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The Medway Valley does its best to to camouflage its villages in lush woodlands, but there is no hiding Hadlow, thanks to Walter Barton May. Almost a hundred and fifty rears ago he added the 170ft tall tower to the Hadlow Castle his father had built and now the tower soars above the village and commands attention from miles around.
It is, in fact, one of the largest follies in Britain. Some say May built it so that he could see over the surrounding hills to the sea. Others believe it was built as a folly, inspired by Beckford's tower at Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, which was built in 1799 and fell down in 1800. The most popular, though probably the least likely, story is that he built his tower so he could keep an eye on his wife after she left him and went home to mother.
The Castle appeals differently to to different viewers. In 1852 it was regarded as a 'truly magnificent' building. Before that, in 1823, Cobbett had called it 'the most singular looking thing I ever saw.'
The castle was saved from demolition in 1951 by portrait painter Bernard Hailstone, but only after part of it had already been demolished. The tower was protected by a preservation order and what remained of the rest was adapted for private ownerships. New homes were built in the grounds, creating a very pleasant and exclusive little private estate.
Walter Barton May was an eccentric man. In a corner of the neighbouring churchyard is the decaying grandeur of the May mausoleum, which he ordered to be built so that he could be buried, seated, above the ground. His wish was not carried out. He was, in fact, buried quite conventionally, but the mausoleum remains as his memorial. Also in the churchyard is a 19th century memorial to thirty hop pickers who were drowned when the cart in which they were crossing the Hart Lake bridge fell into the water, taking them with it.
Today, Hadlow has a neat and tidy look. Its main street is attractively brick paved and passes by several old attractive buildings, including the Old Bakery and two Tudor inns. The conversion of The Maltings into luxury apartments and penthouses has retained the old kilns with their white cowls to remind us that this was in the very heart of the Mid Kent hop-growing and brewing country no more than half a century ago. Hadlow College, on the southern edge of the village, keeps alive the farming traditions of this part of Kent and invites visitors to the various gardens and garden centre maintained by the students.
During the 19th and early 20th century, the River Medway, which had been a major Kent thoroughfare for many centuries before that, assumed new significance as the demand for building materials encouraged more excavation of chalk and clay for cement making.
The river winds through the North Downs, which are virtually all chalk, and many cement works were opened and enlarged upstream almost as far as Maidstone, bringing employment and prosperity to riverside villages like Halling. Cement became the dominant industry and, according to Donald Maxwell, writing in 1921: 'From Halling to Snodland, the river is literally walled on one side or the other with kilns and loading barges.'
By that time, in fact, the industry had passed its peek and many of the kilns and towering chimneys were falling into ruin. The first half of the 20th century was a period of depression for the whole area, mainly because of the decline of the cement and brick industries in the Medway Valley which mirrored the decline into which the construction industry fell during the same period.
New production methods concentrated cement manufacture into larger works, like the one at Northfleet, which had an effect on the smaller factories along the Medway. However, production at Halling and neighbouring Snodland continued, In fact, 1998 battle was joined between the Blue Circle cement company and the local conservationists over plans to open a new works on land between the two villages, with gives a hint of how much less importance the industry has to the local economy now.
But at least one man knew Halling, even if he had no time for it then, 4,000 years ago because his remains were found just behind the railway station in 1912. His only means of transportation, of course, were his own two feet and dug-out canoes like the one - his, for all we know - that was found when the foundations were being dug for an electricity pylon on Halling marshes. Even he was no pioneer in these parts, as evidenced by the discovery of a much earlier skeleton, surrounded by flint chips and the bones of a horse and a sheep, all of whom lived 25,000 years ago.
Long after all these early inhabitants were dead, Romans were characteristically careless with their small change hereabouts, but Halling's history can be said to have begun when Bishop Gunduph of Rochester built a palace there in 1077. By that time, there was already a church on land given to the church of St Andrew at Rochester by King Egbert of Kent during the 8th century. The palace was the last sanctuary of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket's successor, Richard, in 1184.
Richard was at the palace at Wrotham when he had a vision in which he was accused of destroying the church and warned that he, too, would be destroyed. Next day, while on his way to Rochester, he was taken, sick and shaking, to Halling, where he died in the bishop's palace that same night. Some said he was poisoned but perhaps there was something about the place that did not agree with visiting bishops, because after that several Bishops of Rochester died there.
One who did not was Bishop Fisher, whose involvement with Elizabeth Barton, the so-called Holy Maid of Kent, led him to the Tower and execution in 1535. His death ended the connection between the bishops and the palace at Halling, part of which was, however, later to become the home of William Lambarde, a man who is remembered as the author of the first county history, A Perambulation of Kent, published in 1576.
