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At the western end of St Margaret's Bay is the Coastguard Station at Langdon Battery which monitors the Straits of Dover and much of the land behind the Bay is owned by the National Trust. The Saxon Way long-distance coastal walk crosses some of that land.
Local tradition claims that the first of the Huguenot refugees to arrive in England landed here. Could be. It is far more certain that smugglers used the Bay and the village behind it, though we are back to tradition when we recount the old story of a certain parish clerk who is said to have stored in the church tower ropes and tackle for hauling smuggled goods up the cliffs from the beach. The illicit but very popular trade must have been seriously inconvenienced, though probably nothing more, when Capt Philemon Phillips, RN, persuaded the government of his day to set up a coastguard station, with six men and a boat, there in 1737.
It was in the Bay that the Channel Tunnel Co began the first test boring in 1865. The bore discovered coal and the Channel tunnel project was pigeon-holed - again!
St Margaret's Bay joined the modern world in 1865 when Lord Granville, then the new Warden of the Cinque Ports, decided the little fishing village should blossom into a popular seaside resort. The Granville Hotel still stands as a memorial to his lordship's dream and the resort that developed became home, at different times, to such famous residents and visitors as Lord Arthur Cecil, Lord Byron, Max Beerbohm, Noel Coward, Ian Fleming and Peter Ustinov.
In 1918, the last bomb to be dropped in England in WW1 fell on St Margaret's and when WW2 began the area, like many others along the south coast, was evacuated of all unnecessary civilians and occupied by troops in readiness for the expected invasion.
It was here that the big naval guns, nicknamed Winnie (after the popular abbreviation of Winston Churchill's name) and Pooh (after Winnie, of course) were sighted on France. When they were fired they did more damage to local property than they did to their target area, but there is a story that after Winnie fired her first salvo of the war, her commander telephoned the Prime Minister to report a direct hit. Back came the query: 'Direct hit on what?' 'On France, Sir!' was the reply.
Today the bay is still overlooked by a statue of Sir Winston, glowering across the Straits towards the French coast. It was unveiled in November 1972 by the great man's grandson, also Winston Churchill. The Dover Patrol Memorial was there before him, of course, unveiled by Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1921.
Author Edith Nesbit, who found fame late in life as author of such children's classics as The Railway Children, The Wonderful Garden and The Treasure Seekers, came to St Mary's between the wars, with her second husband Captain Tucker. They lived in two former air force huts which were connected by a covered way - one they called the Long Boat and the other the Jolly Boat. When she died in 1924, she was buried in the churchyard in the old village of St Mary in the Marsh, just inland of the Bay.
St Mary's Bay is still growing as a popular holiday resort and has its own Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway station serving both the Golden Sands and St Mary's Bay holiday camps. The Bay used to be known simply as Jesson's or Jefferstone, and there are still Jesson's Farm and Jefferstone Road nearby.
It was after WW1, during which there was an emergency landing strip there, that the Bay became part of that Arcadia on the South Coast described by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward in their book Arcadia for All.
Seaside bungalows were built there and soon it became a popular little residential area, growing quickly into a new village with all its own amenities almost literally 'a stones throw' from the sea.
Until just before WW2 there was no church and weekly services were held in a local garage. But then a modern church was built and St Mary's Bay was created a parish with a resident vicar.
The village earned its name and, no doubt, its existence, by being at a point where it was possible to wade across the Wantsum, the old channel that once made a true island of Thanet but which has since become little more than a drainage ditch at its northern end as a result of centuries of land reclamation on either side.
It is quite an attractive little village, with some typically Dutch gabled houses and a really fine church. Among the memorials inside the church is a brass of charming simplicity to William Henaker who died in 1609. It says only that he lived to the age of thirty-nine 'or thereabouts', and then died and was buried. The church also boasts one of the county's best 17th century pulpits, with a little cartouche dated 1615.
In 1983 a workman inside the church put his foot through a hole in the tiled floor while he was replacing a light bulb. Investigations led to the discovery of hundreds of human bones, equivalent to fifteen or twenty bodies, in an hitherto unsuspected burial area inside the church.
The bones were re-interred and the pit made safe but before that happened the vicar had the foresight to put a time-capsule (well, a biscuit tin wrapped in a plastic bag) into the cavity. It contained a 20 pence coin, a picture postcard of the village, a parish guide and a copy of the parish magazine. It will make an interesting find in a few centuries time, if it does, in fact, survive that long.
Sandwich, E of Canterbury on A257, was founded by the Saxons on the coast at the mouth of the River Stour. Since then the river has silted up and Sandwich is 2 miles inland, with fields and golf courses juxtaposed between it and the sea. An original Cinque Port, Sandwich was one of England's most important naval bases, yet by the 15th century it was no longer even a harbour, but a cloth manufacturing town, its continued prosperity coming from refugee Flemish weavers who sailed there. When the cloth industry declined Sandwich became an exclusive golfing resort, with the Royal St. George's Golf Club between the town and Sandwich bay, where there is a nature reserve.
Today it is a quiet little market town with narrow streets and alleys radiating from Cattle Market, the central square with its Elizabethan town hall housing the museum. Strand Street, which runs along the former seafront, now riverside, is full of timber-framed buildings including the magnificent Weaver's Hall and King's Arms. Two of the town gates survive: massive Barbican Gate to the north, leading to the swing bridge over the river, and Fisher Gate, constructed in 1384, overlooking the quay.
The quay offers a convenient parking area and peaceful picnic place, with wooden benches and plenty of grass for laying out rugs along the willow-fringed riverbank. Active youngsters will enjoy the excellent safe playground. Visitors can stroll along the quayside where a range of old boats, including Thames-style barges and houseboats, float quietly up and down with the tide, or take a river-bus trip on the Stour to the small nature reserve of Gazen Salts, and beyond to the Roman ruins of Richborough Castle and the museum which displays finds from the site.
