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Laddingford is one of Kent's more modest villages, little more than a group of roadside houses and some farm buildings - and the Chequers public house, of course - set in the relatively unpopulated tract of Wealden countryside between Yalding and Paddock Wood. The little River Teise flows past Laddingford, under the 14th century bridge that, presumably, accounts for the village's existence, on its way to the Medway at Twyford Bridge in Yalding. The little traffic that uses the road flows through the village without, for most part, noticing it has done so. That's the sort of place Laddingford is.
Something that happened in 1997 which thrust little Laddingford into world-wide prominence and, indeed, gave it a claim to kinship with the Biblical Garden of Eden, no less, was - an apple. Local farmer Alan Smith of West Pyke Fish Farm grew an apple which weighed 3lb 11ozs. He exhibited it in the annual Marden Fruit Show in October, where it amazed all who saw it. It won an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest apple. The press carried the story of the Howgate Wonder, which brought its owner letters from all over the world, including some from people who recalled the man who first bred the variety on the Isle of Wight in 1929.
After its brief bask in the full glare of publicity, the monster apple might have ended up like the four and twenty blackbirds of the nursery rhyme, baked in a pie, but someone had a better idea. The paragon was rendered inedible by the process the immortalized it in bronze to astonish all posterity - until someone else grows an apple that weighs in at 3lb 12ozs and Laddingford yields up its moment of glory and slumps back into obscurity again.
It was he price of hops that madeLamberhurst a Kent, rather than a Sussex, village. Until 1894 the Kent-Sussex boundary ran through the village, but then the two counties decided that the village must become wholly part of one or the other. Lamberhurst was - and for that matter still is - in the Wealden hop-growing region, where the price a farmer was paid for the hops he grew really mattered. For some reason, hops were regularly fetching higher prices in Kent than in Sussex at that time, so the canny folk of Lamberhurst voted to pay their rates in Kent, too.
Easily the most dominant feature hereabouts is Scotney Castle, which was built in 1358 and for which the river Beult was diverted to create a moat. That caused problems, too, because it meant the moat actually crossed the county boundary. Once, when a maid at the castle was drowned in the moat, the coroners of Kent and Sussex argued over which of them would properly preside at the inquest.
Scotney was the local headquarters for Jesuit missionary work late in the 16th century, and it is one of the local traditions that a certain Father Richard Blount once hid in a priest hole at Scotney Castle while searchers sent by local JPs hunted for him. While the search was on, the lady of the house noticed that the priest's girdle was caught in the secret door, betraying its whereabouts and his. Crouching close to the door, she warned the priest of the danger and he pulled the giveaway girdle out of sight.
But you can't whisper through a stone wall, even if it is only a door disguised as a stone wall, and she was overheard by some of the searchers who at once began to pull down the whole wall in their efforts to find the secret door and its priestly hidey-hole. Before they succeeded, however, it began to rain heavily and the search was called off until next day. During the night, one of the household raised a false alarm that the searchers' horses were being stolen and when they went to investigate, Blount escaped by climbing over a wall and dropping into the moat.
Today the village is famous for its vineyard, thirty-two acres of prize-winning grapes grown by Kenneth McAlpine, head of the civil engineering company, while nearby Bewl Water reservoir claims to be the best trout fishery in the county.
Best known for its castle, but an attractive village in its own right. The church of St Nicholas has Saxon work, a massive early Norman tower and contains a fine 15th century rood screen. From the church the road dips, twists and climbs through the village passing attractive cottages, timber framed houses and oasts. The original wooded castle was built by Saxons, but it was rebuilt in stone in 1119 by Rober de Crevecoeur. The population here is over 750.
Probably throughout history Leeds village has been very much overshadowed by the castle. Once the castle would have shared the local limelight the abbey, but that was one of the victims of Henry VIII's sweeping Reformation and is only remembered now by Abbey Farm. In 1846 the complete foundations of the abbey church were uncovered, including the crypt. They are still there, covered up again for safekeeping.
The village wanders up a hill from the church which has a curiously squat tower. The castle, however, has long enjoyed the reputation of being the loveliest castle in all Europe and now that it is, late in life, open to the public at last, the justice of that reputation is appreciated by thousands of visitors every year.
