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Maidstone has been settled from early times, first with Mesolithic hunter-gathers then by Neolithic farmers tilling the fertile soil of the Medway Valley. Important remains from this period are the Medway megaliths just north of Maidstone. By the time the Romans arrived in AD 43, Maidstone was already a small community; the Romans added villas and other stone buildings, and (probably after building Watling Street) constructed the road lying under the town's Week Street and Stone Street.
The Domesday Book of 1086, records Maidstone as a centre for crafts and part of the manorial estate of the Archbishop of Canterbury. This small manorial town was destined to grow into a market town and borough by the 16th century; the first grammar school was founded in 1549, and by the early 17th century, with expansion in the number of schools, literacy was markedly improving.
Penenden Heath was the traditional site for the sheriff's courts from all over Kent, and by 1620 most Assize hearings were held in Maidstone. The present-day Law Courts, by the bridge over the River Medway, have replaced the old courts at County Hall, continuing a centuries-old tradition.
It was the Georgian age which sparked off real prosperity; living standards rose, specialist industries, shops, inns and professions proliferated. It was still an important market town, and maintained by the weekly Thursday market, four annual fairs, Sunday fairs, and a monthly cattle market. By the time the town hall was built in 1765, Maidstone had replaced Canterbury as Kent's most important town, and with the opening of the first General Dispensary in 1824, a new gaol in 1819, the County Sessions House in the 1820's, and expansion of the barracks, Maidstone was firmly established as the County Town of Kent.
Kent's county town stands in a countryside of orchards and hopfields on the River Medway, still has a real county town atmosphere, with the High Street leading up from the river, originally a wide market place, but later filled in to create parallel Bank Street. Both streets lead to the town centre with the town hall of 1763 and 1960's multi-storey blocks. Maidstone's oldest buildings are the 14th century Archbishops' Palace, fronting the river, the great church of 1395 and the 15th century Archbishops' stables.
Monuments & Churches
The Parish Church of All Saints, located in the Palace Gardens, is one of the finest examples of a perpendicular church in England, the naive is 93 feet long. Containing many treasures including a memorial to Lawrence Washington, an ancestor of George.
The Archbishops' Palace, can also be found in the Palace Gardens. This 14th century residence of the Archbishop's of Canterbury displays many of its original features today, and it's an attractive conference and wedding venue (the town's registry office is located on the ground floor). It has a fine coffee shop on the first floor and visitors are welcome to browse through the historical meeting rooms when they are not in use. The adjacent Apothecary's Garden is also open to the public.
The College of Priests, is in College Road. Behind All Saints Church this complex of medieval buildings was originally the home to the college of priests. The Master's House is now the Kent Music School. From the Horseway by the River Tower a ferry crossed the river up until early this century.
Corpus Christi Fraternity Hall, in Fairmeadow. The 13th century building was the centre of business in medieval Maidstone and used as the Grammar School from 1549 to 1871.
Maidstone Town Hall, in the High Street, built in 1762, the building was originally used as the Magistrate's Courts and today houses the Council Chamber. Above the Chamber is the old prison cell still with graffiti carved by prisoners awaiting deportation. This remained in use until 1807.
Musems & Art Galleries
Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery, is in St Faith's Street. Elizabethan, Chillington Manor, houses one of the foremost museums and art galleries in the South East. The museum is rich in fine, and applied oriental art, ethnography, archaeology, natural local and social history. It is also home to the Queens Own Royal West Kent Regiment Museum. The Egyptian Mummy is a favourite with the children and as well as some fine English and continental old masters, the art gallery offers a lively programme of temporary, contemporary and traditional exhibitions. Coffee shop and gift shop.
The Tyrwhitt-Drake Museum of Carriages, in Mill Street, has an outstanding collection of vehicles including royal state carriages, horse-drawn sledges and sedan chairs housed in the medieval stables of the Archbishops' Palace.
Parks & Gardens
Brenchley Gardens, situated behind the museum, the Victorian bandstand is the venue for summer Sunday afternoon band concerts and other events throughout the year.
Mote Park. This large, beautiful park close to the town centre incorporates the Kent County Cricket Ground, the Mote Leisure Centre, plus pitch and putt, and sports pitches. The lake in Mote Park is used for sailing, fishing and model boats.
Vinters Valley Nature Reserve is 70 acres of woodlands, wetlands, grasslands and scrub. A wedge of wilderness just outside the town centre. Other parks and gardens are to be found throughout the town.
The official website for the town of Maidstone is provided.
Go to the south of the borough and you will find a village that used to have its own courthouse, which still stands in the centre of the village, and dates back to the Celts. The population is more than 3,600, making it one of the largest villages in the Maidstone area. The old town stocks can be found in the 13th century St Michael and All Angels' Church porch.