Lambarde had three wives. The first was a teenager from Ightham. It was the second, a widow called Sylvestre Dalison, who brought him to Halling, her home. They were married in 1583 but she died shortly after giving birth to twins in 1587 and is commemorated in Halling's St John the Baptist church with a memorial that shows her sitting up in bed with her six children, including the twins, around her. Lambarde married for the third time, another widow, in 1592 and lived in Halling until 1598. He died in 1601.
There is a local story the William Caxton, 'The Father of English Printing', also married a local girl and set up a printing press in the village, but there is little hard evidence that it is true.
The bishop's palace survived into the 19th century as a farmhouse but was finally demolished when the cement works were built on the site. All that remains today is a bit of wall around the churchyard.
The village, which shares its bypass with Snodland, grew considerably during the 1990s, with many new homes. It is, in fact, still growing and in 1995 a new primary school was built in the High Street, to replace the 19th century one in Vicarage Road.
With a population of over 1,300, 7 miles east of Maidstone, the village lies either side of the A20. In the south east are the Quested Almshouses, rebuilt in 1770 and a Wealden house, the timbered 16th century Old Bell Farm. North east is the church of St John the Baptist with one of the finest Norman fonts in Kent.
For anyone with the time to explore a little, there is much more to Harrietsham than meets the eye of the A20 traveller. The village is split into two parts by the road and both parts veil themselves from the traffic that uses it behind some fairly unlovely roadside development. But on the south side, in East Street for instance, there is the old Bell public house and nearby Bell Farmhouse has been called the most complete example of a traditional Wealden house remaining in Kent.
Newer, but also attractive in their different way, is the terrace of almshouses that Mark Quested built in 1642. He was a local man who became a member of the City of London Fishmongers' Company, which paid for the rebuilding of the almshouses in 1770.
On the north side of the village, a row of white painted cottages dabble their footings in the little Len stream that flows under West Street behind the Roebuck Inn. Just below the Pilgrims Way is Stede Hill, a house which has had many different owners and several different names during its four hundred year life. Most recently, it was the home of Robert Goodsall, architect and author, who restored it just before the beginning of WW2 and gave it back its old name.
During the war the house served several purposes and it was for a time an Army officers' mess where Field Marshal Montgomery and Lt-Gen Brian Horrocks were just two of a number of war-time VIPs who were entertained there.
One of the old manors of Harrietsham parish was Marley, which has since then given its name to the Marley homecare group of companies, which has its headquarters in and around Marley Court.
Hawkhurst is often described as two villages is one because of the difference in character of the older area around The Moor and the new at Highgate. The individuality of the two areas is underlined by the fact that each has its own church.
The 19th century astronomer Sir John Herschel lived in Hawkhurst for thirty years, and before him the village lent its name to the infamous 18th century Hawkhurst Gang of smugglers and ruffians, who made it their headquarters from which to terrorise the surrounding countryside with their lawlessness. Several of the local houses, including Hawkhurst Place, the Tudor Arms hotel and Tickners, claim associations with the gang.
More recently, Hawkhurst has claimed to be the birthplace of the Rootes car empire. It was here, in the village, that William Rootes set up shop as a cycle trader before ambition and opportunity conspired to take him and his two sons, William and Reginald, into the rather more lucrative production of Hillman, Humber and Sunbeam cars and so into English automobile history.
The opening of the famous Babies' Castle, the largest country home of the Dr Barnado organisation, in 1886 by HRH Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck and her daughter Princess Mary, later George V's Queen Mary, was a day to remember in Hawkhurst's history, which has not included many Royal visits. The home became an adult care centre in 1963.
Today, Hawkhurst is lucky enough to have among its residents Mr Lewis Waghorn to act as its biographer. Wag, as he is known affectionately, but respectfully, has put together two books of Hawkhurst memories illustrated with pictures of people and places that he has collected for the purpose.
They include intriguing reminders of past local enterprises, particularly, perhaps, that of Walter Pridgeon, 'Family and Dispensing Chemist', whose stock included a whole range of home-made concoctions, from hair lotion and lavender water to 'All kinds of Cough Lozenges' and his own 'Odontalgic Essence' for the 'instant relief of toothache.'
A stroll along Church Walk is the best way for a visitor to savour the charms of this ancient village. This quiet footpath with its medieval cottages and neatly kept flower beds was once the main road out of Headcorn. It is one of the largest villages in the area, with about 3,000 residents, many Elizabethan houses and a good range of shops. Just outside the village is Headcorn Airfield for flying and parachuting instruction and charter flights, Headcorn Flower Centre & Vineyard and an 18-hole golf course.