Local websites covering Sandwich can be found at Discover Sandwich and Open Sandwich.
Unusually, this little village in which the main Canterbury-Thanet road forks to Margate and Ramsgate, has no church of its own. Since the 16th century, it has been part of the parish of neighbouring St Nicholas-at-Wade.
What it does have, however, is the 15th century Crown Inn, an early posting inn that for 300 years has been famous for its cherry brandy, The front of the inn is embellished with painted panels containing the names of some of its celebrated patrons, who have included people like Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Ellen Terry and Sir George Robey. So celebrated has it become for its cherry brandy, that it is now better known as the Cherry Brandy House.
The Kings Head hotel, which first welcomes the visitor into Sarre from the Canterbury direction, declares itself to have been an alehouse since 1630, so between the two, the inns have a long record of dispensing hospitality to wayfarers through the village.
More of a landmark, though, is Sarre windmill, which occupies a high spot between the Ramsgate and Birchington roads. The smock mill of tarred brick and weatherboard, with a boat-shaped top, was built in 1820 and later heightened, in 1856, when the base was converted from one to two storeys. Although it ceased to work in 1920 as a windmill it then became the first Kent mill to be worked by steam. The sweeps were dismantled but have since been restored and the mill now offers yet another haven for travellers as Sarre Mill tea rooms.
The A25 saunters through Seal before it nudges the northern fringes of Sevenoaks, passing what is probably the village's most eye-catching building, Grumbles. The timbering is not original but part of a 16th century 'restoration'. The house was a 14th century pilgrims' rest and has been many things since then. At the time of writing it was an Italian restaurant.
It stands on the corner of the A25 and the road that descends from Kemsing, passing the 600 year-old church of St Peter and St Paul, with its avenue of clipped yews. Above, the particularly tall 15th century ragstone tower watches benevolently over the little village and offers a fine view over the Darent valley.
Once, seal was part of Kemsing parish, and did not become an independent ecclesiastical parish until 1874. In the 13th century, the lord of the manor was granted the right to hold a Monday market at Seal and a fair on the festival of St Peter and St Paul, so it is likely the church - or at any rate, a church - was already there then although the actual date of its foundation is not known. Indeed, there is some evidence that there was a Saxon church on the site a long time before the present one was built.
From a niche over the porch doorway, St Peter, with his crossed keys in one hand and a book in the other, is as much a memorial to the Miss Hensman of Sevenoaks who carved him as a reminder of his shared patronage of the church.
Every village has its particular story to tell and Seal's is of the church rood screen which was taken down during the Civil War and stored for sake-keeping in the manor house. But after the Restoration of the Monarchy, instead of being restored to the church, the screen was made into furniture, including a sideboard which was finally given to the church in 1947 and is now to be found near the lectern.
The church also boasts a particularly fine brass of Sir William de Bryene, Lord of Kemsing and of Seal, and the last of his line, who died in 1395. The 54 inch tall knight in armour is in the chancel and is in very good condition for its age.
Seal used to be a rather pretty little village, but it is in danger of succumbing to the sprawl of 'greater Sevenoaks' and being sucked into the town's expanding suburbia. Even so, aside from the main road, it is still a pleasant enough place, where the preponderance of relatively new building nestles in harmoniously enough with what little remains of the village and church alone remembers.
The name hints at the origins of Seasalter because this was one of the parts along the North Kent coastline, between Faversham and Whitstable, where seawater was once allowed to flood, at high tide, into troughs. At low tide, the water was boiled off, leaving highly prized salt to be harvested.
Today, the sea wall prevents any such activity and the former low-lying salt-pan areas are sites for holiday camps and chalets. There are shops and a yacht station and during the summer the whole sea-front bustles with holidaymakers.
if there is a village centre, it is on the corner that takes its name from the Blue Anchor public house, although it was at one time known as Granny Hart's Corner from the name of the proprietor of the inn. Although the present building is Victorian, there has been a house of the same name since 1756 and before that it was the Crown.
Most of the old village, which consisted of a church, the inn, a few farm buildings and a parsonage, had gone by the 1960s. The Saxon church was destroyed by the sea in about 1100 and in 1472 a chapel dedicated to St Alphege served a very small settlement known as Seasalter Street. The dedication commemorated the fact that the body of the Saxon Archbishop Alphege rested at Seasalter on its way to Canterbury for burial.
The building of the sea wall made it possible to farm the hinterland, although the sea demonstrated its disdain for such barriers during disastrous east coast floods in January 1953. In the 1960s and 1970s speculators bought up plots of the former marshland and split them up into so-called 'leisure plots' of about one tenth of an acre which were sold, often with no legal access to them and certainly no planning permission for any kind of development. Some of the plots were used as allotments but many were simply abandoned.
For more than a hundred years the Seasalter Company operated as a cover for local smugglers, for whom the deep littoral of sand and mud and the even deeper area of flatland between the shoreline and Blean Woods might have been purpose-made.
Much of this whole coastline, which is actually watered by the Swale, the channel that separates the Isle of Sheppey from the mainland, is a nature reserve, for some of which Kent has to thank Red China. Henry Newlyn was a retired civil engineer who had spent much of his life in the Far East before he retired to Tunbridge Wells, and in 1973 he bequeathed £50,000 to the Chinese People's Republic. But the Republic felt unable to accept the money from a Western Capitalist and so it, too, went to the SPNR. Part was used to buy land for a nature reserve at Sandwich Bay and the rest bought 15,000 acres between Faversham and Seasalter, to add to the reserve already leased by the Kent Trust of Nature Conservation.
In 1998, Seasalter was again in the news when evidence of a potentially very exciting Iron Age settlement was discovered under housing development on a derelict caravan park.
