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Small town, or village? Perhaps the truth is that Paddock Wood is in that transition from one to the other that so many Kent villages have known at one time or another. Certainly, it was nothing more than one of several hamlets in Brenchley parish until the coming of the South Eastern Railway in 1842, The railway station was first known as Maidstone Road Halt, and even that only happened because the original proposal for a halt at upline Monckton's Crossing met with opposition from a local farmer.
Yet, such was the change brought by the railway that by 1851 there was a sizable village and by 1900 Paddock Wood was established as the hub of a network of branch lines throughout the Weald, many of which have since fallen victim to British Rail economies.
It was the railway that brought thousands of London hop-pickers into Kent for the annual 'hopping' working holiday. Many of them changed at Paddock Wood to go on to other areas, but this was already a centre of the hop growing industry and very many of them remained in the vicinity, travelling to local farms on foot or by horse-drawn farm wagon sent to collect them.
The annual hop-picking phenomenon, unique to this part of Kent, was always anticipated with a mixture eagerness and trepidation, because for a month or so it totally changed the whole pace and character of the area. But it is almost without exception remembered fondly now that the post-war hop picking machines have ended the annual migration.
The influence lingers on, though. If you speak to the locals you are as likely to be answered in South London accents as by a truly native Kentish one, and it is no coincidence that one of the Paddock Wood roads is called Old Kent Road.
The railway brought prosperity to Paddock Wood. It also brought tragedy: for instance, when an early freight train hit an empty passenger train under the bridge in 1919. The bridge was split open, the locomotive broke in two, and a young fireman was killed.
A Paddock Wood family has left its name to one of the best known varieties of hops. The Fuggle family of Fowle Hall, then Brenchley but now in Paddock Wood, is credited with first growing the variety. Legend has it that the strain developed from a stray seed emptied out with the crumbs from a hop-picker's dinner basket in a garden at Horsmonden in 1861, and that it was introduced commercially by Richard Fuggle in 1875.
Today, Paddock Wood is a bustling place, with a diversity of commerce and industry that might well be envied by some long-established towns.
Approaching the town bridge from the Maidstone side the tall buildings of the English Hops headquarters is a landmark. English Hops is a farmers' co-operative that has taken over the regulation of hop-growing and marketing where the old Hops Marketing Board left off, in the same buildings.
It is generally accepted, that it was Patrixbourne that Julius Caesar's expeditionary force met and defeated the British during his second invasion of Kent. He couldn't have chosen a nicer spot for it. Patrixbourne is just north of the A2, south of Canterbury: a pretty collection of half-timbered and thatched houses with a 12th century church that has a main doorway rich with Norman stone carving rivalled only by the much better known one at Barfrestone away to the south-east.
The Big House here used to be Bifrons, former seat of the Marquess of Conyngham, the great favourite of George IV. The house is demolished now, but Highland Court still stands. This was the stone mansion built about 1904 for Count Louis Zborowski, the racing motorist who, with Capt John Howey, was responsible for the famous Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch (the little) Railway.
Count Zborowski, a naturalised Briton, built and raced the famous Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car. He already had his own 15 inch gauge railway at Highland Court when he met and became friends with Howey. With locomotive designer Henry Greenly, they dreamed up the idea of creating a real, but miniature, railway. Zborowski died when his car skidded on an oil patch into a tree while he was competing in the 1923 Italian Grand Prix at Monza and he never saw the work begun on the Romney Marsh railway which has since become one of Kent's major tourist attractions.
Pembury has been by-passed now, but the villagers were not always so anxious to to be rid of the traffic along its London-Hastings main street. Road traffic has loomed large in in village live since even before the road from Sevenoaks to Woods Gate at Pembury became the first in Kent to be turnpiked in 1710. In fact, it was the traffic on the road that put the village where it is because when stage coaches began using the old packhorse road and passengers in them clamoured for refreshment along their way, the good people of Pembury forsook their centuries-old church of St Peter in the center of what was then Pepenbury, and rushed a mile or so south to set up shop alongside the suddenly lucrative coach route.
The village can even claim to have played a part in founding the Automobile Association. The Association's museum in London has a gas lamp which was fitted near Woodsgate House at Pembury after an early motorist, a German called Schlemtyne, missed the corner one night and crashed into a wall. He told friends about the incident at the Fanum Club in London and it was decided there and then to form the AA and to provide the Pembury gas lamp as one of its first acts.