Headcorn today is one of the more attractive of Kent's large villages, with a main street flanked by several nice half-timbered houses, including the Old Cloth Hall to remind us that this is yet another of those Wealden communities that shared in the boom in woollens that followed the 14th century arrival of Flemish immigrants, and lasted until the industry moved north during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Even more celebrated than any of its buildings, though, is the Headcorn oak, a time-scarred veteran in the churchyard, said to be at least a thousand years old and to have grown from an acorn shed in the days when this part of Kent was thick with the vast Andredsweald or Anderida forest. As it grew old, the tree was thought to be in need of support, and wooden props were put against it. But after a while it was found that the props had rotted away and only stayed in position because they were held up by the tree.
There used to be several other equally old oak trees in Headcorn but Authority decided they had become unsafe and they were cut down before villagers really knew what was happening. When, in 1973, a new sewerage scheme meant that pipes had to be laid near the remaining oak, however, local vigilantes mounted a round-the-clock guard to make sure no harm came to it.
Headcorn was the birthplace of John Willes, the man who introduced round-arm bowling to cricket. He later lived and died at Sutton Valence, where there is a churchyard memorial to him.
Just outside the village, at Lashenden, a WW2 airfield reverted to private ownership when the war was over and in 1972 and air warfare museum was opened there. The airfield is still used for private flying, parachute jump training, and by air cadets of 500 Squadron, which carries on the tradition begun by the famous 500 (County of Kent) Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force of 1930.
In April 1985, airfield owner Chris Freeman was awarded a four foot long sword by the Civil Aviation Authority for having the best privately owned airfield in the country.
The pretty little village of Herne, with its white weatherboard houses looking as though they were leaning into the slope of the hill on which they are built, is today a satellite of Herne Bay. Chronologically, though. it is the town that is the village satellite. The village was there centuries before Herne Bay became of the residential retirement resorts that have given the North East Kent coastal strip the unflattering, but not altogether misleading label of 'Costa Geriatrica.'
It was at Herne's flinty little church of St Martin that Nicholas Ridley, when he was vicar there, allowed the Te Deum to be sung in English for the first time in England. Ridley went on to become a Bishop and supported Archbishop Cranmer in what Queen Anne called 'corrupt and naughty opinions' which earned him martyrdom at the stake in 1555. There is a monument to him still at Herne.
Another man still remembered at Herne is Thomas Hole, a 17th century gentleman who lost his way in nearby Blean Forest one St Thomas' Day (December 21). He had almost given up all hope of finding his way out of the wood when he heard the bells of St Martin's at Herne and was able to take a bearing from the sound and so find his way home. When he died in 1626, he bequeathed thirteen shillings and four pence a year 'forever' to Herne parish, of which ten shillings was to go to the poor and three shillings and four pence to bellringers who rang the bells on St Thomas' Day.
The habit of historians of spoiling a perfectly good story with the truth is illustrated by the local legend which claims that 19th century author John Ruskin once said of Herne church tower, that it was one of the three perfect things in the world. The historians have proved, to their own satisfaction at least, that he said no such thing - at any rate, not about Herne church tower.
In the 1960s workmen pulling down a row of cottages at Herne uncovered an oblong black metal plate engraved with a picture of a boy and girl in early Stuart or possibly Tudor costume. It proved to be a long-lost piece of a memorial brass to John Atte Sea and his family. He lived at Herne from 1575 until 1605, with his first wife Martha until she died in 1586 and after that with his second wife, Sara. He had eleven children.
The family home is now called Strode Park and is better known locally as the Cripplecraft Home of the Foundation for the Disabled.
A notable local landmark in Herne is the 18th century smock mill on Mill Lane, a direct descendant of a mill first mentioned on the site in 1511. The present building dates from 1781 and was falling into disrepair when members of Herne Society took it in hand in 1971 and raised money for its restoration. Now it is back in working order again.
Village geography saw to it that Herne was up to its windmill in the North East Kent coast smuggling trade, and in his book Reminiscences of a Country Parson the Rev Giles Daubeney recalled that when he came to Herne from Benenden in 1905 there were three men in the village who had been smugglers all their lives.
On a hill looking northwards towards the coast west of Whitstable over the Graveney marshes, Hernhill hovers in a thoroughly acceptable way round its rectangular village green. The Red Lion Inn, across the green from the church, is a Wealden hall house that is almost as delightful to look at as it is to go into. Along the back of the green is a picturesque row of 19th century cottages, the facade interrupted enticingly by a central arch, and Manor House, with its half-timbered north end wing, stands in the churchyard.