Leeds Castle has been the home of kings, queens and noblemen for almost all its history, and for three hundred years during which it enjoyed the status of 'The Ladies' Castle' it was home to no fewer than eight of England's medieval queens. Its last private owner was Lady Baillie, daughter of Almeric Paget, Lord Queenborough, whose grandfather commanded the British cavalry at Waterloo. It was Olive Baillie who restored the castle and its grounds to their present condition and then bequeathed the lot to the nation to be administered by the trustees of the Leeds Castle Foundation.
The castle is a romantic building, and a perfect setting, floodlit and reflected with mirrored clarity in the still water of its artificial lake, for the open-air concerts, ballet and other performances that are held there now. It is entirely appropriate and seemingly inevitable that there should be several love-stories told about its historical occupants.
The first queen to own the castle was Eleanor of Castile, first wife of Edward I, whose life she saved after he was assassinated with a poisoned dagger whilst crusading at Acre. When she died, her grieving husband had her body brought to London and had every place where her bier rested along the way marked with a stone Eleanor cross, the last one being the Charing Cross.
When Henry V's widow Catherine of Valois, came to live at Leeds, she fell in love with and secretly married he Clerk of the Wardrobe, a young Welshman called Owen Tudor, who founded the Tudor dynasty that gave England Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Henry and Anne Boleyn came to Leeds Castle in those happy days before her failure to give England a male heir to the throne lost her first whatever good name her marriage to the king had left her, and then her head.
It was love for the castle itself that made its last owner, Lady Baillie, spend so much time, money and energy on making sure she left the gem it is now to the county in which it is so beautifully set.
Leeds Castle was built for defence more than a thousand years ago and it seems it has lost none of its security in the intervening years. It was, at any rate, chosen in 1978 as a safer alternative to a London hotel fir the Middle East summit talks. Its moated fastness amid wide open lawns and countryside, with the M20 motorway putting London less than an hour away by car, made it a security chiefs' dream.
However this spelling is pronounced in other parts of the country, here it is 'Lie', and it must be a strong contender for the title of the most attractive village in Kent. The large village green is surrounded by trees and houses and there is a rather pretty village sign in the shape of a shield quartered with local scenes framed in decorative wrought iron.
Across the road from the green are the grounds of Hall Place (once Leigh Hall), which are often, though not regularly, open to the public. This is part of an ancient deer park, but today the chief features are the lake and the helpfully labelled trees and shrubs.
The house itself is Elizabethan red-brick in appearance although in fact it was built in 1876 for the Nottinghamshire merchant and philanthropist Samuel Morley, MP. Part of the house was demolished by fire in 1976.
13th century St Mary's Church, beside the 19th century mock-Tudor Hall Place gates, has one or two curious features, including a pulpit with a wrought iron hour glass stand, probably 17th century, and a most unusual brass in memory of an unknown lady who died in 1580. It depicts a woman on her knees apparently having been raised from the dead by an angel blowing a trumpet and is inscribed, 'Farewell all ye until ye come to me.'
The charming square is the focal point of this large, attractive village close to the North Downs, just off the A20 between Ashford and Maidstone, with a population of about 3,000. Flanked by medieval houses, it contains several shops, restaurants and pubs. The church of St Mary with its fine Kentish tower is of Norman origin.
Buried in the churchyard is Mary Honywood, who was renowned for her bravery in visiting prisons. The wife of Robert Honywood of Charing, she died in 1620, leaving 367 descendents. She had 16 children of her own, 114 grandchildren, 118 great-grandchildren and nine great-great-grandchildren. She lived through no fewer than six reins.
Lenham Square has been used as a film location more than once, and it is easy to see why. Take away the cars, introduce a few extras appropriately costumed and you have a corner of old Kent very much as it would have looked a century or more ago.
From its earliest beginnings, certainly during Roman times and probably before that, Lenham has been a trading village. It grew up around the local springs that bubble out of the ground and trickle away to become the little river Len which joins the river Medway at Maidstone. It was those springs and the streams that flowed from the that gave Lenham its early reputation for growing fine watercress and at one time the village was noted as much for its luxuriant watercress as for its quarrelsome women. Today, the main motif of the village sign alongside the nearby A20 Maidstone-Ashford road is the watercress plant.
