The premier website for SE England - visit Kent today!
From its eminence above Oare Creek, an arm of Faversham Creek. Oare looks down on mainly flat marshy countryside and thinks itself lucky to be, for the most part, well above sea level. The former windmill, stripped of its sweeps, has been converted into a private home and its former glory is better commemorated in the village, where the local inn sign depicts it as it may have once looked.
Oare is built across the one-way road to where a spit of shingle, marked out by wooden posts, slides down into The Swale, to emerge on the opposite shore at Harty, on the Isle of Sheppey.
For centuries there was a ferry there and the spot is still called Harty Ferry although, despite one or two attempts to operate it again with modern amphibious vehicles, there is no regular crossing now.
Although not specially large, Offham green is somehow singularly suitable for the intimate scale of the annual May Fay celebrations that are held there. A May Queen is paraded through the village and crowned, school children perform time-honoured maypole dances and sometimes local equestrians take the opportunity to try their skill at the medieval - perhaps even Roman - sport of Tilting at The Quintain.
The Quintain on the green at Offham is the only one still in use in England. It is a wooden post with a freely revolving arm on the top, a bit like a weathervane. One side of the arm is flat and from the other side hangs a wooden truncheon or some other substituted unpleasantness. The object of this unique relic of medieval horseplay is to ride full tilt at it, strike the flat end with the point of a lance and gallop on in order to get out of range before the business end swings round and catches the rider a fourpenny one.
When you remember that New Romney, which is a town, was built before 1100, you get some idea of the age of Old Romney. Before that date there was only one Romney, and this was it, the one named among the original Cinque Ports. It became stranded well inland as a result of successive and successful attempts to win land from the sea. The first of the 'innings' were on the estuary into which the river Rother emptied, between Lydd and Romney. All the marshes hereabouts belonged to the church and it was the church that first began the business of enriching itself by turning unproductive marshland into good fertile grazing land. As the sea was held even further back, Romney had to reach out towards it and the old town retired into village status, well inland of the last and persisting sits of the new one.
Old Romney church - St Clement's - used to overlook the town's wharf in those long gone days when it had a wharf. Now it presides over a few houses and a lot of open countryside. It was extensively restored in 1959 thanks to the help given as the result of a deal done with the Rank film organisation which wanted to film locally some scenes for a Dr Syn film. One of the more successful examples of collaboration between God and Mammon.
The church makes a pretty picture with its different roof lines and its heavily buttressed tower topped by a hipped steeple and surrounded by trees and grass. In 1967 when much of the restoration work was afoot, one of the workmen was wheeling a barrow through the porch into the church when he noticed that where the grass had been worn away, a slab of stone was showing through. He thought it was probably a long-lost memorial stone but he was interested enough to get the rector's permission to dig it up. It proved to be nothing less than an even longer-lost pre-Reformation stone alter table.
It was an item of church furniture that was banned by Royal command of Edward VI in 1550, so it was reasonable to conclude that instead of being destroyed, as the king presumably intended, it was taken out and buried, perhaps in the hope that the edict would be lifted or the hazards of ignoring it lessened by the passage of time.
It was quite a find and it was later provided with a wooden frame and set up under the east window of the north chapel to serve the sort of purpose it would have served four hundred years or more ago. It joined another treasured curio of the church, the font, which dates from about 1300 and is made with a square bowel of Purbeck marble standing on an octagonal stand with supporting pillars, all the capitals of which are different.
When William Cobbett rode through Old Romney in 1823, he was moved to remark on the height of the local corn, and its yield. 'I never saw corn like this before,' he enthused. 'At this Old Romney there is a church (two miles only from the last, mind) fir to contain one thousand five hundred people, and there are, for the people of the parish to live in twenty two or twenty three houses. And yet the vagabonds have the impudence to tell us that the population of England has vastly increased. Curious system that depopulates Romney Marsh and peoples Bagshot Heath. It is an unnatural system. It is a system that must be destroyed, or that will destroy this country.'
There are conservationists who would echo his sentiments (though without wishing to see more people or fewer sheep on Romney Marsh) to this day.
The village is spread around a minor crossroads on the Downs above Chilham, almost wholly residential and relatively modern, with a spacious village green, the Star Inn and some extensive views over a countryside fruitful with orchards and other farmland.
Formerly, it was distinguished for the annual race that was held, when two village youths and two maidens competed for a prized endowed by Sir Dudley Digges of Chilham Castle. But even that little peculiarity died out with the coming of the 20th century as village youths and maidens no doubt found other prizes to compete for and now there really is little more than the name - but what a name! - to attract any attention to it ay all.
Time was when Ospringe drew much of whatever prosperity it had from the London-Dover road on which it sat. Pilgrims travelling to Canterbury, messengers hot-footing it between London and the coast, occasionally royal entourages following the same route and later, stagecoach travellers - all had occasion to be grateful for the hospitality of this little wayside oasis, a mile from Faversham.
As the 20th century aged, Ospringe joined in the chorus of A2 villages demanding a by-pass to rid it of the increasingly troublesome traffic and, to some extent, the M2 met those demands when it was opened in the 1960s. Yet, in spite of the volume and weight of traffic that trundles, still, through the narrow main street, Ospringe has managed to go on looking like a village, and, indeed, behaving like one, too.
It is administratively part of Faversham, inside the old borough boundaries and a great deal of building on the north side of the A2 has long ago erased any physical separateness there once was.
On the corner of Water Lane, which leads off the A2 towards the church and the countryside beyond, the 13th century Maison Dieu is the solid-looking flint and timber building that was once a travellers' rest. Now it is a museum, its ground floor well below the present ground level, but still with its elaborately patterned plaster ceiling which survived a radical renovation carried out in the 1960s.
