The premier website for SE England - visit Kent today!
Virtually continuous development has made Tankerton almost one with Whitstable; a cobweb of 20th century residential streets behind and beyond the single shopping street which runs parallel with the sea front and The Slopes. Tankerton Slopes spread a wide green apron alongside the sea-front road before rolling steeply down to the beach huts that parade in review order above the shingle beach. It is a popular playground for children and a splendid place from which to view the maritime traffic and sailing regattas that take place from time to time in the bay.
At the Whitstable end of The Slopes, Tankerton Castle was built in the late 18th century by Londoner Charles Parson as a summer home. Unlike some mansion houses dignified the the title of castle, this one does actually look like a small castle. It was later owned by the Member of Parliament Wynn Ellis, who added to it in the 1830s. He built the nearby almshouses as a memorial to his wife before he died in 1875.
The gatehouse, which is what catches the eye on the hill up from Whitstable, was built by a later owner at the turn of the century and after 1935 it became the offices of Whitstable urban council. The grounds were opened to the public as part of the local Royal Silver Jubilee celebrations. Now, it is used as a Canterbury City Council community centre.
Tankerton always seemed to be unable to make up its mind if it is a seaside resort or a slightly haughty residential area. The sea-front area has none of the bucket-and-spade shops that tend to distinguish most promenades and several of the shops in the wide main shopping street, too, have an almost reserved air about them, as though they would much rather be somewhere else.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Tankerton beach was much more welcoming than it is now, with children's swing boats and tea rooms. Perhaps the children were hardier then for although it is pleasant enough on one of the relatively rare warm English summer days, it can be very bracing indeed and nowadays it is more common to see people sitting in their parked cars, perhaps devouring ice cream from the ice cream parlour, and wondering what to do next.
One of the intriguing features of Tankerton's beach is the shingle bank known as The Street. It used to be assumed it was the remains of a Roman road built on land that has since surrendered to the sea. But a more credible suggestion is that it is all that remains of a medieval town called Graystone. Certainly, the shingle all the way along the beach contains fragments of tile and other bits of building debris.
The popularity of Whitstable as a place to visit at the beginning of the 20th century led to the building of Tankerton Hospital. It served as a naval and military hospital for wounded servicemen during and after WW1 before becoming a National Health Service general hospital.
On the A28, SW of Ashford, This is a delightful old town above the Rother levels which grew rich on wool and weaving in the Middle Ages. The broad High Street has stylish shops, especially antiques shops, in fine half-timbered houses which were built in the prosperous weaving days, and elegant 18th century buildings from its days as an agricultural market town. The church, founded in 1180, has a magnificent 15th century tower, 38m high.
South west of Maidstone, Teston overlooks the Medway valley. It is famed for the cricket balls which have been made continuously in the village since the mid-19th century and are still exported for test matches worldwide. The River Medway is spanned by a stout ragstone bridge, which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and three of the six arches are medieval.
Beside the bridge is the popular lock and picnic site, which claims to be one of the busiest in Kent. It marks the end of the Kent River Walk. James Ramsey, a former vicar of the church of St Peter and St Paul, devoted his life to the abolition of slavery. He died three days after the Government agreed to abolish it. The population is about 600.
We can imagine William Cobbett climbing thankfully off his horse and easing the aches out of his saddle-filling end after one of his Rural Rides brought him to Teston. Then, as he waited for the numbness to wear off he no doubt reached for his notebook and pencil to record his opinion that the view from the riverside below the village was one of the most attractive in Kent.
That was more than 150 years ago, but his spiritual successors who stop off at the local authority's picnic site, for example, can take time to enjoy the view across the valley or downstream from the 14th century five-arch ragstone bridge will, surely, echo his sentiments almost exactly.
The village of Teston (pronounced 'Teeson' by the way) has grown a good deal since Cobbett's day. The church of St Peter and St Paul was there then, but the houses that line the little approach lane were not. The church is unusual among others in Kent for being in the classical style, reminiscent of some of the city churches of Christopher Wren, and yet somehow more at home in its rural setting than many of them would be.
Despite the modernity all around it, that rural feeling is well preserved by a nice little green opposite the church, with the entrance gates to Barham Court, Teston's 'Big House', alongside. On one wall of the church, under a window, is a memorial tablet to a former vicar, the Rev James Ramsay. he was the Rector of Teston and Nettlestead from 1781 until he died in July 1789. He was a friend of Pitt and Wilberforce and he worked with them for the abolition of slavery.
That was in no way inconsistent with his relationship with his black servant/companion of twenty-two years, Nestor, who died before the rector and is also commemorated at the church as well as in the name of nearby Nestor Court, a little cul-de-sac of modern houses a few yards from the church.