The major inheritor of Lenham's trading reputation is the international Freightflow depot which accepts goods brought in by TIR juggernauts for redistribution.
Evidence of Saxon occupation came to light in January 1946 when Robert Goodsall, the Kent writer, who lived at nearby Harrietsham, bought and began to restore the 15th century Hall House on the corner of Lenham High Street and Maidstone Road. When the floor was taken up, the remains of three bodies, two men and a woman, together with a small collection of weapons, were found. Archaeologists judged them to be about twelve hundred years old. The house is now The Saxon Warrior Pharmacy.
Because Lenham lies just off the A20 and M20 it is less well-known to travellers who used that road than the memorial cross cut into the chalky hillside above the village, which is a noted local landmark. The turf was first cut from the cross in 1922 as a memorial to 42 local casualties of WW1. In 1939 it had to be covered up lest it should provide enemy aircraft with a navigational aid, but it was uncovered again when peace was restored, by which time fourteen more names had to be added to the great granite memorial stones behind it.
In 1960, villagers acknowledged that it was becoming too much to expect future generations of villagers to climb the steep hill to tend the memorial and the granite memorials were brought down to the churchyard. The cross remains, though, still gleaming white on its green ground.
Despite its antiquity, Lenham is no museum piece. It is still growing, with many new estate homes. The former Lenham Hospital, built before WW1 as a tuberculosis sanatorium on the hill overlooking the village, later became a psychiatric hospital but was empty and disused after 1986. The plans for the site are to redevelop it into yet another housing estate.
The ruins of Leybourne Castle barely hint at the importance of the building and its owners in days long gone. Today, the remains are little more than a few walls onto which the manor house, behind the church, has been built. Yet Leybourne was a significant manor before the Normans arrived and 700 years ago the castle belonged to one of the most powerful families in Kent.
The manor came into the de Leybourne family during the rein of Richard I and Sir Roger de Leybourne was one of the barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. That led to his being imprisoned in Rochester Castle, from where he was only released after he had paid a hefty fine. His son, another Sir Roger, was killed during one of the crusades and, following a custom of the time, his embalmed heart was returned to his family, who installed it in a unique (in Kent) heart shrine in Leybourne church.
He left a son, yet another Roger, who fathered the Sir William de Leybourne who enhanced the family fortunes no end by marrying Juliana, daughter and wealthy heiress of Sir Henry de Sandwich. It was that enhanced family fortune that enabled Sir William to play host to Edward I and Queen Eleanor at Leybourne Castle on St Crispin's Day (25th October) 1286. Two iron crowns in the church are believed by some historians to have been left as Royal mementoes of that visit, although it must be said others have found reason to doubt that.
Sir William had two sons. One, Sir Henry, grew up to be one of the most violent and lawless me of his day and he was finally outlawed for felony and disinherited in 1329. The other son, Sir Thomas, died young, leaving his father to be the last baron to live at the castle. His grand-daughter, Sir Thomas' daughter, another Juliana, inherited so much property and was so rich that she became known as the Infanta (Princess) of Kent.
But she was the last representative of the family into which she was born and from her the Leybourne estates passed to her husband, the Earl of Huntingdon, and later to the Crown. When she died, childless, in 1367, she was buried at St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury and the family was extinct. The castle became the property of an abbey and fell into ruin after Henry VIII's dissolution. It was sometime later that the house was built on part of the site.
Leybourne church is, in fact, older than the castle. Parts of it are 900 years old, although it has been added to and altered over the years. One of its rectors, John Larke, was hanged, drawn and quartered in March 1544 for denying Henry VIII's new title of Supreme Head on Earth of the Church in England.
Today's Leybourne village is almost entirely modern in character. Vastly expanded by estate development, its Old Rectory has been converted into a restaurant, its countryside crossed by new roads and gouged by sand pits that have become water sports centres and nature reserves.