Which areas of land were in the Weald of Kent and which were not once mattered a great deal more than it does today. Woodland in the Weald, for instance, was exempt from tithes, payable by landowners for the support of the church, and juries were called upon to decide whether land was or was not part of the Weald. Today, the matter is more of academic interest but the little village of Sevenoaks Weald permits of no doubt where it stands.
It is a village of some 1,500 people, below the ridge on which the town Sevenoaks stands, just west of the A21, with a large green surrounded by trees and overlooked by the school and memorial hall. The post office, which wears its Kent Best Kept Village Shop first prize award (1995) and other awards like medals, looks across the green at the Windmill pub and the whole effect is pleasantly attractive rather than picturesque.
This is one of several Kent villages that claim to have been the birthplace of William Caxton, father of English printing. The man himself said he was born in the Weald, but he left very few clues about exactly where. When the writer Vita Sackville-West married Harold Nicolson, they went to live at Long Barn in Sevenoaks Weald and they believed this was the house in which Caxton was born.
The house is old enough. When the Nicolsons were renovating it, in 1915, a coin dated 1360 was found behind some plaster on one of the walls. But in Tenterden, which likes to think it is the most likely birthplace of Caxton, the Sevenoaks Weald claim tends to be dismissed as a fairly clumsy attempt by the Kentish Men to usurp the claim of the men of Kent.
Probably the most imposing local house is Wickhurst Manor which, although mostly 19th century or modern now, has a medieval stone hall at its core and 16th century panelling.
Or is it Sibertswold? The village itself seems to be in some doubt about which it should properly be and mapmakers tend to make up their own minds, which can be a bit confusing.
By whichever name you find it, the village stands at a crossroads just east of the A2, and on the Canterbury-Dover railway line, some ten miles south-east of Canterbury. As well as the main line railway, Shepherdswell (most of the resident seem to use that name) is the starting place for the East Kent Railway line, which once wound its way through Eythorne and Tilmanstone to Eastry. The line was built in 1911-17 to serve the East Kent coal mines and link up with a proposed new port at Richborough. The project petered out, however, and the line was closed in 1987. It has since been reopened to Eythorne by volunteers and is one of several such 'nostalgia' lines operated by steam train enthusiasts.
It is a village that seems to keep itself very much to itself and is reticent about whatever contributions it has made to Kentish history. Even its church, St Andrew's, has an almost apologetic look about it, as though it knows it is a modest newcomer, having been built in the 1860s for an economical (even then) œ1,500. But it is the fourth church to be built on the same site, the first having earned a mention in the Domesday survey so its ancestry is nothing to be ashamed of.
There was a Methodist chapel in the village, where services were held from 1870 until 1995 but since then Methodists and Anglicans have both shared St Andrew's church, which is something else in which the little church might take some pride.
It was in Shipbourne (pronounced Shibbun) that Christopher Smart, poet and friend of Dr Johnson, was born in 1722. In 1752, he published a blank verse poem of no less than seven hundred lines, which was a sort of 'teach yourself' treatise for would-be hop growers, detailing at painstaking length all that anyone could possibly need to know about the subject.
He called it simply The Hop Garden, and having unburdened his creative ambitions of such a weighty masterpiece he went mad, apparently the victim of a surfeit of two equally dangerous opiates, alcohol and religion. Smart was one of the sons of a steward of the Vane family and while he was in an asylum he wrote with charcoal on the walls the first lines of his much less famous poem, Song to David.
Milton's friend Sir Henry Vane lived at Shipbourne. He was Charles I's Secretary of State and it was of him that Oliver Cromwell was once provoked into exclaiming: 'The Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!'
In about 1880, Edward Cazalet, owner of the extensive Fairlawne estate with is partly in Shipbourne and partly in neighbouring Plaxtol, gave the village its heart - the present church, with its huge gargoyles, the pub called The Chaser, and some cottages. The Chaser is a most improbable village pub, with an elaborately arcaded front overlooking the common and a brightly coloured inn sign that suggests a seaside postcard of a particular kind.
It was a Cazalet who made Fairlawne famous as a racing stable and Major Peter Cazalet became the trainer of horses owned by HM the Queen Mother.
Today, the estate is owned by an international investment company, but in the 1970s, as a by-product of his research for his book, In Search of Blandings, Norman Murphy concluded that Fairlawne was in fact the model upon which the late PG Wodehouse based Shipley Hall, 'the ancestral seat of George, sixth Viscount Uffingham.'
Wodehouse's daughter Leonora married Peter Cazalet in 1932, and she and her husband were living at Fairlawne during the time her father was writing stories about Lord Uffingham while he was interned by the Germans throughout the whole of WW2.
When I went down to Shoreham
Some time another year
I found a cross for sorrow
And pain for men to bear
For lads I knew aforetime
Were sleeping otherwhere
Those words, from a poem entitled A Kentish Lad by George H Vallins included in his Kent Ways in 1923, refer to the great white memorial cross on the hillside across the river Darent opposite Shoreham church. It was dug as a memorial to local men killed in WW1, and is still a prominent landmark today.
Dorothy Gardiner described her own visit to Shoreham in her Companion into Kent in 1934, in which she recounted a story she was told about some smugglers who arrived at the Old Crown Inn there early in the 19th century, with a wounded Spaniard. The foreigner was nursed back to health by the daughter of the owner of the inn, a man known as Squib the Maltster. When he was fit and well again, the Spaniard married Squib's daughter and for a while they lived together in the village.
But then one day the Spaniard was taken by the press-gang and his wife died giving birth to their child. Many years later (so the tale concluded) the Spaniard returned to Shoreham. On enquiring in the village after his wife, he was told she was dead and he, without another word, turned round and walked away again, never to be seen thereafter.
Methodist John Wesley used to visit Shoreham to see his great friend and supporter the Rev Vincent Perronet, who was vicar there for fifty-seven years. Wesley is said to have had to be rescued by the Perronet family from an unsympathetic audience when he preached from a stone near the bridge over the Darent, but the experience did not stop his preaching in the vicarage kitchen.
