point the stream was diverted to create a moat round a house at East Malling. The moat has been filled in now and nothing is known of that house except that it was bought during the 16th century by Richard Manningham and razed to the ground in order that he could build for himself a far grander house.
That one we do know about because it was called Bradbourne, one of Kent's finest houses, and now the headquarters of the East Malling Research Station which, among a great many other things, concerns itself with improving and developing varieties of fruit of all kinds. Manningham was a Bedfordshire man who made his fortune in The City and died in 1611. But after him the house was owned by a family that left a much deeper impression upon county history, the Twisdens. They rebuilt the house and altered the rebuilding until they had it more or less the way it is today, a pretty house at the end of a long drive, one of the best Queen Anne houses in England with a specially fine Jacobean oak staircase inside.
The Twisdens (Twysdens, Twysendens - depending upon the period) provided Kent with one or two notable sons. One, Sir William, the first baronet of Roydon, was a noted scholar, astrologer, book and manuscript collector, Member of Parliament, and also a buccaneer! He died in 1629, and it was his son, Thomas, who first changed the Twysden to Twisden when he became baronet of Bradbourne in 1666.
Thomas was a lawyer who was made a Serjeant (in the legal, not the military, sense) by Oliver Cromwell in 1654. He was knighted and made a High Court judge by Charles II and died at the age of 81. After him the Twisdens of Bradbourne provided three Members of Parliament, two Naval officers (although one married a nurse and was disinherited) and several others who made their marks in various ways, not least by their alterations to the house at East Malling. The last baronet Twisden of Bradbourne, Sir John, died in 1937 and the two hundred acre estate seemed certain to be bought by developers and planted with new houses.
As it happened, though, the East Malling Research Station was already established on neighbouring land and looking for more on which to expand, which is really a very satisfactory role for so lovely a building.
To read the views on East Malling from local residents visit the East Malling Blogspot website.
East Peckham, 4 miles NE of Tonbridge, off the B2016, is a large village with several outlying hamlets set in beautiful countryside deep among the hop gardens. There is no old church in this village because the community has drifted south to the river, leaving its 14th century church isolated 2 miles away. On its present site the village has three pubs surviving from the days when hop pickers from London thronged the area every autumn.
The nearby Hop Farm Country Park, at nearby Beltring, has the largest group of Victorian oast houses and galleried barns in the world, now housing two award-winning museums. Of the many events and attractions here, the greatest must be the magnificent shire horses that pull the Lord Mayor of London's golden coach, making the two hour journey to the City each November in their specially built horse box.
The Beltring farm was. in fact, the last stronghold of large-scale old-style hand picking in Kent. It 'went mechanical' in 1969 and although there is still some very limited hand picking of hops in Kent, including here, virtually the entire crop, less now than it once was but still a significant one, is harvested by a few workers who are little more than machine minders.
In about 1504, Thomas Roydon came to East Peckham and enlarged a house called Fortune. It became known as Roydon Hall and later passed by marriage into the Twysden family which owned it until 1837. The house has produced information about the Civil War in Kent. The cellars of the old house gave up, two hundred years after the war, a day-to-day diary of events that added significantly to what was already known about them at that time.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, East Peckham was a reception area for London foundlings sent out from Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital. The children were brought up in East Peckham and then, when they were old enough, went back to London to be apprenticed. Some of them came back, to settle and marry and become villagers themselves.
Located in farming country, the village is about six miles from Maidstone and has a population of about 300. The 14th century church of St Peter and St Paul has a Jacobean pulpit and a late 13th century font. There is a magnificent brass of 1629 to Sir Edward Filmer, his wife and their 18 children.
One of the treasures of Eastry is a brass Standard Winchester bushel measure, inscribed 'Hundred of Cornillo, 1792' which was owned by the former Eastry rural district council for many years and was given to St Mary's Church in 1974. The Winchester measure dates from Saxon times, and the Hundred of Cornillo once took in the towns and villages of Deal, Sutton, Ripple, Ringwould, East Langdon, Sholden, and part of Northbourne.
The measure is, in its way, a surviving reminder that Eastry was once a Saxon Royal capital. In the 7th century, Kings of Kent had their palace there, astride the Canterbury-Sandwich road. The palace is generally supposed to have stood where Georgian Eastry Court now is, and it was the setting for one of Kent's oldest legends.
The story is told that the 7th century King Egbert was persuaded by a nobleman called Thunor that his cousins Ethelred and Ethelbert coveted his crown. So the royal brothers were murdered and their bodies hidden behind the king's thrown, where they were spotlighted by a divinely focused pillar of light that led to the discovery of the crime.
To atone, the king agreed that the princes' sister could have all the land her pet deer could cover in a day's coursing, on which to build an abbey. Thunor's arguments against the settlement lost ground rather literally when the earth opened beneath him and swallowed him up. The very spot where it happened is known to this day as Thunor's Leap.