Leybourne Grange, a 270 acre site between the A20 and the M20, was a home for 1,200 mentally handicapped people until it closed in 1992. It now houses the Grange Park College for 16-20 year olds with severe learning difficulties and plans for much of the rest have included a 700-home housing estate, Among Leybourne's latest features is a 22 acre RSPCA animal rescue centre in Castle Way, which was opened in 1996.
The Isle of Sheppey is a place of sharp contrasts. In the south, the marshes are today much as they must have been centuries ago: low, flat, and dotted with sheep too busy fattening themselves on the plentiful grazing to look across the Swale to the mainland of Kent beyond.
The north-west corner of the island is relatively densely built up, with the towns of Queenborough and Sheerness now barely distinguishable, one from the other, and both dominated by the port industries that support their considerable populations. Much of the rest, though, is open, undulating countryside that appeals strongly to holidaymakers and, therefore, to providers of holiday accommodation, and everywhere there are caravan parks, chalet villages and holiday homes.
Leysdown is the most blatantly 'seaside' village on the island. The long, almost straight approach road bursts into a mini-Margate sea-front type main street, where shops flaunt all the traditional wares of sun hats and T-shirts, ice cream and comic postcards, fish and chips and kebabs.
A short distance further on, however, the natural character of the place makes some effort to gain control. The road, thus far disguised as a good, main highway, suddenly changes its mind at its extreme north-east end and becomes a cliff-edge cul-de-sac. Even here, though, the broad grassy cliff top has had to offer itself as a large car parking area where visitors can throw frisbies at each other or, if the prevailing wind is in a bad mood, sit staring through the windscreen at the Thames Estuary and the ships of all sizes that plough to and fro across their line of vision.
Very few of them know - or care - that long before this became the holidaymakers' playground village it is today, Leysdown was where British aviation began. It was from one of the neighbouring treeless fields that J.T.C. Moore-Brabazon (later Lord Brabazon) made his first circular flight in Great Britain, which won him a £1,000 prize. Later, in the 1920s, flying moved to nearby Eastchurch, leaving Leysdown which just a couple of farms, a pub, post office and general store and a few bungalows.
This attractive village has a population of about 500. The 13th century church of St Nicholas contains an interesting and varied collection of monuments, including some by EH Baily, who sculpted the figure of Nelson in Trafalgar Square.
You might have travelled the A229 out of Maidstone by car many times and never realised it took you through Linton. St Nicholas' Church is only a few yards back from the road, but it is on top of a bank and above the average motorist's eye as he goes down the hill, concentrating on the approaching bend half-way down.
The colourful village sign, sturdily framed in timber, embellished with wrought iron and topped by the Kentish White Horse badge, is equally easily missed despite the spotlights focused on it. In fact, it bears a shield with the name of the village very prominently across the middle and the rest quartered with representations of local features - a group of oast kilns a deer (to remind us of Linton deer park), a cricket bat, ball and bailed stumps, commemorating the great days of Kentish cricket when Linton Park owners were enthusiastic patrons of the game.
Across the road from the church, the reeling timbers of the old Bull Inn and its own very lively inn sign do catch the eye, but a few roadside cottages alongside it do not suggest a village. Yet, this is Linton - a hillside village born of a need to house the employees of the Big House, Linton Place, which was built in the park early in the 18th century by Robert Mann.
It is a big white house on the hillside that gives its views right across the Weald and fully justifies the description given to it by Horace Walpole, who called it 'that citadel of Kent, with the Weald as its garden.' Travelling along the A229 back into Maidstone, you see the house gleaming among the trees from miles away.
One of the Manns who lived at Linton was Sir Horatio, grandson of the first owner, who, in 1737, was sent to be the English Ambassador in Florence. There, his special duty was to spy on the Young Pretender and his family. I was he who persuaded the Pope to drop the titles of the Old Pretender's successor. Sir Horatio inherited Linton from his brother in 1755 and although he died in Florence, he was brought home to be buried at Linton in 1786.
Another member of the family was Sir Horace, who was known as The King of Cricket. He lost a considerable fortune gambling on the game and he sold Linton Park to Galfridus Mann to pay his debts. Galfridus gave the estate to his daughter, who married the fourth Earl Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield, which was how the property came into the possession of the Cornwallis family.