Artist Samuel Palmer lived in The Water House with his father and nurse from 1827 until 1833. His work was considered eccentric in his day, but is regarded more highly today. He used to entertain a group of artist friends known as The Ancients, who used the village as a sort of artists' colony until the 1830s. Another of Palmer's friends was William Blake who visited Shoreham at least once.
A more recent distinguished resident of Shoreham was the writer Lord Dunsany, who was president of the Shoreham Players in the 1950s and wrote a one-act play about the village called The Road.
Shoreham church preserves a large painting depicting the return from Africa of Lieutenant Verney Cameron, RN, son of a former vicar. He headed an expedition to Africa to find Dr David Livingstone but met bearers bringing the explorer's body to the coast. Cameron went on, however, and became the first white man to cross Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.
After his triumphant homecoming, Cameron settled down and became a writer of boys books. When he died as a result of being thrown from a bolting horse in Bedfordshire in 1984 when he was fifty years old, his body was brought to Shoreham for burial.
Papermaking was once a local industry but the mill closed during WW1 and although it was reopened in 1920 it finally closed in 1925. Today, Shoreham's one shop is well outnumbered by the five public houses and its railway station houses a Countryside Centre.
An elongated village on the northern slopes of the North Downs, about equidistance from Gravesend and Rochester, Shorne is, in the words of the ubiquitous estate agent, wholly 'res' and most definitely 'des'. The church tower looks out across the estuary towards Essex and London, although St Paul's Cathedral in London, which, in 1771, Richard Hayes of Cobham told his diary he could see with the naked eye from Shorne windmill, is no longer one of the local sights.
Just outside Shorne is the lost village of Merston, apparently a stockaded Saxon settlement which got a mention in the Domesday Book, unlike Shorne. An archaeological dig in 1957 revealed foundations of a small Norman church, but the village seems to have been deserted by 1445, possibly as a result of a visitation of plague.
The village was the medieval home of Sir John Shorne who had a reputation of being something of a healer. He was credited with having blessed a well in Buckinghamshire which became a certain cure for the ague and he was said to have captured the Devil in his boot, too, although subsequent history suggests that it was not a very secure incarceration.
The church of St Peter and St Paul was built during the 13th and 14th centuries, with a tower added in the 15th century, and has been in continuous use ever since. When students at Canterbury College of Art were commissioned to design stained glass for the church the result was the abstract representation of the four seasons to be seen in the church porch.
Dickens knew this part of Kent very well and he once remarked that he thought Shorne church had one of the most peaceful and secluded churchyards in Kent, forming 'the fairest spot in the Garden of England'.
Today, that particular accolade might be applied to the 174 acres of Shorne Country Park, which was once a clay pit on part of Cobham Hall estate, and is now claimed to have become, since it was opened in 1987, the most popular public open space in Kent.
This is another of those Wealden villages that suffers - or perhaps benefits - from being almost wholly outshone by one local feature, in this case nearby Sissinghurst Castle. The castle, which is nothing of the sort, and never was, is world famous especially for its gardens. The village is virtually unknown outside its immediate boundaries. The Castle is, in fact, all that remains of the splendid Elizabethan mansion built by the Baker family of Cranbrook, who owned it from about 1500 until 1730.
History, with its love of all larger-than-life characters and legends, and with its special fascination with the bizarre, has pretty well dismissed most of the Bakers, but it remembers very well indeed that 16th century Sir John, sometimes known as Bloody Baker or even The Kentish Bluebeard.
Apart from the probably slanderous support pf legend, history claims Sir John as one of its favourites. He was a lawyer and a politician, a Kent Member of Parliament, Under Sheriff of London, Recorder of London, Attorney-General, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Commons. Legend would like to label him a seducer of local girls, rapist and murderer - when he wasn't satisfying his blood-lust with his enthusiastic support of the religious persecutions of Catholic Queen Mary, who he once entertained at Sissinghurst.
But history casts a good deal of doubt upon whether or not that reputation was justified, at least by anything more than general ill-will towards a man who undoubtedly feathered his own nest very cosily at the expense of others in a period when there was plenty of scope for such perfectly conventional behaviour.
Sir John was lucky enough to die naturally, aged seventy, just as Elizabeth I succeeded Bloody Mary on the throne. If he had not, he might very well have died judicially very soon afterwards, or at best ended his days in prison. Elizabeth did not hesitate to clear the decks of Mary's supporters when she came to power.
After his death the great house at Sissinghurst went into decline. It became a prisoner of war camp during the French Seven Years War and it was then that it first became known as Sissinghurst Castle. The prisoners almost demolished the house between their efforts to burn everything combustible to keep warm and to remove everything else in efforts to keep escape. By the time the war ended the house was estimated to be worth only about œ300.
It became Cranbrook's parish workhouse for more than fifty years, during which it earned a mention in the previously noted poetic guide book of Cranbrook. Later still, the house provided homes for farm labourers for another fifty years. Then, in 1930, Sir Harold Nicolson and his wife, the writer Vita Sackville-West, found it. Vita told her diary: 'Fell flat in love with it', and her love affair with the house and its gardens lasted the rest of her life.
Twenty-three years later, Vita wrote: 'The amount of old bedsteads, ploughshares, old cabbage-stalks, old broken-down earth closets, old matted wire and mountains of sardine tins, all muddled up in a tangle of bindweed, nettles and ground elder, should have sufficed to daunt anybody. Yet the place, when I first saw it on a spring day in 1930, caught instantly at my heart and my imagination.'
She dubbed it there and then Sleeping Beauty's Castle and she wrote a poem about it, which she called simply Sissinghurst. It is her personality that has over-ridden any impressions earlier owners left on the house, or what nowremains of it, and the gardens, still open to the public, are hers alone, although created with the help of her husband.
The tower study where she worked is lined with her books, including her gardening books, and is preserved just as it was when she was writing in it. Visitors can look into it, but cannot go inside. She and Sir Harold spent most of the rest of their lives creating the world-famous gardens that are still a place of pilgrimage today, after both of them are dead, she in 1962, he in 1968.
The year before he died the property passed into National Trust ownership and now house and garden are open to the public throughout the summer each year.
On the A2, 8 miles E of Gillingham lies Sittingbourne. Sittingbourne is an industrial town with a long history as a market town and staging post. It lies near Roman Watling Street on a creek off the Swale in the heart of the Kentish cherry orchards. In the Middle Ages, this was a stopping place for pilgrims to Canterbury and had a thriving market. Today, paper manufacture and fruit preservingand packing are the main industries.
N of Tenterden, off the A262, Smarden is an old Wealden wool village, Smarden has particularly attractive High Street, with white weatherboarded and half-timbered houses on either side. The Dragon House, next to the village pump, was built in 1331 for a family of Dutch weavers brought over by Edward III to weave broadcloth. Chessenden is a good Wealden Hall house, built in 1462. Further evidence of the village's prosperity as a cloth town is to be found near the church in the two big half-timbered houses built by wealthy clothiers. The excellent cloth hall is dated to about 1420; the hoist that was used for lifting bales of cloth into the loft still hangs from the gable at the west end.
Next door, Matthew Hartnup's house has its name carved on it; it is probably older than the 1671 date shown. The church dates from the 14th century, it has a 15th century tower and is built of local Bethersden marble. It is called the 'Barn of Kent' because of its surprising width and absence of aisles to support the 11m span of its wooden roof, a rare occurrence in medieval churches. Another rarity is the oven for baking communion wafers, near the high alter. Smarden continued to thrive as a weaving town, with a weekly market, until the 19th century when hops were introduced to the area. Oast houses in the village date from this time.
The Romney Marsh villages are rather like members of a family, each one different but all sharing a common likeness. They are almost all small; some little more than a church, a pub and a few cottages. Perhaps it is that which makes the visitor feel that he is under scrutiny all the time.
Snargate exemplifies this very well. It is a tiny village on the B2080 between Brenzett and Appledore amid open farmland where a handful of horses keep just a respectful distance from 13th century St Dunstan's church and the Old Rectory next door.
The 17th century Red Lion pub is the most reliable village marker. Miss that and you've missed the village. When Cobbett rode through in 1823, he found only five horses and 'a church capable of holding two thousand people'. He seemed puzzled by it but, of course, it was in Snargate that the Lords of the Level (the earliest practitioners of real local government in unified England) held meetings during the 12th century - and perhaps before that - and it would have been an important gathering-place for centuries. It is the sizes of the churches on Romney Marsh that hint at the extent of the decline of the population of the Marsh generally.
This was one of the churches served by Ingoldsby legends author, the Rev Richard Barham. He was born in Canterbury but he came to live at Warehorn, another Marsh village, and was rector of Snargate from 1817. Later, in 1821, he became a minor canon of St Paul's Cathedral and achieved some fame with his Legends, which related embellished stories of several Marsh churches, villages and characters, including Snargate's St Dunstan's church.
Like most of the Romney Marsh churches, St Dunstan's has tales to tell of being pressed into service by smugglers and in 1743 Revenue men seized a quantity of tobacco hidden in the belfry and a cache of gin under the vestry table. It is said that the north aisle was sealed off from the rest of the church and was used as a regular hide for smuggled wares.
Members of the Stevens family ferried travellers across the river Medway between Snodland and Burham and also between Halling and Wouldham for centuries, keeping up a tradition that went back to the time when pilgrims heading for Canterbury would have had to use the ferry, all of five hundred years ago. Some sort of ferry may have been in use even before that.
The last man to ply the service was ferryman Ron Stevens who surrendered the job willingly enough in 1960 saying he was very happy about not having to man the boat eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, rain or shine. Now, the only way across the river is by the old bridge at Aylesford, which is now pedestrianised, and a newer one to carry traffic, or the great concrete one that carries the M2 over the river at Rochester.
Anyone who thinks villages are invariably picturesque should see Snodland, which is one of the more utilitarian variety. Until the 19th century the village was wholly agricultural. Then, quite suddenly, the local land became worth more for making things from than for growing things in, and, very soon job-seekers from all over Britain were arriving in the Medway villages to work in the new cement, brick and paper-making industries. Some of them came to Snodland.
Barges, many of them built locally, came from London loaded with rubbish with which to feed the kilns of the new factories. They returned, equally loaded with bricks and cement for the building work that was sending London sprawling out in all directions.
Between 1840 and 1857 Snodland's population doubled. After the Maidstone-Rochester railway arrived in 1859, the village trebled in size between 1861 and 1881.
One of the earliest of the new industries was a silk factory near The Brook, which opened in 1866. That failed, however, and the premises was taken over to become a printing works. The paper mill of Charles Townsend Hook, next to the church, became one of the biggest employers in the whole Lower Medway Valley. The former mill of C Townsend Hook & Co Ltd changed to become Townsend Hook Ltd in the 1980s, then Smurfit Townsend Hook in the early 1990s. The mill is currently owned by the SmurfitKappa Group, and is still a large, if not the largest, employer in the area.
(Many thanks to Brian Sams for updating the above paper mill information)
Major William Lee Henry Roberts opened his Holborough Cement works at the edge of the village in 1923. It began with two kilns but a third was added in 1928 and in 1931 the works were acquired by the present owners Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers.
During the 19th century, the Hook family lived in The Veles, the old manor house that perpetuated the name of Richard Vele who farmed at Snodland early in the 13th century, now remembered only by the modern homes in Veles Garden.
More than a century ago, in 1873, Snodland hit the headlines in a big way when the local policeman, PC Israel May, was murdered one summers day, battered to death with his own truncheon. Apparently the constable found a man sleeping off a drinking bout beside the stream and when he tried to waken him the drunk reacted by attacking the constable of killing him, leaving him lying where he fell while he made off to hide in neighbouring woods.
But there was no escape. He left evidence at the scene of the crime that led to his arrest the next day. The man, called Thomas Atkins, was brought to justice and sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude for manslaughter.
The constable was a popular man and Snodland's church was packed with villagers and floral tributes for his funeral on August 28, 1873. A small memorial stone was placed on the spot where he died and the centenary of the tragedy in 1973 was marked by having the stone refaced. A year later, however, it was found to have been broken and was taken to the cemetery to protect it from further damage.
Now the main street through the village, the A228, runs at right angles to the older High Street, which has been severed by the much-needed by-pass. The new road has certainly taken much of the traffic out of the village, but it has also cut a great divide between most of the villagers and their riverside church, which is now reached by a bridge.
A local website for Snodland.Com is linked here.
Southfleet is upstream from Northfleet, which is too big to be called a village, on that tidal creek or fleet which, having baptised both of them, has since dried up completely.
Southfleet has a slightly surprisingly rural look about it, considering the extent to which industry and particularly in cement industry with its associated excavations has hedged it about for centuries. There is some new development, inevitably, but it blends reasonably well with older properties like the Ship Inn and the timber-framed houses opposite. Church cottages are over four hundred years old and the Old Rectory was built in the 14th century, or perhaps even earlier than that.
The Rectory had a number of ghost stories told about it, including one about a monk said to have been bricked up in one of the rooms, and a Brown Lady who was supposed to have been locked away to die in the cellar. Whether the two were associated in life and whether that association, whatever form it took, had anything to do with the manner of their deaths seems to have become lost among the lumber of local lore.
Although part of the parish of Groombridge, Speldhurst is an attractive little village in its own right. It is recognisably another of those villages where the population is very substantially boosted by commuters, but that is no bad thing. 'In-comers' as they are sometimes called tend to come in because they like what they see and many of them have the resources to defend it against unwelcome change. Many of our Kent villages have owed much to in-comers through the centuries.
The George and Dragon at Speldhurst claims to trace its origins back to about 1212 and there has been a village church for at least 700 years, probably since Saxon times. After the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, Sir Richard Waller of Groombridge Place brought back as his captive Charles, Duke of Orleans, who was held prisoner at Groombridge while his family scraped together the ransom that was demanded for him.
The local story claims he could have been ransomed earlier than he was, if he had not indulged his enthusiasm for architecture by spending some of the money on restoring the church of St Mary the Virgin at Speldhurst, allegedly as a show of appreciation for his treatment here. It seems rather a pity to have to say, however, that there are variations of this story and the benefactor may have been someone else altogether.
Sadly, the church was destroyed by fire in 1791 when the wooden spire was struck by lightning. A new church was built but it did not satisfy its congregation and was pulled down in 1870 when the present church was built on the same site. The spire was not added until 1923, though.
The church is particularly notable for its windows, most of which were designed by Edward Burne-Jones and made by William Morris.
This large village boasts the largest population in the borough at over 6,000. It lies on the outside of the old Roman road from Rochester to Hastings, now the A229, at the southernmost point of the Borough. Brattle Farm Museum, a country museum on a working farm, is in the area. Just south of Staplehurst is Iden Croft Herbs, which has a 17th century walled garden.
All Saints Church is mainly 15th century. The Martyrs' Memorial commemorates the death of those burned during the Marian persecution. Two were burned at Canterbury and the other in Maidstone in the 16th century. Charles Dickens was involved in a serious railway accident to the east of the village in 1865, where the line crosses the River Beult. He alludes to this in a postscript to "Our Mutual Friend".
The oldest architectural treasure in Staplehurst is with out doubt the south door of the church. It may be the oldest church door in England - the remnants of wrought iron that once illustrated aspects of Danish mythology suggests that. Once, no doubt, the whole door was decorated with similar ironwork, probably made at one or other of the nearby Wealden foundries, though by whom and quite how such unashamedly pagan symbols came to embellish a Christian Church we shall almost certainly never know.
Industrial modernity clusters around the railway station at the very northern edge of the village, but inasmuch as it forms a sort of all-of-a-piece annexe, it does not intrude unduly upon the rest. Approaching Staplehurst from the north, this unhappy prologue is soon forgotten. Leaving the village from the south, it is quite easy not to notice it at all if you choose not to.
A memorial stone at the side of the village main street commemorates three Staplehurst women and a couple from nearby Frittenden who were executed for their Protestant convictions during the 16th century persecutions that stained the reign of Queen Mary.
A century later, though, Staplehurst had one of the first Baptist churches, in 1644, and in 1647 the Rector, the Rev Daniel Poyntel, found himself unable to comply with the requirements of the 1662 Act of Uniformity and was deprived of his living. He became the first non-conformist pastor there, preaching from his own house on the site where the present Congregational chapel was built.
In 1763, John Wesley preached in Staplehurst, at a house whose owner, together with fourteen other people, were summoned before local magistrates for breaking the law. They were charged under an Act of 1664, the magistrates apparently being unaware that the law had been changed more than seventy years earlier. The Methodists appealed for a retrial to Maidstone Quarter Sessions and then, when that was rejected, to the King's Bench which granted the appeal and the sentences was quashed.
It was just outside Staplehurst that a train in which Charles Dickens was a passenger crashed in 1865. The accident happened after a ganger in charge of line maintenance works failed to stop the Folkestone-London express, which was derailed on a bridge over the river between Staplehurst and Headcorn.
The engine, tender and first carriage of the train jumped a 43ft gap in the rails, but the middle eight coaches crashed over the bridge. Some fell into the river and the swampy fields on either side, and many of the passengers were killed or badly injured.