Barham - originally Berham - Court is a fine old house made even more interesting by association as the home of Randall Fitz Urse, one of the knights who murdered archbishop Thomas Becket in his cathedral at Canterbury in 1170. As a result of that deed, Fitz Urse fled to his lands in Ireland and the manor passed into the ownership of his kinsman, Robert de Berham. The de Berhams prospered in Kent and became one of the great families of the county. Richard Barham, author of the Ingoldsby Legends, was one of their descendants.
But at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, the property passed to Sir Oliver Boteler and his wife, Anne. The Botelers (later they changed their name to Butler) were Royalists and Barham Court was sacked by Cromwell's New Army during the Civil War. Their son, William Butler was imprisoned in London for his support of the Kentish Royalists petition of 1642.
The last of the Butlers, Sir Philip, was responsible for changing the course of the old Tonbridge-Maidstone road, which used to run north of the church and then south of the house on its way to Barming and Maidstone. He had the road moved 'some hundred rods' (say five hundred and fifty yards) to the south.
In the 18th century, Edward Hasted described Barham Court, then owned by the Bouverie family, as the greatest ornament of this part of the county. William Wilberforce was a frequent house guest of the first Lady Barham, who is said to have inspired and supported him in his fight against slavery. He loved the place and once wrote that 'for the charm of softness and elegance I never beheld a superior to Barham Court'. Today, part of the house has been converted into flats, and the main building into offices and a commercial training centre.
Rather more prominent in the village scene, thanks mainly to the bold white inscription on the front of the building, overlooking the village street, is the cricket and hockey ball factory which Alfred Reader established there more than a hundred and eighty years ago.
He that will not live long
Let him dwell at Murston, Teynham or Tonge
Thus the old rhyme, which probably had some relevance in days gone by when these low-lying Swale creekside villages tended to be pretty unhealthy spots. Today Murston is lost among a mass of post-war homes and is wholly a suburb of Sittingbourne. Tonge (pronounced Tong) has withered down to an isolated church and an old watermill which now deals in production antique furniture and handicrafts of all kinds.
Teynham, however, continues as a somewhat sprawling village between the A2 and the railway line linking Sittingbourne and Faversham, the result of infilling between the once centres of population.
When William Lamparde wrote his Perambulation of Kent in the 16th century, Teynham was still a garden within the Garden of England. It was here that, during the reign of Henry VIII, Richard Harris planted his orchards of sweet cherries and apples that made the village 'the most dainty piece in all our shire' as Lambarde put it in his first of the English county guide books.
Harris was born locally - a house called New Gardens at nearby Conyer is sometimes claimed to have been his home. The story goes that when he heard of Henry VIII's passion for cherries and some of the apples he had found growing in France on one of his visits there, the Kent businessman went to the Continent himself and bought some trees which he brought back with him and planted on his own land at Teynham.
Teynham church is another that looks as though it had crept quietly away from the imperfections of the village it was built to serve and now broods peacefully among the orchards, which protect it from the bitterly cold winds which sweep across the marshy flatlands bordering the Swale. But there was no protection from the Civil War skirmish that lest the scars of the combatants' bullets on its massive old door.
The A2 forms the main street through the village, with the Fox inn at one end, the Swan and the George next door to each other half-way along and the Dover Castle inn at the other end. The older village centre was at Teynham Street, near the church and the site of a former archbishops' palace, where the now separate village of Conyer was its creek-side wharf.
This is one of the oldest parishes in the borough and is mentioned in the Domesday Book. The cricketer Alfred Mynn is buried in the churchyard of the medieval St Mary the Virgin. The remains of the 12th century Thurnham Castle can be found about a third of a mile north of the church. The population here is more than 850.
All the signs suggest that very soon Thurnham will be a forgotten village, engulfed by neighbouring Bearsted. It had its great days eight hundred years ago, when people like the de Thurnham brothers, Stephen and Robert, sailed forth from their castle in Kent to go crusading with Richard the Lionheart and the rest of the nobility of Europe.
It was Robert de Thurnham who was given command of the English fleet, while his brother Stephen was entrusted with escorting the Queen Mother, Eleanor, on a mission to collect His Majesty's betrothed, the beautiful Berengaria of Navarre. Stephen saw the king and his bride safely married on Cyprus, where Robert was made governor, and later on Stephen was sent back to England, again as escort to the Queen and her mother-in-law.
It was Robert who acted as chief fund-raiser when the crusade-impoverished flower of the English peerage was dunned into subscribing to the ransom demanded by the Emperor of Austria if they wanted their king-napped monarch back again. Kings men through and through were the de Thurnhams, and yet they survived all the hazards of their day to die peacefully in their beds at Thurnham.