The last member of that family to live at Linton was that Lord Cornwallis they called 'The Spirit of Kent.' Wykeham Stanley, 2nd Baron Cornwallis of Linton succeeded to the title and the estate when his father died in 1935, his elder brother having already been killed in Ireland.
He, too, was a talented cricketer who played for Kent from 1919-26, captained the county side three times, 1924-26, and was President of MCC in 1948. He was a member of Kent County Council and its chairman from 1928-35 and as Lord Cornwallis he held an astonishing number of important offices in the county, including the of Lord Lieutenant of Kent from 1944 until 1972.
The family moved away from Linton in 1937 but Lord Cornwallis outlived two wives and died in his 90th year at Ashurst Park, Fordcombe, near Tunbridge Wells, in January 1982. The funeral service at Linton church, however, was attended by local people who said they felt a real sense of loss at the passing of a genuinely well-loved man.
Littlebourne is situated within four miles of Canterbury on the A257 Canterbury to Sandwich and Deal road. The village is set in a rural area mainly dominated by fruit farming with woods on the Canterbury side and the Lesser Stour forming the boundary to the east. Quite what St Vincent of Saragossa, Spain's first Christian martyr, is going patronising a very English little church like the one at Littlebourne is not known. It has been suggested that, since he was regarded as the patron saint of winedressers, he may have been adopted by the monks of St Augustine's Abbey at Canterbury who tended vines in the part of the abbey lands. The great barn that flanks one side of the churchyard is thought to have been their 14th century grange.
The village stands beside the Little Stour (the 'little bourne' from which it takes its name) and though the church dates its foundation from the 13th century, the 20th century has imposed itself fairly relentlessly upon its surroundings. There is still a core of quaint timbered houses but bungalow development in the 1960s, especially south of the church, expanded the original village which now seems to be under imminent threat of absorption into grater Canterbury.
Like so many villages, Littlebourne has experience considerable increase in traffic in recent years. The A257, the main route through the village, is the Canterbury-Sandwich and Deal road and the inevitable traffic tends to be relentless and fast.
Littlebourne has pretty well lost what claims it once had to be numbered among Kent's more attractive villages, despite a few individually eye-catching features that survive, including the very distinctive shape of the Littlebourne mill at the northern end of the village, straddling the river, and an interesting group of oast houses where the road bends in search of Howletts, itself a major attraction, at nearby Bekesbourne.
By no means a twin of Greatstone, Littlestone has been described as 'a resort that never quite took off.' It is at one end of the Romney Marsh shoreline sea wall, a place of Edwardian and Victorian villas, landmarked a trifle self-consciously by the 120 feet loftiness of the red brick water tower built in 1890 and never embellished with the four clock faces it was designed to carry.
The pattern for the development of this hitherto tiny coastal community was set in the 1880s when Sir Robert Perks and surveyor Henry Tubbs built a home for Sir Robert and a terrace of houses to go with the new Grand Hotel and the church.
The two men also laid out Littlestone golf course, which became very popular with Members of Parliament and Government ministers. In 1913, the Strand Magazine told the story of how a day's golfing at Littlestone led to a wager being taken up by T.H. Oyler that he could drive a golf ball the twenty six miles (as the crow flies) from Linton Park at Linton to L:ittlestone in under 2,000 strokes.
He actually covered thirty five miles in the three days and 1,087 strokes it took him to win the bet, losing seventeen balls on the way. Modern traffic makes it unlikely that the feat will ever be repeated; certainly not by Mr Oyler who died, aged ninety one, in May 1941.
Littlestone was a lifeboat station from 1858 until 1928 and the old coastguard cottages, privately owned now, are still there in St Andrews Road. In her book The Gift of the Sea - Romney Marsh (1984) Anne Roper recalls the former times when the lifeboat was called out, a 'knocker-up' went to each of the cottages in turn and pulled the 'knocker-up cord', which was a strong piece of cord with a metal device that tapped on the window to wake up the sleeping coastguard within when the cord was pulled.
This delightful village, with a population of more than 2,300, is unique in this part of the country, having cottages rising in terraces above the Loose stream, from which it takes its name. The power of the stream, the purity of the spring water and the availability of Fuller's Earth helped the woolen trade prosper in the 16th century.
All villages are unique, but Loose (pronounced Lose) does seem to have gone over the top a bit to distinguish itself from other Mid-Kent villages. It clings apparently to precariously to its hillside site, each building seeming to be holding hands with its neighbour. each preventing the others from slipping down into the stream at the valley bottom.
That stream has been powering mills and watering cress beds on its way down from Langley to the river Medway at Tovil since Saxon times. On its way it crosses the main road into the village opposite the old Chequers Inn and spreads out, gathering tributes from from several local springs, on either side of the causeway that gives pedestrian access to the road up to the higher parts of the village around the church.
It is, in fact, something of a tourist attraction to be able to walk on this causeway along the middle of the stream in which local children paddle in hot weather. During the winter, adults who use the causeway sometimes have to paddle as well, because the water washes over the footway.
In the churchyard at Loose is a massive old yew tree of which it had long been said locally that anyone who sticks a pin in it and then runs round it anti-clockwise at midnight shall be rewarded for peering through a small window above the Charlton memorial against the church wall by the sight of a woman killing a baby.
The half-timbered Wool House at Loose, which dates from the 15th century and is now owned by the National Trust, though privately occupied and available to view only upon special request, was probably once a fleece store for the local water-powered woollen mills and there is a local belief that it was once used by Cromwellian forces as a headquarters during the Civil War.
Loose is bypassed these days by the viaduct that carries the road from Maidstone out into the Weald. It was built in 1829 as an aid to troop movement during the Napoleonic Wars, having been designed by Thomas Telford with a 50 ft span between piers. But the Alpine character of the village is still sufficiently recognisable to justify the local scout group being know as Loose Swiss Scouts.
However, if you go there, do be diplomatic if you must refer to the local Women's institute. The joke about the Loose Women's Institute has worn a bit thin with some of its members!
Here is a still growing village, the special character of which is to be found near the church, which is at the end of a short cul-de-sac crossed by a river which empties into the river Medway and in which boats of all shapes, sizes and colours make an irresistible scene for artists and photographers. Lower Halstow is on the edge of the Medway marshes, those 'lost lands' of Kent, once sufficiently above sea level to support possibly the largest area of potteries in Roman Britain.
The church of St Margaret of Antioch looks a bit as though it had hunkered down against the winds that beat against its old walls. It looks quite small from the front, but from the seaward side it is seen to be much larger. There is only the churchyard wall between it and the river.
During WW1 several anti-aircraft batteries were located around the village as part of the Thames defences and when they were fired the houses were more badly shaken than anything at the skyward end of the guns. However, it is an ill wind that blows no good at all - or, in this case, an ill barrage. One morning, after the guns had been firing heavily during the night, the wife of the Lower Halstow parson went into the church and found pieces of the old font lying in fragments on the floor. When she overcame her horror, it was found that the font was not a stone one, as everyone had supposed for centuries, but a rather lovely 12th century lead one, decorated with figures of kings and angels, which had been plastered over.
It has been suggested that the plaster camouflage was provided to save it from Civil War Army plunderers looking for leas for their bullets.
In the 1800s, this was one of the Medway brick-making and barge-building areas. Several barges were built at Lower Halstow by John Woods, brickmaker, before his business was taken over by Eastwoods in 1880. In 1912 the Lower Halstow brickworks employed 120 men and boys and produced between seventeen and eighteen million bricks a year. The works closed in 1966 and the buildings were later demolished.
There is an Upper Hardres (pronounced, like its nether neighbour, Hards) as well. They are both just east of the distinctively Roman Stone Street which, except for a rather curious kink around Horton Park at the south end, runs arrow straight due south from just outside Canterbury to within a couple of miles of Hythe.
But despite their origins, the two are separate and distinct villages. Lower Hardres is perhaps less visually favoured than Upper Hardres, with a 19th century church. Pevsner described the church as 'conceived, outside anyway, as a humble village church, and imaginative leap before Pugin's example made such attention to appropriateness commonplace.'