Perhaps he fell into one of the Eastry caves - an elaborate, multi-storey labyrinth, the access to which is privately owned. Some say the network of passages is very old indeed and connect it with Druidical practices in pre-Roman times. Others dismiss it as of much more recent origin. In fact, nobody knows when or why or even how the caves were dug, nor if what is there today is all there ever was. It has been calculated that about 90 per cent of the original labyrinth is now blocked although towards the end of the 1800s there were people who claimed to have walked from Eastry to neighbouring Woodnesborough through the tunnels. One tunnel was supposed to go all the way to Canterbury, some ten miles away, and another to Sandwich, but that does seem to be stretching credibility, as well as tunnels, a bit too far.
Traditionally, Archbishop Thomas Becket hid in the caves while he was preparing to flee England from Sandwich in 1164.
Before WW1, Eastry seemed all set to find new prominence as one of the Kent coalfield villages. But although two railway stations were opened there in 1916 and 1925, and the East Kent light railway ran through the village, the line failed and was closed in 1948, leaving Eastry with a fairly serious heavy lorry traffic problem to take its mind off its prestigious distant past. But, in recent years, a by-pass has been built to remove the traffic problem, leaving the village at peace.
Right up to the 1860s Eccles was known as Bull Lane and was just a few cottages alongside the lane that is now the main road through the village. Not that the name is new, Judith Glover, in her book The Place Names of Kent, traces it in its present form back to 1208 and suggests that it derived from the 10th century Aecclesse, meaning the meadow of the oak. Whether or not the Romans knew the name or the meadow, with or without the oak, when they came exploring up the Medway we don't know. What we do know is that one of them liked whatever he did find there because he built the largest Roman villa yet excavated anywhere in Kent quite close to the present village.
It seems he was some kind of pottery magnate - the Josiah Wedgewood of his day, perhaps - and his pottery must have paid for a pretty luxurious life-style because his villa had an elaborate suite of baths, with several heated rooms and a cold plunge that would have outshone many a private swimming pool today.
Once the pottery stopped production and the villa crumbled, its fabric probably being pirated by later locals for their own homes or, more likely, for barns for their crops, Eccles quickly merged into its agricultural background and forgot about its days of fragile fortune.
It was the building boom of the 1800s that brought the village out of its own extended Dark Age, as did several other Medway Valley villages. Thomas Buss, who was born in Aylesford in 1848 and moved to Eccles at the age of eight, wrote a pamphlet in 1908 in which he recalled the village as he remembered it during those days of growth. According to him, the 'boom' began after Thomas Cubitt bought two farms near the river and opened a brickyard and a cement factory on the land. One of the local farmers, Thomas Abbott, foresaw the need for homes for workers in the new industries, and he built a row of twenty-two houses. That was the start of modern Eccles.
Soon there were three-hundred more houses there and then Thomas Kemsley, who built a house complete with its own gasometer so that the house could be lit by gas, also built the Walnut Tree public house in 1861. Buss remembered the men who came to work in the new brick and cement works as a pretty rough lot, from all over the country, drawn by the promise of high wages. They earned £5 a week, which was very high indeed for those times, and they spent most of it on gin and beer in the Walnut Tree.
A strong temperance movement grew up and the young Buss used to go with his father to the public house with wheelbarrows to collect the drunks as they fell out onto the street and wheel them home. In was in an effort to wean the brickies from their alcoholic ways that Eccles church was built at the end of the 1880s, but however well it competed with the Walnut Tree in the 19th century, it could not compete with the materialism of the 20th. In 1930 Eccles had its own cinema, as well as pubs, the Working Men's Club and the recreation ground. In 1979, the church was sold for more new homes to be built on the site.
Today, Eccles is one of the villages where there is more profit to be made from what comes out of the ground than from what is grown in it, and the area is deeply scarred with quarry sites, some of them still active.
The little village of Egerton is not one that many tourists stumble across by accident unless they happen to be following the Greensand Way Walk, which passes through the churchyard of St James' church. For at least a thousand years the village has congregated around its church in the deeply rural East Kent countryside north-west of Ashford, roughly between Charing and Headcorn, with Pluckley as its nearest neighbour of any size at all. It is a village of about 1,000 people living in old red brick and white weatherboarded cottages around a little green, opposite which the George Inn extends its hospitality to such visitors as do happen upon it.
One of the oldest properties is Spring Cottage, part of a medieval hall house built in about 1400. It was bought for renovation in 1967 and some of the original wattle and daub cladding - clay, straw and animal dung mixed with horse and cow hair spread over a framework of woven hazel wattle walls - was uncovered. Part of the original thatch was found under the roof tiles, too.
The church, though, is a good deal older than that, and stands on the site of an even older one. The present building is mostly 14th century, restored in the mid-19th century, with some interesting internal features including the chandelier which was given to the church in 1699. It was later sold and then given back to the village and installed in the church again. It is said to be the oldest chandelier of its kind in England - possibly in the world.
The 15th century church tower is almost 100 feet high and from the hillside on which it stands it makes an impressive landmark.
The say the man upon whom Baroness Orczy modelled her fictional hero of the French Revolution, The Scarlet Pimpernel, used to stop and dine at the Rose and Crown at Elham while he waited for a fresh horse to carry him to the coast for one of his real-life dashes to France to rescue some doomed aristocrat from the guillotine.
Across the road, is Abbot's Fireside restaurant, a heavily timbered building dating from about 1480. It was built as an inn, though not with that name. It was the Smithies Arms when the Duke of Wellington used it as his East Kent headquarters when he was preparing for the expected Napoleonic invasion. There is a local tradition, too, that Prince Charles (later to be Charles II) hid there, too, during his flight to the coast pursued by Roundhead troops in 1651. Since then, its kitchens have delighted many less distinguished travellers over the years, and continue to do so today.
It is easy to imagine how Elham must have looked centuries ago when its Monday market was famous for its hides and leather work. But the market died out in the 19th century and today the square is an attractive little centrepiece to the village and to the whole Elham Valley.
The Nailbourne flows just to one side of the village on its way to join the river Stour. Like other Nailbourne rivers, it is said to flow only once every seven years by divine decree. Of this one, it is said that St Augustine, during his missionary days in Kent, once came out from Canterbury to the valley which was suffering a particularly bad drought. To relieve the suffering this was causing among the local pagans, the Bishop (not then yet a saint, of course) struck the ground with his staff and brought forth a stream to water the valley. But this interference angered the Old Gods who conjured up a great storm that blocked the spring again.
Augustine decided he could not go on playing that game, so he called upon his God to have the last word by ordering that the spring should feed the stream regularly once every seven years. It seems that was acceptable to the Old Gods, and presumably it continues to be today, although the seven-year timetable has not been strictly adhered to over the centuries.
Early last century, a man called Elliot Downs Till had some village stocks made and set up in Eynsford to replace the original ones that used to stand on the triangular green at Bower Lane's junction with the A225. He thought it would make a nice feature for the street scene. Unfortunately, though, the new stocks awoke local memories of a man who had died in the old stocks in 1838 and there were some villagers who wanted them removed. Mr Till felt sure the opposition would subside once the local people got used to the new stocks, so he put a fence round them instead of removing them. It was not good enough. The fence was uprooted and the stocks burned where they stood.
Poor Mr Till. He died in 1917, at the age of 82, of a bee sting on his ear and Eynsford sufficiently forgave him for the stocks to put up a lychgate to his memory.
Eynsford really is a picture-postcard village, with its many architectural styles, including several timbered houses and its ford over which the river Darent swarms very prettily and in which local children slake their insatiable fascination with running water. There is a bridge as well, a little gem of a medieval hump-back bridge with two low semi-circular arches separated by a bold cut-water on the upstream side, into which is built a medieval carved stone figure. St Martin's Church, with its wood-shingled spire, has a tower clock surrounded by a quotation from Browning, 'Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.'
Nearby are the remains of Eynsford's old castle, one of the most complete Norman castles of its kind in England. It is looked after by the Department of the Environment now and is open to the public, but for some years it was used as kennels for the hunting dogs owned by the Hart-Dyke family of nearby Lullingstone Castle.
Lullingstone isn't really a castle at all, and never was, despite the impressive towered gateway which was built in the last years of the 15th century. Between the gate and the house is a wide expanse of lawn on part of which stands the ancient parish church of St Botolph known appropriately enough as The Church on the Lawn. The church can be visited at any time, but the house cannot.
House and church were both restored by Sir Percyvall Hart in the 18th century in honour of Queen Anne, who often stayed there. A rather odd little story is told of his daughter, Anne. It relates how, on the night of the celebration of her betrothal to Sir Thomas Dyke of Horeham, Sussex, she slipped away to her bedroom where she made a rope of knotted sheets and climbed down into the arms of a young navel officer called Bluet, who was waiting for her in a boat in the moat.
Together they ran away and were married. The jilted Sir Thomas swore he would never marry anyone else and, indeed, he did not. When Bluet died nine years later his widow found the faithful Sir Thomas still waiting for her and they were married. A later member of the family, Sir William Hart Dyke, and two of his friends framed the rules of lawn tennis at Lullingstone in 1875 and first played the game there, using a ladder supported on two barrels instead of a net.
The house remained in the same family for six-hundred years. It was empty when Sir Oliver Hart Dyke married Zoe, who became Lady Hart Dyke and who started the famous Lullingstone silk farm in part of the house. Silk from the farm was used for Queen Elizabeth's Coronation robes in 1937, as well as for dresses for the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.
Later, more Lullingstone silk was incorporated in Princess Elizabeth's wedding dress, and during WW2 it went to make parachutes. Now the whole enterprise has moved to Compton House in Dorset and it was from there that the silk used for the wedding dress of Princess Diana was spun.
A guess would be that most of the visitors to Lullingstone Castle arrive there from the car park of Lullingstone Villa, the cherished excavation of a Roman villa which has been completely enclosed inside a rather nice building of timber and glass to which the Department of the Environment charges admission and then allows visitors to roam at will around the edge of the excavated site. There is a gallery, too, which affords a nice panoramic view of the whole, and cases exhibiting some of the finds unearthed there.