All around the countryside is full of fruit trees and, one way and another, Hernhill is a very attractive village indeed, and very understandably a designated conservation area over which 15th century St Michael's church presides with a sort of lofty indulgence. It was to the churchyard at Hernhill that the body of the man they called Mad Thom, otherwise Sir William Courtenay, was brought. His brief career as a Parliamentary candidate, self-acclaimed Messiah and small-time rabble-rouser ended at the battle of Bossenden Wood in nearby Dunkirk in 1838, when he was shot down by soldiers sent to arrest him.
But no-one can show you the grave site because it was not marked, so that the morbidly curious should not disinter him for relics. The grave is said to have been dug only four feet deep, four paces north of the North chancel door, but there is no evidence of it there now.
Six others who were killed with Thom that battle were also buried in the churchyard during a two-hour service that was conducted without any psalms or hymns being sung because the choir men were all either among the dead or in prison awaiting trial for their part in the affair.
There is more than just the castle - but not much more. There is the church - St Peter's, the pub - The Henry VIII, and a short street of houses, some old and some not so old. The castle is old, no doubt about that, although it has been pretty thoroughly renovated in the last hundred years. The huge gatehouse, the outer walls, and the moat were all built in about 1270 and it was the Bullen family (it did not become Boleyn until after it went up in the world, and before it came back down in the world, too, during the 16th century) that added the Tudor house inside the walls.
The family fortunes were at their height when its most famous daughter, Anne, caught the Royal eye. Poor, pretty Anne. How different might have been the history of England if Henry VIII had not lost his heart to her, and she lost her head to him.
There must have been something about the Bullen women that particularly captivated the king. Elizabeth Howard became the king's mistress after she had married Sir Thomas Bullen. One of the daughters of the marriage, Mary, comforted the royal heirlessness for a while until her young sister, Anne, usurped her in the king's affections.
When a king went a-courting in those days he did so with a considerable retinue that had to be entertained by the lady's family while the lady entertained the monarch. It was no small expense to have the king dropping in at all hours, although Sir Thomas was mollified if not actually recompensed with a succession of titles and no doubt he made his guest as welcome as that guest thought proper until, at last, Henry was able to to divorce his Queen Catherine in defiance of the Pope, and Anne was duly crowned Queen of England on May Day 1533.
The marriage saddled her with the reputation of having seduced the king away from his faith as well as his wife and begun the reformation that founded the Church of England and paved the way for some of the most cruelly bloody religious persecutions the country would ever know.
In September that year, the royal couple's first child was born - a girl they called Elizabeth (later, of course, Queen Elizabeth I), and not the son the king craved. That was Anne's first misfortune. Her second was a miscarriage in 1534, followed by a still-birth and then another miscarriage.
It was too much for the volatile Henry, whose disappointment boiled over in rage and he ended the marriage by having Anne executed by a specially commissioned French swordsman on Tower Hill, for the High Treason of adultery with five men including her own brother. So ended the Thousand Days of Boleyn glory. Her father, disgraced Sir Thomas, died two years later and was buried in St Peter's Church at Hever, where he is still commemorated by one of the finest church brasses in England.
His wife and his heir, Anne's brother George, were both already dead, so the king claimed the Hever estate for himself and he later gave it to his divorced fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, who lived there until she died in 1557 - surely one of the most insensitive gifts of all time, even for a man whose sensitivities were very much more his servants than his master.
After that the castle began a slow decline. During the 18th century it was a private house and notorious as a centre of the Kent and Sussex border county smuggling trade. A century after that it was no more than a humble farmhouse. But then in 1903, the house was bought by William Waldorf Astor, the New York millionaire and one-time American Ambassador in Rome, who became a naturalised Briton and was later created Viscount Astor of Hever.
Like many another convert, he became more English than the English and he chose Hever upon which to lavish his investment in his chosen life style. He employed the architect Frank L Pearson and, it is said, two thousand workmen to undertake a four-year programme of restoration of the building and the creation of magnificent gardens. Most of what Hever castle is today is the result of his work.
The course of the river Eden was changed to fill a newly-excavated thirty-five acre lake and a new single-storey house was built, cleverly designed to look like a a complete Tudor village from the outside. The Tudor 'village' is today the castle guest suites, international standard accommodation for conference delegates. The thirty acres of garden includes the unique Italian Gardens, designed to be a backdrop to an unmatched collection of Roman and classical statuary, one of the finest mazes in the world - and a big adventure playground for children.
William Waldorf Astor died in 1919 and his young son, John Jacob VII, MP for Dover from 1922 until 1945, became the first Baron Astor of Hever. It was his son, the second Baron, who became chairman of the board of The Times Publishing Company and later Life President of Times Newspapers, and who first opened Hever Castle to the public. He and his wife, Lady Irene, lived there from 1962 until 1982 when he resigned as Lord Lieutenant of Kent and retired to Scotland, where he died soon afterwards.
Despite an income of nearly œ400,000 a year from the visitors who come to Hever, the cost of maintaining such a national monument privately was more than the family wanted to continue to bear. In 1981 they decided to sell the castle and the 3,500 acre estate, and it was offered for sale at œ10.5 million, plus œ3 million for the contents which were sold separately. The house and estate were bought by Yorkshire based Broadland Properties, but the castle remains open to the public, both day visitors and longer stay residents, as a conference centre as well as a stately home.
The old gateway is the finest remaining of any castle in England, and two of the three portcullises are original, the outer one probably the only one in England still capable of being lowered to keep out unwelcome guests.
There are really two Highams, Upper and Lower, and this is because the village has been gradually moving away from its original centre towards Rochester. Lower Higham is the oldest part, down by the marshes at the end of Church Street, where St Mary's church flaunts its antiquity with Roma tiles built into its walls. In the churchyard lie buried many of the navvies who lost their lives during the building of the canal tunnel through Higham towards Strood. The canal was abandoned and the tunnel used for the railway instead.
It is a very out-of-the-way little church, unfrequented and a bit 'spooky', almost begging to be discovered by some film crew and used as a suitably mist-shrouded location for a late-night horror story. A hundred yards from the church is Abbey Farm, which is on the site of old Higham Priory, a nunnery founded by King Stephen in 1148 and which was still there in 1512 because it was then that the vicar of the church, Edward Sterofer, was reprimanded by his bishop for keeping company with a nun from the nunnery, a certain Lady Anchoretta Ungelthorpe.
Perhaps he was not the only one who 'kept company' with the nuns, either. It surely was not necessary for the Prioress, a year later, to petition the Bishop for a wall to be built round the nunnery 'for the increase in virtue and observance of the rule' in order to fend off the attention of just one vicar?
On the other hand, though, in 1520 - by which time the Lady Anchoretta had become Prioress and admitted she had taken money from the Common Chest of the nunnery in order to pay debts owed to her sister - two other nuns were said to have borne children fathered by the vicar, so perhaps the wall was needed after all. Anyway, the nunnery was closed soon after that and scarcely a breath of scandal has emerged from what what remains of the old village since.
The parish used to be a collection of hamlets that included Lillechurch, Church Street, Gore Green and Chequers Street. It was to Chequers Street that the Gravesend-Rochester railway came in 1845 and there that Higham Station was built, just about halfway between Lower Higham and the former hamlet of Higham Upshire, which is now the larger centre of population.
The railway tunnel between Higham and Frindsbury, two and a quarter miles long, was designed for the Thames and Medway canal by William Tierney Clark, who also built an iron bridge over the Danube at Budapest. But the canal was not a financial success and the line was adopted by the Gravesend and Rochester Railway, which later became part of the South Eastern Railway network.
Upper Higham began to emerge as a village during the 18th century, and it was this that Charles Dickens knew so well during the time he coveted and later when he owned Gad's Hill Place. Gad's Hill itself was, before Dickens' time, a notorious place for highwaymen, who waited until the travellers had slowed their pace on the hill and then relieved them of such encumbrances as their purses and other valuables.
The Sir John Falstaff Inn recalls that it was here where Shakespeare's great comic character had his own taste of highway robbery in company with Prince Hal. Here, too, began the Dick Turpin legend after a gentleman was robbed on the hill early one summer morning. He afterwards identified his robber who was able to prove he was with the Lord Mayor of York at 8.30 pm that same day, and was acquitted of the robbery by a jury that could not bring itself to believe that a man could be in Higham and York on the same day.
Later the robber was convicted of other offences and admitted the crime, telling how he had ridden to Gravesend, forced the ferryman to take him and his horse over the river, and had then ridden across Essex to Cambridge and so to York, where he went to a fete in the York teagardens and deliberately engaged the Mayor in conversation for some minutes to establish his alibi. The hero of this exploit was not called Dick Turpin, who was a different character altogether, but was a well-known Kent highwayman called Swift Nicks.
Almost opposite the Sir John Falstaff is Gad's Hill Place, built by a man called Stevens, a barely literate ostler at an inn who was canny enough to marry the landlord's widow, became a brewer and reached the pinnacle of social achievement by becoming Mayor of Rochester. Now the house is a girls school, but once it was a private house where Charles Dickens lived from 1856. It was in the garden of this house that the author had his famous Swiss chalet workroom in which he was working on the story of Edwin Drood the day before he died there in June 1870.