Lower Hardres featured in the first reported case of the wrecking of steam threshing machines in Kent during the 'Captain Swing' disorders in 1830. Two magistrates and a posse of constables backed up by thirty dragoons were sent out from Canterbury to try to catch the gang of about four hundred wreckers, but without success.
It was at Lower Hardres, too, that a rather curious little incident was reported at Christmas 1859 that had to do with the old Kent custom of hoodening. Percy Maylam, in his book Hooden Horse, published in 1909, said in bygone days it was probable that the hooden horse was to be found at Christmas in every village and hamlet and on every large farm in East Kent. By this time, though, it had died out almost everywhere, surviving only in Thanet and Walmer.
The custom was for hoodeners to go from house to house collecting (demanding with menaces might well be the term we would use today) money or goodies for a Christmas feast. The band was made up of a Waggoner with whip who led the horse, the Rider, who tried always unsuccessfully to get upon the Horse's back, and Mollie, a man in 'drag' who went behind the Horse with a besom broom.
The Horse was a man, known as the Hoodener, who held a usually rather crudely carved wooden horse's head on a stick. Attached to the head was a sort of hood of coarse sacking which more or less hid the man. The head itself was made so that the man could jerk a piece of string to make the loosely hinged jaws open and shut with a vicious clacking sound. Sometimes the jaws were lined with nails to represent teeth and altogether the creature was pretty fearsome. The whole performance was known as hoodening, and it was accompanied bu some fairly licenced horse-play and rustic ribaldry.
Maylam himself dismissed suggestions that the ritual was descended from some Saxon Woden worship rites and thought it had more to do with morris dancing. However, the custom came under censure from the church, which saw it as a pagan survival that ought not to be encouraged, and it lost a lot of support from ordinary people too when it became rather too robust a frolic for comfort.
His story concerned the visit in 1859 of a group of hoodeners to Lower Hardres Rectory, where a German and his wife were spending Christmas with the rector. The German lady was an invalid and has not walked for seven years. She was wheeled out to the lawn in her invalid chair to see the hoodeners' performance and when the Horse (a man named Henry Brazier) pretended to jump at her, the jaws snapping viciously close to her face, the lady was so frightened that she sprang out of her chair and ran indoors, and was able to walk perfectly well from then on.
The story ended that her husband was so delighted that when the hoodening season was over he bought the Horse and took it back with him to Germany.
The hooden horse is still very much an East Kent custom today and enjoying something of a revival, not just at Christmas time but more especially as an attraction at summer fetes.
The area around Folkestone has changes a great deal since St Ethelburga the Queen founded Kent's first monastery at Lyminge in AD 633. But this is still a very pleasant part of East Kent and Lyminge was, in fact, judges Kent Village of the Year in 1998.
Ethelburga was the daughter of Kent Ethelbert, the first Christian King of Kent, who made Augustine and his monks welcome and allowed them to make Canterbury the headquarters of their mission. She was married to the pagan Edwin of Northumbria and when he died she returned to Kent and founded a monastery and nunnery of which she became abbess and which took her name.
She built on the site of a Roman settlement which took its name from the Roman name for the river, the Limen, nowadays the eastern Rother. In its turn, Lyminge gave its name to one of the original seven (later reduced to five) Saxon lathes into which the kingdom and later the county was divided. It became the lathe of Shepway, which remained on of the five, and the name survives as that of the district council today.
Ethelburga died in AD 647, afer which part of the monastery was given to St Augustine's at Canterbury. In AD 804 the nunnery was transferred to Canterbury. The monks remained in the monastery at Lyminge until about AD 965, then they, too, moved to Canterbury. The church of St Mary and St Ethelburga, however, remained and was rebuilt by Archbishop (later St) Dunstan. Today, together with the old railway station, it is at the heart of a busy and generally pleasant village.
The Elham Valley Railway opened in 1889 and Lyminge had a railway station which encouraged development into a small market town. But the line was closed in 1947 and is now a public walk and the station houses the local branch of the county library.
In 1997, Lyminge Forest became the chosen site for major development as a Rank Group leisure park. The plans aroused a great deal of controversy and attracted protestors who made camp among the trees, determined to prevent the scheme from going ahead. In fact, in was an unforeseen fall in the Rank Group profits that did most to jeopardise the development which, by 1988, looked as though it might be abandoned.