In the first of the derailed coaches was Dickens, who was returning home from holiday in Paris with his young mistress, Ellen Ternan and her mother. Their coach caught on part of the broken bridge and hung their. Dickens was fifty-three by then, but he climbed out of a window and rescued the two ladies before returning to help the wounded and the dying. He suffered severely from shock, although he did not appreciate it himself at the time, and he never really recovered from the experience. When he died on June 9, 1870, friends were quick to find significance in the fact that it was five years to the day after the Staplehurst train crash.
The village and the parish both contain some picturesque old houses, including Tudor Loddenden Manor, Great Pagehurst farmhouse, and Iden Manor which welcomes visitors to its herb farm.
Just outside the village, Brattle Farm Museum has a fine collection of vintage cars, tractors and agricultural machinery and equipment, much of it saved from a disastrous fire in 1984. The oasthouse has been rebuilt and displays set up of dairy, blacksmiths, wheelwrights and carpenters tools, and the museum is open throughout the summer on selected days.
The Stockbury Viaduct, which carries the M2 over the dry valley through which passes the A249 that links Maidstone with the Isle of Sheppey, is as much a local landmark now as Stockbury's old St Mary Magdalene's church. But the church is higher, seemingly to crane its neck to see past the viaduct to the Swale and the Medway estuary beyond.
Near the church are the remains of a Norman motte and bailey castle which must once have frowned down upon the surrounding countryside. Pevsner thought Stockbury's church was one of the most interesting in Kent. it is actually a little way out of the village centre, its only near neighbour the adjoining farm.
But the grassed churchyard is well tended. and surrounded by old trees and the view from its two-tier burial ground, over surrounding farmland and orchards, has a gentle peacefulness about it that subdues the ceaseless activity of the main roads on two sides.
The entire village is a memorial to St Simon Stock, from whom it takes its name. He lived in a hollow tree hereabouts before he became the head of the Carmelite Order in England at their Aylesford Priory.
Stockbury is a Downland village with a post office and store, and ancient and modern houses clustered around a modest triangle of village green, where the village sign features the church, three squirrels and a harrow. The three Squirrels is the name of an inn below the village alongside the A249 and the Harrow Inn overlooks the green. It has pictures painted on one wall showing Stockbury in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.
The curving village street at Sturry was quite picturesque a century ago. It might have remained so but for the interference of a couple of high-explosive bombs which dropped on the village in 1941. They practically wiped out the centre of the village, which has since been redeveloped, giving the place a new look, although in fact it is very old.
It stands at the junction where the roads from Thanet and Reculver meet to go on together into Canterbury and the Romans thought it necessary to build a fort to protect the nearby river Stour crossing.
The Manor House, which was built in 1583, and rather prides itself on its medieval tithe barn, was once owned by St Augustine's Abbey at Canterbury. Now it is the junior boys school of King's at Canterbury.
Inevitably, a such a junction of roads up from the coast leading into Canterbury city, Sturry saw a good deal of smuggling activity during the 18th and 19th centuries. Several incidents were reported in the local press at the time and one of those reports refers to an occasion when Excise officers and a soldier set out from Canterbury to intercept a band of smugglers known to be heading for Sturry.
The smugglers were warned of their coming and hid their contraband in a wood before they went on into the village where they sought out the officers. They pulled the soldier from his horse and beat him up pretty severely and threatened the rest with instant death if they touched the hidden cache. Nevertheless, the officers, reinforced with a party of dragoons, searched the wood and found eighteen tubs of gin and brandy and about two hundred and fifty pounds of tea, which they took back to Canterbury with them. It was not always the smugglers who won, by any means.
Sundridge lurks alongside the A25, whose travellers can easily go through the village before they have properly appreciated they are in it. To find the best of Sundridge it is necessary to turn aside and seek out some of the picturesque old houses on, say, the Ide Hill road, or to visit Coombe Bank, now a girls school but once the home of Dr William Spottiswood, Queen's Printer and President of the Royal Society. He entertained all the great scientists of his time there, people like Darwin, Huxley and Herbert Spencer.
When the house became the first locally to be wired for electricity the work was supervised by Michael Faraday himself. Later the house was owned by Robert Mond, one of the founders of Imperial Chemical Industries. The house was bought in 1720 by Col John Campbell when he married Mary Bellenden, maid of honour to Queen Anne. He was groom of the Royal bedchamber. His wife died young and he lived on at the house with their children until 1761 when he became the Duke of Argyll. The house was inherited by the Duke's third son, Frederick, and was restored and added to after a disastrous fire in 1807. In 1924 it became a convent and in 1972 a school.
Sundridge is specially favoured by its surroundings and the tourist-trap gardens of Emmetts are National Trust owned.
This village, built on different levels on the side of a steep hill, has a population of more than 1,300. A memorial to John Wilkes, who introduced round-arm bowling to cricket, stands in the churchyard. To the east are the remains of a Norman keep with ragstone walls eight feet thick. Sutton Valence School, a public school founded in 1578 by London clothworker William Lambe, covers the northern part of the village. St Mary's Church dates from the 14th century and had an exquisitely carved stone alter from the same century removed for display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The main one of the Three Suttons - the other two being East Sutton and Chart Sutton, which are close neighbours and which, in fact, combine for certain purposes - Sutton Valence was earlier known as Town Sutton.
The three are, however, separate parishes, although but for the fortunes of war East Sutton and Sutton Valence might well have evolved as one after they were united under the ownership of Reginald Lord Grey in the 14th century. Unhappily for his lordship, he also owned land in the Welsh border country where he was kept pretty constantly occupied in beating off the raids of Welsh war lord Owen Glendower, who later declared himself Prince of Wales.
In was in one of these clashes that Reginald was taken prisoner and he had to sell some of his Sutton lands to raise the ransome to secure his release. That sale led to part of the Kent estate becoming the property of the St Ledger family.
A very large part of Sutton Valence today is occupied by the public school which spreads over a hundred acres of hillside overlooking The Weald. The school was founded more than four hundred years ago by William Lambe, who was baptised in St Mary's church in about 1495 and grew up to become a Freeman of the City of London Company of Clothworkers in 1568 and its Worshipful Master in 1569.
It was he who built the almshouses at Sutton Valence and in 1576 he founded Sutton Valence Free Grammar School for about twenty boys, making the Clothworkers Company its trustee. Today the school educates about three hundred and sixty boys, and since 1983, a smaller number of girls as well. William Lambe is commemorated in London by Lamb's Conduit Street, which is where he brought fresh water to the people of Holborn in 1577 by means of the conduit he had built.
The school playing field is known as Bloody Mountain, which has nothing to do with how some of the less enthusiastically sporting of the boys feel about it, but bears out a tradition that a Saxon battle was fought there about a thousand tears ago.
A more recent tradition is perpetuated every Midsummer Day in a ceremony in which the chairman of the parish council hands one red rose to the Headmaster of the school in payment of the rent due for the use by the parish of the village green which is actually part of the school grounds.
Sutton Valence castle stands on the southern slopes of the hill - a small building by the standards of some castle ruins, with an internal floor space of only about twenty feet square. But in its days of now departed glory, whatever its defensive qualities, it must have been the envy of many a larger castle's owner for the superb view over the great sweep of The Weald.
What remains is no more than part of the keep, perhaps thirty feet high, on private land. This would have been the castle to which William de Valence gave his name when Sutton was granted to him by Henry III, his half-brother, and from which the village, too, got its name.
In the churchyard there is a memorial to John Willes (1777-1852), who was born in Headcorn and died in Gloucester. He is remembered as the man who introduced round-arm bowling into cricket. It is said that he copied the style from his wife who, when they played cricket together, found she could not bowl conventional under-arm because her hooped skirts got in the way.
It did not make him popular. In a match between thirteen Men of England and twenty-three Men of Kent on Penenden Heath outside Maidstone in 1807, he earned catcalls from the spectators who became so incensed against him that they invaded the pitch and uprooted the stumps rather than let him carry on with his unconventional style of bowling. Violence at sporting encounters is not as new as all that!
In 1820 the Marylebone Cricket Club ruled that the ball must be bowled under-arm and when Willes bowled an over-arm delivery in a game at Lords in 1822 and was given 'No Ball', he stormed off the pitch vowing he would never play another game.
The Sutton Valence memorial describes him as 'a patron to all manly sports and the first to introduce round arm bowling to cricket.' He lived at Bellingham House in Sutton Valence and was cricket coach to the famous Alfred Mynn, so-called Lion of Kent.
In recollection, there was, in Swalecliffe, a path which led one between the houses in St John's Road to St John's church, which stood among the fields of Swalecliffe Court Farm. The path went on, through the churchyard and past the farm buildings, over a precarious wooden plank bridge across a stream and then ended abruptly on the edge of a four or five foot high jump down onto the beach.
it was a perfect combination of countryside and seaside, with miles of low-water shingle and mud upon which to enjoy that special kind of solitude that is only to be found on unpeopled beaches. Even the nearby caravan camp was acceptably remote and as anxious to keep itself to itself as the village was. It is very different today. The little church is still there, but now it is jostled by houses and estate roads busy with the new villagers' cars and its churchyard overlooks a necessarily much enlarged sewage treatment works.
The village main street turns a hairpin bend where the railway station is, extending from the Wheatsheaf inn at the Tankerton end to Eddery's (formerly the Plough) at the Herne Bay end. Most of the shops are on that bend, where the railway bridge gives access on to the Thanet Way roundabout.
The rest is all housing, almost all of it built during the last sixty years and much if it more recently than that. So much is new that it seems unlikely that history has had much to do with Swalecliffe. Yet the place was found by those diligent bureaucrats the Domesday survey clerks, who recorded finding eight cottagers there.
There has been a Swalecliffe church since about 1200 and the first rector was appointed in 1296. Kent historian Edward Hasted noted that there were eleven houses there in his own 18th century, and that it seemed there were the same number when a return was submitted to Queen Elizabeth I in 1565. The parish seems to have been always too poor to maintain the church and after it was several times rescued from terminal decay, in 1875 the present church was built for the village population of 167 people. It cost just £1,410.
Early in the 20th century there was a brickfield at Swalecliffe. The chimney of the brickworks was a landmark on this bit of the North Kent coast, but after 1914 the industry began to decline and in 1935 it was decided that the time had come to demolish the chimney. Quite a crowd gathered to see the familiar landmark toppled, but seventy-five minutes before it was due to be brought down by explosives, it was blown down by a wind that couldn't wait, and spectators and workmen alike had to scatter for their lives.
Swanley village stands apart from the much bigger town of Swanley, brooding over the past that was virtually obliterated by the arrival of the railway at what became known as Swanley Junction.
The village was, and to some extent still is, an agricultural community where even the local jam factory relied heavily on local fruit. This, in fact, was one of the chief market gardening areas of Kent and its glasshouses once supplied a major part of London's demand for vegetables. It had been settled since Anglo-Saxon times at least and was almost certainly occupied long before that.
The arrival of the Rochester-St Mary Cray railway line in 1861 began a change. The hamlet where the station was built had only three houses in the 1850s but it quickly became known as Swanley Junction and a new church was built there for the new ecclesiastical parish that was created to cater for the rapidly expanding population.
When a separate civil parish was created in 1901, for some reason it was decided it should be called Swanley, laying the foundations for confusion that still arises, since town and village, a mile or so apart, continue to exist side by side. The situation became even more confused when, during the 1974/75 reoganisation of local government, the village was formally absorbed into the town, even though it still identifies itself as a separate community.