The old village church, now isolated and seldom sought by visitors, has in its churchyard the tomb of Anne West of nearby Bayhall, who once dreamed she was buried in a trance and ordered that when she was in fact buried, the lid was to be left off her coffin and one end of the tomb was to be left open. She also left instructions for her butler to bring food and drink to the opening every day for a year - just in case.
When she died in 1903, aged 34, her wishes were respected and until 1947 one could still look down into the vault through an opening at one end. Poor Anne West. Her Bayhall, once the home of the great Kentish Culpeper family and also the Duke of Buckingham, is today a ruin, said to be haunted by her ghost.
Hers is not the only ghost hereabouts, either. The tale is told that when the owner of Hawkwell Mansion, west of Colt's Hill, died, he left the house to his widow and two daughters. One of the daughters married and went to live with her husband in London, but hr ill-treated her so cruelly that she left him and walked home to mother in Pembury, carrying her baby in her arms.
When she arrived, however, she found the house had been burned down and her mother and sister gone to stay with friends. Too tired to walk any further that night, the young mother laid down with her child in the grounds of the ruins of her home. The next morning they were both found, frozen to death, and it is the young woman's ghost who is said to haunt the site still.
There was considerable development between the wars, and since, but the village centre, around the school, post office and Royal Oak public house, has kept its 'villagey' character and is all the better for having been bypassed at the end of the 1980s. Pembury has a vineyard now, and in 1998 it became a pioneer among Kent villages when the parish council opened its doors to the world with its own Internet page.
Thousands of people arrive by car, coach and bicycle every year to visit Penshurst Place, one of Kent's most stately of stately homes and ancestral home of the Sidneys, of whom the present incumbent, Lord De L'Isle, is a descendant. They follow a well-trod trail - accounts of visits to Penshurst Place are to be found in the diaries of 17th century diarist John Evelyn and others.
The house was already old when its most famous owner, that Sir Philip Sidney who was such a favourite of Elizabeth I, was born in it. Sir Philip it was who expressly forbidden by Her Majesty to go with Sir Francis Drake on his second expedition to the West Indies, lest - as she put it - 'we should lose the jewel of our dominions.'
Instead, she appointed him Governor of Flushing in the Low Countries at a time when Holland was at war with Spain and so was at least in some measure responsible for his being wounded at the battle of Zutphen in September 1586. However, he contrived to earn immortality with the words 'Thy necessity is yet greater than mine' with which he refused a drink of water on the battlefield and instead quenched the thirst of another dying soldier. Sir Philip himself died twenty-five days later, aged thirty-two, and was brought home to England for a state funeral at Old St Paul's, where his memory outlived his memorial which was destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666.
Penshurst Place fell into ruin and had to be rescued during the 19th century by succeeding generations of the family. Today, one of the great glories of the ancient house is the splendidly restored Great Hall with its unrivalled 60ft high chestnut-beamed roof.
The village of Penshurst has become used to taking second place to the great house, though it deserves better. It lies between two rivers, the Medway and the Eden, each crossed by a bridge by visitors coming or going in either direction, and the 20th century has been rather kind to it, considering what it has done to many other villages in Kent and elsewhere.
There is a pronounced timelessness about Plaxtol, which is well off the beaten track inside the rectangle of high sided narrow roads bounded by the A25 on the north, the A26 on the south and the B2016 and A227 on the east and west. In 1994 the local metal works closed after twenty years in the village; the old bakery, which once employed nearly a hundred people and served thousands of customers each week, is also closed and abandoned, as is the former garage; and the distinctly-named Rorty Crangle has been decommissioned and is now a private house.
An effort to keep the village alive was made in 1998 when the village stores in The Street became one of the first village shops to benefit from a new Rural Development Commission scheme to help small businesses survive. It received a grant to help pay for, among other things, the setting up of a sub-post office in the store, a major life support aid in itself.
The village still has its own school and the church and its neighbouring white weatherboard cottages still make an eye-catching group. The church has no dedication, having been built in 1649 during the Cromwellian Commonwealth as the inscription over the door testifies.