Lympne has to get a mention, if only for the fun of untangling a few tongues. The name is pronounced Lim. It was the name of a Celtic town even before the Saxons had their way with it, and no doubt it seemed to them a perfectly proper way of spelling it. The Romans called it in their forthright fashion Portus Lemantus, and built one of their main Shore forts there to discourage raiders from sailing up the river Limen (now Rother) and indulging their piratical taste for the old Nordic pursuits of pillage, rape, and arson.
After the Romans left, the port silted up and the once major town declined to become a very minor village indeed. Sic transit gloria mundi (as the Romans would probably have said if they had known about it). However, in AD 892 the channel was still open and a great Danish force of 250 ships sailed into the river Limen and rowed up to The Weald, stopping only to overcome very inadequate opposition at Appledore and make that their own base for a sustained campaign.
Today's memorials to the great days of Lympne include the Shepway (shipway) cross on top of Lympne Hill and lower down the remains of the old Roman fort, now called Stutfall castle, which lie in tumbled ruins where centuries of landslides on the old shoreline cliff face have left them.
Lympne Castle and church are still there and no doubt both played their part in secreting smuggled goods brought up under cover of darkness from the Romney Marsh beaches below. Once, when an old pew was removed from the chancel inside the church, a chamber was uncovered which was at once identified as a hiding place for tubs of Hollands or other un-Customed wares.
The castle today owes much to the restoration carried out by Sir Robert Lorimer, the Scottish architect, at the beginning of the 20th century. He restored it from threatened ruination and made it into the single large house that it is today.
Visitors to the castle can climb up to the concrete room which was built as an observation post during WW2, and also go up to the ramparts and enjoy the view over the Marsh. The ramparts are supposed to be haunted by the spirit of a Roman soldier which cannot bring itself to desert his look-out post, and their are other ghosts reputed to be associated with the old castle, too.
More popular than either the castle of the church is lovely old Port Lympne, where the late John Aspinal's open house for the thousands of visitors to the mansion, its fifteen acres of terraced gardens and three hundred acres of parkland in which he has established his sanctuary for free-ranging exotic wildlife as an extension to his private zoo at Howletts, near Bekesbourne.
The mansion at Port Lympne was begun by Sir Herbert Baker for Sir Philip Sassoon just before the outbreak of WW1, and the gardens which are now rich with mature trees and shrubs and weathered stone and brickwork are as breathtaking as the climb up the hillside wildlife park.
Some old villages are marred by new building, but some seem to want to show it off almost as people show off new clothes. Lynsted is one of these. It lies between the old A2 (Watling Street) and the newer M2, south-east of Sittingbourne. That it is old is obvious from a number of nine old buildings in and around the village. Half-timbered Lynsted Court, for instance, and Lynsted Park, part of an Elizabethan house that was built by Sir John Roper, later Lord Teynham, in about 1599, although it underwent major alterations in 1829. Jeffries is another 15th or 16th century timber-framed house and there are others, as well as several more modest old houses and cottages.
The church of St Peter and St Paul was very badly damaged during the Battle of Britain in August 1940 when a 50kg bomb fell through its roof into the north isle, but it has been restored now and dares any other vandals to repeat the outrage. Another bomb from the same stick damaged several old houses nearby.
This is a village with a duck pond, which does much to enhance the cul-de-sac of new houses beside and behind it. There is a school, too, and the Black Lion pub and altogether it comes as no surprise to learn that Lynsted has been several times a winner of the Kent's Best Kept Village title.
There is a particularly fine collection of memorials inside the church, including those to members of the Roper family. In 1377 John Roper stumped up £50 towards the cost of a ship to fight the French and in 1588 another John was knighted for his financial contribution towards the cost of fitting out a ship to fight the Spanish Armada. It was Margaret Roper, Daughter of Sir Thomas More, who, after his execution in 1535, brought his head to Lynsted on the way to Canterbury to be buried in the family vault in St Dunstan's church.
Another local family remembered in the church were the Hugessons, merchant adventurers and Royalists who raised arms to fight Cromwell's Parliamentarians.