Where all the villagers who ploughed and sowed and harvested the lands that supported their castle lived and died we really do not know. Probably not far from where the the overgrown heap of rubble that is all that remains of the castle today, on the highest part of the parish on the Downs above Bearsted and Detling, in an area that is today protected for its outstanding natural beauty. Even before the castle was built there was a big Roman house at Thurnham. The foundations were found in 1833 but the excavators omitted to say where they found them.
Exactly a hundred years later, in 1933, a Roman building was found about a mile from the castle ruins. It may have been the same building, or another one. Either way, part of it is under the Maidstone bypass. Elsewhere in the parish there have been other Roman finds and in 1913 Anglo-Saxon graves were found, too. The most splendid of all local archaeological finds was the 7th century gold cross set with garnets which was ploughed up in a field in 1967.
Now there is no recognisable cluster of homes that could be called a village. There are no shops at all. The church, St Mary's is there, where it has certainly been since Norman times and probably before that. It is just beside the old Pilgrims Way and it contains several memorials to local families, stained glass windows dedicated to the memory of local men killed in the First World War, and a wooden plaque commemorating those who died in WW2.
It is almost as though the church is itself a memorial to the village that was, and which is now so scattered that there is no one place to which one can go and say: 'Here, then, is Thurnham.' Yet the names of its villagers have sounded through history. One, Richard Thurnham, was Clerk of Canterbury, another Richard was Town Clerk of Sandwich in 1490-93. In 1977 a stained glass window was installed in the church to the memory of Col Alexander Thurnham who was directly descended from the first Sir Robert de Thurnham in the 12th century.
One of the people remembered here is Alfred Mynn, that Lion of Kent who distinguished himself in the game of cricket. He was born at Goudhurst and lived for some years at nearby Bearsted but when he died in 1861 it was to Thurnham churchyard that they brought his body, and there he lies still.
In 1882 Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the actor-manager, was married here, with the young Max Beerbohm, although only ten years old, acting as best man. The occasion was celebrated with two triumphal arches of flowers and branches, one at the gate of the church and the other at the garden gate.
Near Tunbridge Wells, on the A26, this pleasant old town is dominated by the 13th century gatehouse of a Norman castle demolished in the Civil War, and now surrounded by landscaped gardens. The town has spread along the road away from the River Medway, spanned by Victorian cast-iron bridge, and the northern part of the High Street has many attractive 18th and 19th century buildings. The famous public school, which stands imposingly at the top of the town, and founded in 1553, was rebuilt in 1864.
Iron Age forts, Saxon churches and Norman fortresses have all left their mark in the development of this now thriving town. Throughout its history the town has always been an important communications centre and in 1784 was used as a staging post for the government mail coach. However, it was the construction of the railway in 1842 which transformed Tonbridge from farming village to market town and a centre for commerce and light industry.
Walking around Tonbridge today there is much evidence of its long history still to be seen. The motte and bailey castle with its magnificent gatehouse is the finest example of its kind in Kent. Timber-framed buildings can be found dotted throughout the town as well as fine 18th century weatherboarded and tiled houses.
Tonbridge has not stood still, however; the town bought the old racecourse in the 1930s and created a fifty-acre recreation ground, the envy of many large communities. In the 1980s the Angel Leisure Centre was built alongside Sainsburys and Bentalls. A magnificent multi million pound state-of-the-art swimming pool opened in 1996, as part of an ongoing programme designed to offer both residents and visitors the very best facilities.
At the Racecourse Sports Ground you will find sports facilities, a safe surface area for children, tennis courts and bowling green. During the summer after a gentle game of putting you can take a ride on the delightful miniature railway which operates most weekends. In the evening after a glass of wine in the 16th century Office Wine Bar or a meal at the Rose and Crown Hotel you can enjoy a performance at the Oast Theatre.
If you travel by car the excellent single-level car parking throughout the town means everything in Tonbridge is within easy reach, helping to make your day action-packed and trouble-free. Alternatively, let the train take the strain. Tonbridge Station is only a minutes walk from the High Street.
Pronounced Tovvul, the once quite distinct village is now one of the more sadly frayed edges of Maidstone, although particularly in Church Street and down by the river, where the boatyard hires out narrow boats and other craft, glimpses of the old Tovil remain. The hundred and fifty rear-old St Stephen's church is redundant and closed now, and the paper mills that gave the old village its life are not just closed but, for the most part, cleared away. Little more than the public house, The Royal Paper Mill, remains as a memorial to mills that were making paper at Tovil as early as 1681.
Upper Tovil Mill changed hands many times before it was bought in 1896 by Albert Reed, who also bought nearby Bridge Mill in 1907. Mr Reed had already laid the foundations for the giant Reed International papermaking group before he abandoned Tovil and spread himself over several acres of new ground at downstream New Hythe and Aylesford.