When the 18th century Kentish historian Edward Hasted rode through Marden he was moved to record that it was a place with three streets, 'the houses of which are but meanly built'. The village has changed a bit since then. There are still, basically, three streets, but the 'meanly built' houses have aged into picturesqueness and although the village straggles a bit raggedly out into the Wealden countryside, the centre has that bustling, lively look that identifies it as anything but a mere picture postcard museum piece.
The old village stocks in the churchyard were brought there from the village square where they were in danger of being vandalised. Still in the square, however, is the old timber-framed Court House, now a shop, recalling days when Marden was part of a Royal Hundred and exempt from the jurisdiction of the county sheriff.
The most strikingly 20th century feature of Marden, apart from the industrial estate on the north side of the railway station, is the glass in the windows of the church chancel. It was designed by Patrick Reyntiens in 1962 and represents with vivid modernity the vision of St John in Revelations.
In 1998, Kent Wildlife Trust extended by nine acres Marden Meadows Nature Reserve, one of the best remaining examples of unimproved hay meadows, with a huge variety of wildlife, some of it quite rare.
Marden Fruit Show is the biggest show of its kind in Britain and is now known as the National Fruit Show.
A local website for Marden village can be found here.
Margate, 15 miles NE of Canterbury on the Isle of Thanet, is a popular and bustling seaside resort with 9 miles of sandy beach, safe swimming, arcades and funfairs, the Winter Gardens with a concert hall that seats 2000, the Theatre Royal and the Tom Thumb Theatre with the world's smallest stage. The curious Grotto, chambers hollowed from the chalk and embedded with shells, possibly prehistoric, is believed to be an 18th century folly.
Margate was one of England's earliest coastal resorts, developed after 1753 when Benjamin Beale, a Margate Quaker, invented the bathing machine. The upper classes came to Margate to partake of the new and fashionable craze for sea bathing, making use of Beale's invention - a kind of wagon in which the bather was towed into the sea.
The first development, around Cecil Square in 1769, was inland from the sea, behind the old fishing village, but soon London visitors were heading for Margate in their droves, first down the Thames and by sea and later by train, and building moved seawards as the 19th century progressed.
The pier, built in 1810, was partially destroyed in a storm in the early 1970's, and was later, after many attempts, demolished. Today, the parade and the little harbour separate the boisterous seaside sands and fun from the eastern cliffs and 19th century terraced.
Although 20th century building has made Matfield virtually an extension of Brenchley (or vice versa) the two villages could be more different from each other. Brenchley wears its antiquity like a medal; Matfield looks as if it is equally proud of its modernity. Like Brenchley, Matfield is surrounded by orchard farmland, as suggested by its relatively simple village sign, which stands on the village green. It is a wrought iron hoop with the name across the middle, two apples dangling above it and the date 1981 in a horizontal diamond at the bottom.
It is a pleasant place in which to wander, with its white painted boarded Wheelwrights Arms overlooking the cricket pitch and the pond and with some attractive Georgian houses for neighbours. The First World War poet Siegried Sassoon was born in Matfield and the village was the setting for one of Kent's more spectacular murders during WW2. In 1940, Dorothy, wife of Walter Fisher, and their daughter Freda were shot to death in a orchard immediately behind Crittenden Cottage, just outside the village. Their housemaid, Charlotte Saunders, was also found dead inside the house.
The murders were investigated by no less a person than the head of Scotland Yard's famous Flying Squad. He suspected an attractive young widow names Florence Ransome, a frequent visitor to Crittenden Cottage where she sometimes spent the weekend with Walter Fisher. The (then) unconventional lifestyle of the people involved served to divert some public attention from the London Blitz, which was at its height during the Old Bailey trial. Florence Ransome, although she maintained her innocence throughout, was found guilty. She was not executed, however, but certified insane and sent to Broadmoor.
More recently, the parish was thrust into international headlines when, in 1997, Badzel Park farm, and rural centre became the final refuge of the notorious Tamworth Two. The porcine pair were on their way to the slaughterhouse when they took to their trotters in a bid to save their bacon. After a short, but well-publicised spell of freedom they were finally rounded up, reprieved by public demand and became two of Badzel Park's most famous residents.
Meopham (pronounced Meppum, by the way) is chiefly notable for two things: for being the longest village in Kent and for having a windmill that is one of the best preserved in Kent. The village is up on the North Downs, south of Gravesend and as well as for the windmill it is also well-known for its cricket green, claiming that the game has been played there for at least two hundred and fifty years.
The mill, which overlooks the green, is a six-sided black wooden smock mill with white sweeps, standing on a two-storey brick base. It was probably built some time after 1801 by the Killick brothers and it worked by wind power until 1927, when a petrol engine took over. Later still, it was worked by an electric motor, with the mill generating its own electricity until it was linked to the mains.
By 1958 the structure was in a bad state of repair and was given, with the land on which it stands, to the Kent County Council, which leased it back to the owner for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. Restoration was begun and a Trust set up to take over the lease and bring the mill back to working condition. Very practically, the base of the mill was put to use as a parish council meeting room.
The mill is, in fact, unique in Kent for being six sided. Eight sides were more usual and it is supposed to have been built originally from the timbers of an old battleship dismantled at Chatham dockyard.
Probably the reason why the green and its presiding windmill have come to typify Meopham is because the village has very little else to commend it to the visitors' eye. It is a bit of a straggle along the A227 between Wrotham and Gravesend, having lost its recent rural reason for being there, yet not having gained enough commuting newcomers to raise it to the status of a small town.
Most of the people who live in Meopham now have no recollection at all of the historic broadcast made by Harry Price, the famous psychic researcher, from Dean Manor in 1936. During the broadcast, one of his pieces of equipment, designed to record changes in temperature, created some excitement when it suddenly twitched, first upwards and then down well below the normal, for no apparent reason.
Mr Price thought that such behaviour could only have been provoked by some paranormality that he did not, however, identify. Later during the night that Price spent in the house with BBC technicians and others, mysterious footsteps were heard and could not be accounted for, and there were other reports of ghostly sights and sounds from Dean Manor, too.
The whim of an earl's son who wanted a better view of his new house put Mereworth (pronounced Merryworth) where it is now. When the Hon John Fane, later Earl of Westmorland, inherited the manor of Mereworth early in the 18th century, he was a man who had everything - except a Palladian-style mansion which was the 'in' status symbol of his day.
So in 1720 he had one built to a design by Colin Campbell. Today, Mereworth Castle can be glimpsed from the Maidstone-Tonbridge road; a domed and porticoed confection of a house with flues cunningly built between the inner and outer shells of the dome so that the perfect lines should not be marred by chimney stacks.
Now it is the private property of a Middle Eastern oil state diplomat and out of bounds to everyday sight-seers at the end of its parkland drive. But when it was built it overlooked the old village, which its owner decided spoilt the view. So he built new homes for the villagers where they would be hidden from his fine new house and had the old ones demolished.
He built the villagers a new church, too, and it was the steeple of Mereworth church that identifies the village to travellers today. It is the most incongruously ornate village church spire in Kent, looking for all the world as if it had been evacuated from the City of London. In a way, it was. The church was modelled on Inigo Jones' St Paul's Church in Covent Garden, but with a steeple copied from that of St Martin in the Fields.
The memorials in the old church were conscientiously removed to the new one, and have since been joined by others, including one to Rear Admiral Charles Lucas, who distinguished himself during the Crimean War. As a Royal Naval Lieutenant, he picked up a live enemy shell from the deck of his ship and tossed it overboard, and act of bravery that led to his becoming the first man to win the Victoria Cross.
Like a number of other villages elsewhere in Kent, Milton has been virtually absorbed into the apparently endless inflation of an overwhelming neighbour, in this case Sittingbourne. So much so, that the two are spoken of in the same breath and there will be those who will wonder at Milton's inclusion among the county's villages.
But Milton (properly Milton Regis) was a royal manor long before Sittingbourne mattered at all and in Saxon times the Isle of Sheppey was just part of the manor of Milton, where stood the mother church for chapels in villages for several miles around.
Milton was Alfred the Great's town of Middleton and its creekside location would have made it a significant little port. Holy Trinity church claims to be the second oldest in Kent still in use. There was certainly a church on the site in AD 680, although most of the present flint and stone building is 14th century.
It was that same creekside location that brought the 19th century paper mill that completely overwhelmed the little 18th century fishing village. The mill's need for water drained the creek (although nowadays, its water comes from its own wells) and the creekside area became lost among industrial development.
The Dolphin Yard sailing barge museum is on one branch of the creek, into which the tide still flows, and Holy Trinity church, with its exceptionally massive tower, keeps watch over the Milton and Kemsley marshes and particularly the immediately neighbouring Church Marshes Country Park.
Despite all the expansion of Sittingbourne that has blurred its boundaries and the new building that has bloated its own appearance, vestiges of the old Milton are still to be found. The beamed and peg-tiled old court house still stands, defiantly incongruous today, in the main street.
>In writing about some parts of the Isle of Sheppey there is an underlying sense of a need to get the words down quickly because tomorrow may be too late. The seaward coastline can change quite dramatically and very suddenly whenever another bit of the clay cliffs crumbles and falls into the sea.
The Isle of Sheppey is highest east of Sheerness and it slopes away to flat marshy grazing and mud levels on the southern Swale side. It was on the heights (though that is perhaps too grandiose a word for the reluctant eminence that serves as high land on the island) that the first settlers built their homes. There, too, a widowed Kentish queen, Sexburga, built a monastery in about AD 670 on the spot where an angel told her that before many more years had passed a heathen people would conquer the nation.
The abbey claimed to be the first in Kent and was specially a place to which royal or noble widows or spinsters could retire from the stresses and strains of the man's world in which they lived. The ex-queen, fittingly enough, became its abbess.
This was the part of the island which became known as Minster and the angel was quite right: two hundred years later the heathen Vikings did descend on the Saxon nation and, eventually, conquered it.
They came not to conquer at first but to plunder and one of the more accessible places in which to do that was Sheppey. The great Minster there offered worthwhile prizes for any raider and in fact so hospitable did they find the 'island of sheep' that when they came in force, bent on conquest rather than mere plunder at last, it was on Sheppey that they made their first headquarters and where they established a beach-head for their advance towards the west.
They remained masters of Sheppey until the Normans came and took it over from them yet, oddly, they left no recognisable traces of their occupation that have yet to be discovered at any rate. The old abbey gatehouse has been restored and made into a local history centre which, incidentally, is well worth a visit for anyone who wants to know more about the Isle of Sheppey.
At least one miracle is credited to Minster. At some time (the date seems to have been lost in the telling and re-telling of the story) a year-old child called Ann Plott who lived in a cottage nearby was run over by a loaded dung-cart and crushed 'flat as a pancake'. A passing woman led prayers for the child, who miraculously returned to life and actually spoke her mother's name for the first time as she did so. Before night fell the same day, the child was dancing in the street again, evidently tempting fate to send another dung-cart to do the same thing all over again.
When an inventory of the Abbey's possessions was taken for Henry VIII in 1536 when he was dissolving the monasteries, among the items listed was 'a chamber hanging of painted paper'. As far as is known, this was the earliest use of wallpaper in England.
In the early 20th century, Sheppey was seen by speculative developers as a kind of blank cheque on which to write their own fortunes. One of these was a man called Frederick Ramus who, after doing quite nicely out of buying and selling land elsewhere, including Herne Bay, turned his attention to the wide open spaces of the island. He bought about a thousand acres of farmland on which he laid out roads and drains and then offered for sale small plots of land on which buyers could build their own homes.
It probably sounded lovely, and in fact, he sold some three thousand of these plots to about one thousand Londoners, many of whom had no doubt read the Daily Express comment in August 1903 which wondered why no-one had thought of converting 'this semi-circle of grassy cliffs, swept by the breezes of the German Ocean' into a Health Resort.
The paper predicted confidently: 'Minster-on-Sea, as the unknown paradise is called, will find its way into popular favour in a remarkably short space of time. It is the nearest Kentish resort to London.' Well, after WW2, the population of Minster had swollen from about two hundred and fifty people in a hundred homes to about five thousand five hundred in eighteen hundred homes, but there was a large number of vacant sites, still. Many of the people who had bought land and built houses there as a business investment rather than with any intention of settling there themselves were doing their best to sell again, and finding it difficult.
Today, Minster still has an unfinished look about it. The coast, from Minster east to Leysdown, is pretty well one continuous holiday camp of caravan sites and chalets.
The 'in Thanet' is necessary to distinguish this village from a quite different one of the same name 'in Sheppey'. Both took their names from very early religious houses (minsters), this one from the nunnery founded in the 7th century by King Egbert of Kent for Ermenburga, Queen of Mercia.
Legend has it that the king agreed to give as much land as his sister's pet hind could cover in a day's coursing in compensation for the murder of his two nephews, her brothers. The deal was struck, despite the advice of the king's councellor, Thunor, at whose investigation and perhaps by whose hand, the prices had died. But that advice was undermined, in an unusually literal sense, when the ground opened up beneath Thunor's feet and swallowed him up. The very spot where it happened, so they say, is known to this day as Thunor's Leap.
Ermenburga took the religious name of Eva and became known as Domna Eva or Domneva, to be succeeded as Abbess of the Minster by her daughter, Mildred, who is still regarded as the patron saint of Thanet.
Parts of the old minster that gave its name to the largest parish on the Isle of Thanet still stand, probably one of the oldest inhabited houses in England. At the Reformation it became a private home, which it remained until 1937 when it was restored to a small community of Benedictine nuns from Bavaria, refugees from the Nazis.
The built-up centre of the village is for the most part not more than a century old, although the present church of St Mary's dates from 1150. It has been restored since then, particularly over a period between 1861 and 1863 and again, more thoroughly, in the 1970s.
Of a number of interesting old houses in the parish Cleve Court deserves a special mention. The house was bought by Sir Edward Carson, lawyer and politician, in 1920. He is probably best remembered for his cross-examination of Oscar Wilde in 1895. He was given a life peerage in 1921 and died at Cleve Court in 1935. His widow lived on at the house until she, too, died in 1966. While she lived, Lady Carson was convinced the house was haunted by a Grey Lady who appeared whenever there were children in the house.