Although Wealden in character rather than one of the Romney Marsh villages, High Halden is actually between the two. Because it was on the edge of the old Wealden forest, it has been an inhabited spot for many, many years. Tiffenden Manor, south of the village green, claims to have been farmed continuously for more than a thousand years.
Edward Hasted, in the 1700s, did not think a lot of High Halden. He spoke of it as being 'situated very obscurely, in as unpleasant a part as any within this county.' William Ireland did not find it a lot better when he spoke of it in his History of Kent in 1830. He described it as 'very retired, damp and as unpleasant as any I have seen in the county.'
Today, the village has a rather open look about it, and there seems to be more new than old houses. There used to be a railway linking the village with Tenterden and Headcorn, but that was closed in 1954.
In the 19th century, Henry Latter built a house on the site of Harbourne Hall, which featured in GPR James' novel The Smuggler. In fact, the house in the novel was a fictitious one on the Hrbourne Hall site, and it is said that when Mr Latter read the novel he became so dissatisfied with the old house he originally bought and lived in that he had it pulled down and another built on the pattern of the one in the book, using bricks made from clay dug on the site and timber felled on the estate.
The old house was linked with some of the leading smuggling families of these parts and the Ransleys, one-time leaders of the notorious 18th and 19th century Hawkhurst and Aldington gangs rented land on the Harbourne estate. George Ransley began life as a farmer, prospered as a smuggler and built the Bourne Tap at Aldington in which to settle as an innkeeper and master smuggler.
During WW2 the house was an Army headquarters where some of the details of the D-day invasion were planned, but several bombs were dropped in the area, the house itself was never hit, despite the fact that in 1944 the local Home Guard captured a man in Harbourne woods while he was in the very act of signalling to enemy aircraft to help them pinpoint their Harbourne House target. Since then, the old house has been demolished and the site is now occupied by a new one built in 1980.
In no sense a twin of its Lower namesake some seven miles away on the other side of the river Medway, High Halstow is a high and airy place with a wide-awake look. The local Women's Institute celebrated its anniversary by erecting a village sign on the signpost that stands in the tiny triangle of green where the road branches off down towards Hoo.
The bells of St Margaret's church have been ringing out over the Hoo Peninsular since 1675, but early last century the vibration they caused threatened to bring down the church tower so they were no longer rung in the old way, but instead were equipped so that they could be chimed by one man. The system enabled the great tongues to swing rather than the bells themselves, which was quieter and safer, too.
Then, in 1983, the five bells were restored at the cost of £9,000 and a certain amount of volunteer labour, and re-hung on metal supports which replaced the old wooden ones first built into the church in about 1350.
Some of the East Kent villages are very small indeed; mere pinpricks on even quite large-scale maps. Hoath is one of these. It is almost an intrusion upon the prairie-like countryside in which it sits; a sort of thin crust of human settlement on either side of the road that seems to have lost its way in an unpeopled landscape south of Herne Bay. Yet it has been the certainly for 500 years, if the date, 1440, on Clayhanger Farm is to be believed.
The little flint church of Holy Cross even keeps its dedication to itself. The wayfarer will look in vain for any outward admission to the name. Yet it, too, has been there since the early 14th century, although most of the building today is Victorian, with a vaguely incongruous-looking wooden bell-tower and steeple. Next to the church is Hoath Court - and that, together with the pub, just about sums up Hoath village.
A little further along the same road, however (if you happen to be travelling from west to east) is the hamlet of Marshside - appropriately named, since it is as far as it is possible to go without plunging into the Chislet Marshes that border the vestigial Wantsum Channel which once made Thanet a true island. Marshside is no greater a metropolis than is Hoath, but it has a more lived-in look and it does have a very pleasant pub, the Gate Inn, which features a pond-side garden and a somewhat raddled old pillory just outside the front door. Inside, there is a gallery of photographs recording local social activities which seem to confound any assumptions that this is the dead-and-alive corner of Kent that casual acquaintance might suggest.
Almost 1,000 people live in Hollingbourne, which straddles the North Downs on the Pilgrims Way. In upper Hollingbourne there is an Elizabethan Manor House, home to the Culpepper family during the 17th century. All Saints Church dates back to the early 14th century. This long, winding village has many beautiful listed buildings, also a village pond.
Hollingbourne is a kind of peanut of a village because it has two centres of population, each different from the other in character, separated by a sort of no-man's land of council houses, school and playing fields, and the railway station.
At the upper end, where Hollingbourne Hill curls up the lower slopes of the North Downs, the Pilgrims Way emerges from its Downland meanderings just above the warm red-brick welcome of Hollingbourne Manor.