Time was, when Water Lane lived up to its name. A stream ran through the farm further along the lane and in times of flood - which happened every year and often several times a year - flowed into the lane which became, for a day or two at a time, a bed of the stream before it went under the A2 and emerged again to eater the watercress beds and power the Faversham Chart Gunpowder Mill on its way to Faversham Creek.
Then, when the M2 was built, it was realised that water draining off the four-lane motorway was going to swell the volume of water that used Water Lane as its escape route to the creek so that the houses would no longer be at risk only when cars used it at the same time.
The lane was dug up, hollowed out with a huge double-barreled culvert occupying the complete width of the road, and re-laid again. Since then, no more water has flowed on the surface of Water Lane - it all flows under it.
One of the attractions of The Bull at Otford is the high-backed oak settle that once - it is claimed - belonged to Thomas a Becket himself. If it is true, no doubt the archbishop's saintly person once sat in it, and modern customers at the inn are invited to do likewise and to make a wish. The Bull was once a refectory at Otford monastery and was granted a licence by Papal Bull (hence the name, despite the beast on the inn sign) in 1538.
The archbishops of Canterbury had a palace at Otford for five hundred years or so. Of course, there were archbishops' palaces all over the place, never more than a day's riding apart, so that travelling prelates could be sure of a comfortable night's rest when they were pursuing their necessarily peripatetic profession. The one at Otford was improved and enlarged after Thomas Becket used it.
According to the legend, it was Becket who provided the place with water when he struck the ground with his staff and a spring gushed forth. He is also said to have banished nightingales from the palace precincts after one disturbed his prayers with the splendour of its song, and to have laid a curse on all blacksmiths at Otford, condemning them never to prosper there after one accidentally lamed his horse while shoeing it.
In fact, nightingales do sing in Otford, and blacksmiths did prosper there long after Becket had gone to glory glory. Perhaps canonisation gave the prelate a change of heart so that he lifted his ban and his curse port mortally. There is no practising blacksmith in Otford today but the Old Forge there can still be visited. It is a restaurant now, just opposite The Bull Hotel.
After Becket, successive archbishops stayed at Otford. One, Archbishop Winchelsea in 1313, died there. Cranmer wrote his Thirty-Nine Articles there, and it was he who gave the palace to King Henry VIII, the newly self-proclaimed head of the Church of England, after the king, queen and five thousand retainers had stayed there on the way to Dover and the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
The king was characteristically ungrateful, grumbling that it was a 'rheumatick' place and deciding that he would use Knole at Sevenoaks whenever he travelled this way in future, and the rest of his household could stay at Otford.
In fact, he quickly tires of both places. Otford was sold to pay Army wages during the 16th century, and its roof was stripped of lead to make ammunition. After that, inevitably, it soon declined into ruin and today almost nothing is left, apart from a bit of a tower and a few cottages. The village declined with it.
Then came the railway in 1862. It brought some growth, although the village remained mainly agricultural until the 1930s when the railway was electrified. Since WW2, Otford has been very largely another of the Kent commuter villages.
The village, with a population of about 400 and located 3 miles south east of Maidstone, boasts late medieval timber-framed houses, including Stoneacre, a National Trust property. Located in the churchyard of the restored 14th century St Nicholas Church is the grave of William Stevens, the writer who called himself "Nobody", and founded the society of "Nobody's Friends".
So far, Otham had remained almost desperately aloof from neighbouring Maidstone, although apparently always on the verge of being swamped by the spread of modern homes, most of which are totally out of character with village conventions. Otham is a village that is rightly celebrated for its very fine 14th and 15th century timber framed houses: Synyards, Gore Court, Wardes and Stoneacre.
Stoneacre was the home of a gentleman in 1467 although the present house dates from about 1480. It was beautifully restores and extended between 1920 and 1926 by the then owner, Aylmer Vallance, who having completed his work capped it generously by giving it to the National Trust who now own it, although it is still occupied as a private home.
Wardes, in Otham Street, was thrust into the limelight in July 1985 when raiders murdered gardener Bill Austin, who lived there, and wounded the owner, 74 year-old widow Ellen Ditcher, with rifle bullets and a crossbow bolt.
Otham church is still very much a village church, a little aloof from the center of population, its well buttressed tower topped by a weatherboard belfry and, on top of that, a broached, shingle-clad spire that looks like some kind of hat that has been pulled down rather too firmly against the weather.
The churchyard has a memorial stone 'Sacred to the Memory of William Stevens (known as Nobody) who died February 7 AD 1807, aged 74 years.' The inscription adds that the stone was erected in 1896 by the Society of Nobody's Friends, founded AD 1800.
The Society was a charitable organisation founded by the 18th century author who used the pen-name 'Nobody' and who described himself as 'shy, awkward, silent, neither profiting others by his conversation nor, to appearances, profiting by theirs. As a member of society he is nobody, neither father, husband, uncle, brother, ...'
A modest sort of man, easily forgotten, you might think, yet the Society still exists today, which is more than might be said of some groups founded by less self-abasing men.
The village sign split villagers in 1997 as the result of a referendum organised by Otham parish council. The sign, which stood in front of the village war memorial, had become rusted and was removed for restoration. Some of the villagers thought it should be re-erected somewhere else. Some even wanted it demolished.
But in the end it went back to its original site where it is indeed, one of Kent's most unusual village signs: an open box framing a collection of ancient tools. A plaque on the ragstone plinth on which the all-metal sign is mounted says simply: 'OTHAM Parish council 1894-1994. The tools that shaped our village.'
Whatever you think of the sign, it is difficult not to envy its position on the large grassy village green overlooking a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside.