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The little East Kent village of Ickham has left very few permanent marks on past centuries and might very well have left none on the 20th if it had not been for -Mini-Jaws'. That was the name local journalists gave to a rogue perch which, in 1977. somehow got in among the goldfish in a pond owned by ex-trawlerman Alf Leggatt. The perch had helped itself to about 2,000 of Alf's goldfish before he called in the Army to deal with the creature.
He had already tried to net it and others had tried to catch it with rod and line. But the golden plenty among which it lived disinclined the perch to vary its diet with barbed bait. So the Army was called in and tried to blow up the voracious perch. The attempt failed. Mini-Jaws champed on.
A second attempt was made by none other than the resourceful explorer and big game hunter Lt-Col Blashford-Snell. He set about the problem with characteristic directness, increasing the amount of explosive and confidently asserting that 'that must have done the trick'. A grateful Alf restocked the pond with another 800 goldfish - which began to disappear at once. Mini-Jaws was still at home and as gluttonous as ever.
In the end it was the Southern Water Authority experts who ended the predatory perch's rampage with a comparatively high-tech weapon called a stun-rod, which knocked out all the fish with an electric charge. The shocked perch surfaced amid his equally stunned prey and was pulled out, his days of easy pickings over.
Local pressmen had a lovely time reporting the successive highlights of this little saga, which had all the makings of a true village legend for a century or two hence.
Which is very much as it should be. Ickham deserves such a story to relate to its visitors. It is an attractive village, with a rectangular green that carpets the approach to the 13th century church of St John the Evangelist. Thomas Cranmer's brother, Edmund, was rector in 1547 but was deprived of the benefice in 1553 because he was married.
The first Ickham church was a wooden Saxon building that was there in AD 791. That was replaced in 1090 by a Norman church which, in turn, was extended and altered during succeeding centuries until the shingled spire and clock were added in 1870. The clock in unusual in having a mechanism like that of Westminster's Big Ben and a face with pointers carved into the stonework instead of figures.
The single village street is fronted with mostly 19th century cottages of brick and weatherboard and the green is flanked by a long black weatherboard barn. The Duke William public house has has Forge House next to it.
The village was once the home of the 17th century scholar Meric Casaubon, who is buried in Canterbury Cathedral.
West Kent has a wealth of picturesque villages and Ide Hill is one of them. There is no nearby town to encroach upon its hilltop remoteness, and the buildings all around its sloping green have the well cared for look of a village fully appreciated by its inhabitants. Ide Hill has less history than many other villages, even though its origins have been traced back to Anglo-Saxon settlement. But what it lacks in historical interest, however, it amply makes up for in character. Standing on one of the highest points of the Kentish sandstone ridge, it offers views south over the Weald and north across the Holmesdale Valley to the North Downs.
Nearby Bough Beech reservoir, completed in 1969, is a resort of birdwatchers and, of course, of birds, distinguishing itself very early in its life as the inland water chosen by the first large flock of eider duck to come to England.
This has been a prosperous farming area for centuries, and this prosperity has left some very fine old buildings. One that might have been lost beneath the reservoir waters was Bayleaf, but instead it was carefully dismantled and moved to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton, in Sussex, where it was reassembled and is now one of the museum's most outstanding acquisitions.
There has only been a church at Ide Hill since Bishop Beilby Porteus of London had one built there in 1807. The present St Mary's Church was built in 1865. A popular local walk leads from the village green, alongside the churchyard and over the crest of the hill to where there is a stone seat commemorating Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust. Ide Hill was one of the first acquisitions of the Trust.
The walk goes on past the seat, but a great many visitors are dissuaded from from their good intentions by the pleasantness of this spot with its superb view and the knowledge that the two village inns, The Crown, and The Cock, are still beckoning nearby.
It was at Ightham Church, in 1570, that William Lambarde, author of the first English county history, A Perambulation of Kent, married his first wife, Jane. The couple had met and fallen in love during that perambulation of his, and the marriage took place on the day before Jane's 17th birthday. Tragically, it was not to last long. She died only three years later, childless, of smallpox. There is a monument to her in the church.
In 1643, Ightham's rector, the Rev John Gryme, provoked a Royalist rebellion in the village by refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance to Parliament and to impose the same oath upon all his parishioners. Soldiers were sent from London to arrest this rebellious Kentish cleric, but when they rode into the village they were confronted by villagers ready to fight for their rector if need be.
There was a bit of a skirmish, from which the soldiers withdrew after one of the local men had been killed. The incident threatened to spark off a serious Royalist rising, and might actually have done so if any such prospect had not been very promptly quelled by a large body of troops who rode with all haste to the village.
Buried in the churchyard is Adelaide Kemble, who died in 1879. She was one of the great opera singers of her day, the younger daughter of the English actor Charles Kemble and niece of Sarah Siddons.
Although some distance from the village centre, Ightham Mote bears its name and is easily the most notable local building. The house is one of the finest moated houses in England, although the name refers not to the moat but to the fact that the building stands on the site of an ancient meeting place (mote).
Visitors who go seeking the house today are led there by signs pointing the way, but it is not difficult, even now, to believe the old story that a party of Cromwellian soldiers sent to seek out this Royalist refuge during the Civil War got lost in the maze of lanes that all seemed to lead past rather than to the house, and never did find it.
The house was owned by the Selby family for almost three hundred years. The most celebrated member of the family was Dame Dorothy, a lady in waiting to Elizabeth I and renowned for her specially fine needlework. There are various stories about how foiled the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, one of which tells how she sent an anonymous letter to her cousin, Lord Mounteagle, warning him to stay away from the opening of Parliament that year. She didn't say why he should do that, but he recognised his cousin Dorothy's handwriting and begun the enquiries that led to the discovery of the plot.
Another notable owner of Ightham Mote was that Sir Charles Selby who was described by Pepys as 'the lewdest fellow of his age'. He was a poet and dramatist who was born at Aylesford in about 1639 and who, in 1663, was fined œ500 for running naked in London's Fleet Street while drunk. Nowadays, of course, he would be paid that much to do it for the tabloid photographers.
When he found himself in trouble for another drunken frolic five years later, the king himself intervened on his behalf and, it is said, got drunk with Selby and his friends, just to show where his sympathies lay.
It is a rather odd thing about marshland anywhere. It is the flattest, most open landscape there is, yet always there is an air of mystery about it, as though the very openness was hiding secrets that only lifelong residents among it could reveal. Ivychurch is not specially redolent of this secretiveness, but it is there, just as it is in all the other Romney Marsh villages, though more subtly, perhaps, today than it was in times past.
When the Rev John Streating was looking for another parish to serve after nineteen years at Ivychurch three hundred years ago, he wrote that he lived in 'an unhealthfull place, and among rude and ill-nurtured people for the most part.'
Smuggling was respectable even though it was unlawful, and highly lucrative, too. There is many a family fortune still being enjoyed today that was begun when a humble labourer or (literally) moonlighting artisan first turned his hand to a bit of free enterprise smuggling.
Daniel Defoe, when he was riding in these parts, saw dragoons riding about 'as if they were huntsmen beating up their game' and when he inquired the reason he was told they were 'in quest of the owlers, as they call them'. He was told that sometimes the owlers were caught, but that often the smugglers operated in such numbers that the law enforcers could only stand and watch the contraband goods being carried off, not daring to meddle.
When Cromwell's soldiers had occasion to show the Parliamentary flag on Romney Marsh, it was the church at Ivychurch that they stabled their horses, and when WW2 brought its threats of German invasion, it was in that same church that one of several secret stores of food was stacked away while lookouts used the centuries old beacon turret on the corner of the church tower to watch the coast for the invaders that did not, in the event, arrive.
This is the last village on the mainland before the Kingsferry Bridge carries travellers across the Swale and on to the Isle of Sheppey. There has been a village her for centuries. The present church, All Saints, is 14th century. But the 20th century very nearly extinguished Iwade before it changed its mind and overlaid its antiquity with a huge estate-style development that has left the church looking more like a poor relation than a venerated oldest inhabitant.
For decades the villagers demanded a bypass for the A249 which carried increasing volumes of traffic right past its church as the industry of Sheppey grew. Today, Iwade is bypassed by a dual-carriageway road and the Sittingbourne-Sheerness traffic no longer trundles through the village centre.
The changed character of old Iwade is nor without its own attractions, one of which is the bright new sign which, although an unsuitable advertisement for the developers, guides visitors to the various amenities on offer and succeeds in making the WELCOME it extends feel genuine and warm.
Nearby Chetney Hall once had England's only lazarette, a quarantine colony for carriers of contagious diseases. Work was begun on building an isolation hospital in 1801, mainly for seamen and passengers arriving at Sheerness aboard ships that anchored in the Medway as a precaution against the plague. Ten years and £20,000 later it was abandoned, unfinished.