At the opposite end, near where the B2163, the village main street, joins with the A20, are the shops and some very picturesque old half-timbered and brick houses.
It is a very happy arrangement, in fact, because it means that anyone who travels through the village from either direction, has a first and last impression that lingers long after the middle section is forgotten.
Upper Street, also called Hollingbourne Street, is where the church is, as well as the manor house, the King's Head Inn, Penn Court and The Old Forge. Half a mile lower down is Lower Street, usually known as Eyhorne Street because it is where Eyhorne House is.
There is, od course, a reason for this separation. There used to be two manors, Hollingbourne and Alnoitone (nowadays rather whimsically contorted into Elnothington). The present house called Elnothington is Georgian, on the southern boundary of the parish. There used to be a church there, too, but that has long gone, leaving only a faint echo among local lore of the late 13th century scandal that rocked (but, human nature being what it is and always was, also no doubt delighted) the village with its revelations of adultery by William the chaplain with a local girl called Emma Horseman.
Eyhorne Street is lined with houses dating from the 16th century, but the red-brick Georgian Eyhorne House was condemned to demolition in 1976. However, it was saved and is now privately owned but open to the public from time to time. As you have every right to expect, it is said to be haunted and one of its former ghosts was supposed to be a little old lady in grey who used to tell bedtime stories to a little girl who lived there.
All Saints Church is probably 14th century, although it succeeded a much older church on or near the same site. Evidence of that was found in 1969 when workmen digging outside the church walls found a number of chalk blocks, below ground level, which when uncovered were found to have traces of red paint and gold leaf on them. The general belief was that these were the remains of one of those earlier churches.
The great treasure and curiosity of the church is the famous three hundred years-old Culpeper cloth, usually described as an alter cloth even though it is improbably large for that purpose. According to Hasted, who lived in Hollingbourne and whose son was vicar there, the cloth was embroidered by the four daughters of Sir John, afterwards Lord, Culpeper of Greenway Court.
The story is told that it took them almost twelve years to complete the work, while their father was abroad sharing the exile of Charles II. During that time, one of the sisters actually went blind through working by candlelight on the cloth, which is of purple velvet decorated with applique fruits of all kinds, including Kentish hops and hazel nuts, worked in gold thread.
The Culpeper family crops up all over Kent at just about all periods of history, but the first Hollingbourne Culpeper was Francis. The family chapel in the church, however, was built specially to contain the tomb of Lady Elizabeth, wife of Francis' son, Sir Thomas. It is a particularly fine example of the work of the 17th century sculptor Edward Marshall - a white marble effigy of Lady Elizabeth, her head on a pillow and at her feet a curious mythical creature described as a Thoye - an animal with a dog's head, a lion's tail, cloven hooves and covered in leopard-like spots. No wonder it is chained!
The much-quoted inscription, in Latin, can be translated to describe Lady Elizabeth as 'Best of women, best of wives, best of mothers.' This paragon died in 1638, aged 56.
The last male descendant of Hollingbourne's Culpeper family, Philip, who lived at Blackheath, died at the age of 78 in August 1985. He was buried with his ancestors at Hollingbourne. At different times, the family owned Greenway Court, Hollingbourne Manor and nearby Leeds Castle. Now it is commemorated, other than the church, by the village street called Culpeper Close.
Here we have another of those Hoo Peninsular villages distinguished from its neighbours by the name of its 13th century church, one of the wonders of which is the yew tree in the churchyard which is said to be anything from six hundred to a thousand years old. In fact, the parish became formally Hoo St Werburgh only as recently as 1968. Before that, although the name was used, most of the local people simply called it Hoo - as, indeed, they still do.
When Richard Church wrote about Hoo in 1948 he referred to it as cut off from the mainstream of life, but since then the mainstream has broadened out a bit in this part of the county and today Hoo St Werburgh is no longer small and remote, but quite large, although there is still a sense of remoteness about it, and some vestiges of its past linger among the modernity.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the village was almost thrust into that mainstream of life when land that had been wholly agricultural until then began to be valued more as an industrial raw material. Gravel was dug there, bricks were made there, so was pottery. The barges that carried away the products busied the river frontage. The industrial life of Hoo St Werburgh lasted until the 1930s after which it declined, leaving behind the pits from which the mineral wealth was dug.