Until the Victorians had their wicked way with so many old churches, this one was the only complete 17th century church in Kent. The particularly fine hammer-beam roof remains, as does the Cromwellian oak alter in the Lady Chapel, and the churchyard contains some particularly interesting gravestones, including some examples of the kind unique to West Kent and East Sussex, made of ragstone shaped like human figures with carving on the 'heads'. The transepts and chancel, however, were added during the alterations in 1885 and 1894. Excavations in 1857 uncovered evidence of an extensive Roman villa on the banks of the River Bourne, where a Minerva statuette was found, and there was a Roman cemetery at nearby Ducks Farm.
There are a number of 14th, 15th and 16th century houses in the vicinity, the best-known of which is Old Sour Manor, a mile east of the village, which is the remains of a medieval knight's hall with a 13th century solar (family quarters). In fact, only part of the old house remains, to which a red Georgian farmhouse has been attached where the medieval hall would have been. The manor (now owned by the National Trust) was once owned by the Culpepper family, which looms large in Kentish history and whose menfolk were rumoured to have founded their fortunes as the biggest landowners in Kent and Sussex by marrying all the available heiresses of the day.
It is said that the house is haunted by the ghost of a young servant girl called Jenny. The story is that when Jenny was seventeen in 1775 she was called in to help prepare food for a great Christmas feast. While she was busy in the dairy, the family priest, who had been getting himself into the Christmas spirit, took it upon himself to initiate a nativity of his own.
When Jenny's personal advent made itself known as a result, she asked the parson what she should do about it and he told her she should marry her boyfriend - a solution that left poor Jenny so un-reassured that she fainted, hit her head on the font and drowned in it. When she was found, it was assumed that she had committed suicide and was buried in unconsecrated ground, from which she returns from time to time to haunt the old house.
Another notable local property is Fairlawne House, once owned by Sir Henry Vane Senior, Secretary of State to Charles I. His son, also Henry, became Governor of Massachusetts in America but was later executed by Royalists for his Puritanical support in 1662. The house has been suggested as the likely model for Shipley Hall, home of Lord Uffenham, one of the characters created by P.G. Wodehouse. His daughter, Leonora, lived there after 1932 when she married Major Peter Cazalet, who trained race horses for both the Queen and the Queen Mother.
All villages lay some claim to fame, or at least distinction. But little Pluckley, near Ashford, got a bit carried away when it claimed to be the most haunted village in England. Nobody seems to know quite how many ghosts do haunt Pluckley. There is always someone who knows of one the others hadn't heard about.
Jack Hallam, in his Ghost Tour (1967) put Pluckley at 'very near the top of the league table for the most haunted village in England.' In 1975, Andrew Green wrote in his Shire Album of Haunted Houses that it was 'the most haunted village in Britain.' Peter Underwood, in Ghosts of Kent in 1985, decided there were 'about a dozen' ghosts that haunted or had haunted the immediate area.
However many there are, they include a schoolmaster who hanged himself, a highwayman who was run through by a sword at (appropriately enough) Fright Corner, a mysterious Red Lady, a member of the formerly prominent Dering family who searches for her child among the churchyard gravestones, another Dering lady whose spectre wears the red rose her adoring husband dropped into her coffin, a former miller, a monk, and an old gipsy water-cress seller who burned to death when she fell asleep and dropped her old clay pipe onto her straw bedding.
There has even been a report of a complete fife and drum band marching through one house, and in the seven hundred year-old Black Horse Inn furniture has been said to rearrange itself. it all seems a bit excessive, especially as Pluckley could just as easily have settled for its distinctiveness upon those intriguingly domed Dering windows that are a feature of several of the local houses, including the Black Horse.
There is, of course, a legend attached to them. It claims that one member of the Dering family discovered that a forebear of his during the Civil War once escaped the consequences of his equivocal politics by leaping through a window of that shape. Deeming such windows to be lucky for his ancestor, 19th century Sir Edward Cholmeley Dering had all the windows on the whole estate replaced with ones of the favoured pattern.
The family home, Surrenden Dering, was burned down and only the stable block now remains, parts of which have been converted into private homes around the old cobbled courtyard and the family is remembered today, as well as by the Dering windows, by the black horse family emblem that still remains on several of the vanes and cowls on top of local oast houses.