New homes are still being built on the sites of the demolished Tovil mills and papermaking has given way to a whole range of industrial and commercial enterprises. But it has not quite disappeared. Striking away from what, for want of a better description, must be regarded as the centre of the village, is Straw Mill. It leads past the once County Fire Headquarters (now relocated to Loose) to Hayle Mill which probably had its beginnings before 1550 and is now operated by the Barcham Green family as the only commercial mill in Britain producing very special hand-made paper.
One entrance to Hayle Mill is at the bottom of Bockingford Lane in the small hamlet of Bockingford. Almost unbelievably picturesque with its old houses and its mill stream and ponds, it is, in character, a thousand miles from Tovil, yet geographically it is almost literally just a stone's throw away.
Pronounced 'Trosley', by the locals, it is a pleasant little place, squatting in the southern lee of the North Downs and, in recent years, rambling up the lower slopes in a rather untidy straggle of new-ish homes. The church, which stands well clear of the village, in a farmyard, has acquired a great many second-hand treasures over the years.
In a glass case on one of the walls inside the church are exhibits of finds at the nearby Coldrum Stones, a prehistoric burial site forming a large mound ringed with great sarsen stones and trees. They include some of the remains of twenty-two people, an ox, cat, deer, rabbit and fox, all discovered when the site was excavated by the archaeologist Benjamin Harrison, of Ightham, to whom there is a memorial plaque fixed to one of the stones.
Then, during the 18th century, the church acquired the pulpit from St Paul's Cathedral. It was, shall we say, an irregular acquisition, and the Dean and Chapter had to be persuaded, after it was really too late for them to do anything else, to agree to make a gift of it to the village. There is a seat below the West Window that also came from St Paul's.
In 1865 the little orchestra that used to play in the minstrels' gallery was replaced by an organ which came from Meopham and remained in use until it was replaced in 1937 by the present organ which came from the church at Leybourne. Some day, someone will discover in the west wall a small lead casket containing 19th century coins and photographs of the rector and parishioners in 1885, when it was built into repair work.
Trottiscliffe is well of the beaten track and has had no shop since the former Post Office in Taylor's Lane closed in 1984. It still has two public houses, though - The George and The Plough, both about five hundred years old - which attract quite a lot of visitors.
The chimney at The George collapsed into the inglenook one lunchtime in November 1980 and among the debris were found some shoes, a leather purse and a clay pipe, all of which had apparently been bricked in at least a hundred years before.
In 1749, the Kent historian Edward Hasted said Tudeley was 'obscure and unfrequented'. Today, it is internationally known for the stained glass windows in its little All Saints' church.
When Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldmid was drowned in a sailing accident in 1963, her parents Sir Henry and Lady d'Avigdor-Goldmid of Somerhill at Tonbridge, commissioned memorial stained glass windows from one of the great artists of the century, Marc Chagall. The glass was installed when the church was restored in 1966 and the 'paintings in light', as they have been called, are now the principle treasures of this little country church.
The church itself is 18th century although it is built on Saxon foundations and was one of only four churches in the Weald of Kent at the time of the Domesday survey in 1086. Tudeley was one of the possessions of Bishop Odo of Bayeux and one of the early iron smelting centres which provided iron for the Roman Empire. It is known that metal forging continued there into the 16th century.
The church was completely rebuilt during the first half of the 16th century and was again restored and rebuilt 250 years later, when the brick tower was built. There were further alterations and repairs to the church in the late 19th century and again in 1966.
The Jacobean house, Somerhill, on the hill above Tonbridge, was bought in 1849 by Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid who extended the park and surrounding estate to include Tudeley and the neighbouring hamlet of Capel. The family were major employers of local labour, with a great many indoor and outdoor servants.
The even smaller church of St Thomas รก Becket (now redundant) at Capel made its own claim to fame in 1927 when a series of 13th century wall paintings were uncovered in the nave. The parish today combines the two names: Tudeley-cum-Capel.
This cheerful former spar town grew up amid the Wealden forests after Lord North discovered its chalybeate spring in 1606. Until that time there were only a few scattered cottages and farms hereabouts, so Tunbridge Wells has no medieval or Tudor buildings. The initial visitors roughed it cottages, lodged in nearby towns or, like Queen Henrietta Maria, camped out on the common.
Building began in 1638 when a grassy promenade, called the Walk, was laid out beside the spring and visitor 'took the waters' in the morning and socialised afterwards. Later, the Walk was paved with square earthenware tiles, giving rise toits present name, The Pantiles.
Tunbridge Wells grew haphazardly and informally, and is a very attractive town, its charm arising from the 18th and 19th century elegance including Decimus Burton's Calverley Park and Calverley Park Terrace, and the buildings on Mount Sion and Mount Ephrahim. The common is a superb open space, while the most famous area, The Pantiles, is in effect an 18th century shopping precinct: a raised paved walkway shaded by lime trees, and fronted by shops behind a colonnade, which gives uniformity to otherwise varied architecture.