The embarrassing Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667 brought soldiers to Hoo, to man Cockham Wood Fort, but the fort was never needed and very little of it remains now. The Hoo fort, like its twin, Darnet Fort, was built in the 1860s as part of the defences against the expected Napoleonic invasion. Both were originally intended to mount twenty-five guns on two tiers, but while the forts were still being built it was obvious they were going to sink into the marsh under the weight of that much ordnance, and in the end the Hoo fort was armed with only eleven 9 inch rifled muzzle loaders, with stores and accommodation for the gunners. The fort remains in reasonably good condition and although it was disarmed before WW1 it remained Ministry of Defence property and cannot be visited.
Neither the brickworks nor the pottery have survived and today farming is again the most important local industry, while most of the residents look to the Medway Towns, Thames-side or London for their daily bread.
An attractive village, with a nice shady village green just across the road from The Gun and Spitroast Inn, on the Heart of Kent country tour route - the one way-marked with the county's white horse on a chocolate brown sign.
Horsmonden was one of the centres of the old Wealden ironworking region and its Furnace Pond is one of the largest and finest of the artificial lakes made to provide water power for the great hammers that once made all this part of Kent noisier than the traffic does today.
The mill wheel is no longer there, although the water still cascades over the spillway steps and the circular basin at the bottom in which the wheel used to turn is still there. It was here that John Browne had his famous forge and foundry where, in 1616, he was employing two hundred men in making great guns for the Army and Navy.
Browne had the monopoly on manufacture of royal guns and in 1625, after the outbreak of the Spanish War, his foundry at Horsmonden made five hundred guns for the British ships. King Charles I visited the foundry in 1638 ti watch a canon being cast - a bronze four-pounder, forty-two inches long, now preserved in London's White Tower. Not long after that, though, Browne found himself in trouble because despite his previous royal patronage he sided with the Parliamentarians in the Civil War and would not make guns for the Royalists.
The famous foundry closed in 1685 and is now remembered both by The Gun and Spitroast, formerly The Gun, so-named after it became an inn round about 1750, and by the canon carved on one quarter of the wooden village sign.
After John Browne and John Read - inventor of the stomach pump, Horsmonden's most noted son was Simon Willard who was born there in 1605 and grew up to become that Major Willard who founded the town of Concord in Massachusetts Bay in America.
The village also claims to be where the most famous of all Kent hop varieties, Fuggles, was first found growing in a flower garden belonging to George Stace in 1861. Traditionally, the plant grew from a seed emptied out of a hop-picker's dinner basket with the crumbs at the end of the day's picking. Its qualities were recognised and the strain developed commercially by Richard Fuggle of Fowle Hall, Brenchley in 1875.
It is said the Sir Arthur Sullivan's most famous composition - after, of course, his work for the Gilbert and Sullivan collaborations - The Lost Chord was composed and first played on Hothfield parish church organ by the man himself. Apparently, he was a guest of Lord and Lady Hothfield at their mansion, Hothfield Place, when the inspiration prompted him to pop across to the church and try the new piece out on the organ there. The rest, as they say, is history.
The church still stands, but Hothfield Place does not. The church was struck by lightning and pretty well burned to the ground in 1598, but it was rebuilt some five years later by Sir John Tufton, whose marble tomb, complete with effigies of Sir John, his wife and family, is one of the more magnificent of the church's monuments.
Away from the village, alongside the A20 in a field just behind the roadside fence is a small granite pillar which tells its own story in the inscription, which is headed simply TITHE:
In memory of Roderick Morris Kenward, President of the
National Tithepayers Association 1931-37, MP for Ashford
1929-31. Born 1881. Died 1937. This stone is a token of
gratitude for the splendid service he rendered in the tithepayers'
cause and of admiration of his character. This site forms part of
Beachbrook Farm where his was born and where he suffered
repeated distraints of tithe.
The stone and its inscriptions are a reminder of the bitterness of the days when farmers, not only here but all over the country, campaigned bitterly against the system that required them to contribute regular sums towards the maintenance of the clergy.
During WW2, scores of distinctive barrel-roofed Nissen huts were built on Hothfield common for use of troops. When the war was over, the huts were used for ten years to house people during the time the post-war housing shortage was at its worst. Ashford MP Bill Deedes campaigned for them to be demolished as a health hazard to the people, particularly the children, who lived in them and eventually, in 1955, the occupants were all re-housed and the huts finally cleared away.
The proposed Channel Tunnel rail link will thrust through Hothfield parish and necessitate the demolition of Yonsea Farm buildings beside the A20. The buildings are late Georgian, built soon after the Battle of Waterloo, and lottery money is being sought to help pay for them to be dismantled and re-erected elsewhere as a working museum.
About 5 miles out of Maidstone is the parish of Hunton, known centuries ago as Huttingstone, the hunters' town. Hunton Court, built in the 18th century, was the home of the former Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The population is about 600.