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This Wealden village, with a population of about 850, has one of the most interesting churches in the area. History claims that one of the two yew trees which guard All Saints Church has been growing since the time of William the Conqueror. Father and son Joseph and William Hatch, who made six bells for the church tower in the 17th century, also cast a bell for Canterbury Cathedral.
In 1985 volunteers working on a £100,000 restoration scheme at Ulcombe church dug out hundreds of human bones, boars' teeth, and other assorted relics from around the bottom of All Saint's church ragstone walls. At the moment the first shovel hit the first bone, a flash of lightning ripped across the sky and there was an exceptionally loud crash of thunder followed by heavy rain. In that instant, two thousand years of Christian teaching fell away and betrayed lurking pagan apprehension among the diggers.
However, the work went on and as more and more of the funerary bits and pieces were uncovered, weekly reburial services had to be held by the parish priest, the Rev Anthony Salmon, to re-inter them with appropriate 20th century ritual.
Nobody really knows how old the bones were, but it has been suggested that the church was probably built on a pre-Christian burial site and that the remains recalled those long-ago interments.
Ulcombe church is one of a line of churches along the greensand ridge that separates the North Downs from The Weald and perhaps waymark an old forgotten highway, presumably to Canterbury. The church itself is a Norman building, altered and enlarged in the 13th and 15th centuries, with two enormous old yew trees in the churchyard which make some claim to being as much as three thousand years old.
Recent information suggests that according to a notice displayed at the church, one of the yew trees has been dated to 400 BC and the other to 500 AD. Many thanks to Robert de Brenzie for the update.
The restoration workers also found in an overgrown corner of the churchyard a little building which nobody remembered was there. Nobody knows when it was put there and the only clue to its purpose was a wooden bench seat with two holes in it. It seems it was, in fact, the ultimate in earth-closet era togetherness, a side-by-side two-seater lavatory!
The village was the home of the most famous of Kent bell-founders, Joseph Hatch, who lived at Roses Farm on the Broomfield-Ulcombe boundary. He died in 1639 and was succeeded in the business by his nephew William who, however, never achieved the same degree of recognition. Most of Joseph's bells still hang in Kent churches.
In 1850 Ulcombe had one of the first village schools in Kent, at a time when only about a dozen of the county's villages could boast such a thing.
The eye of the visitor to Upchurch is drawn quite irresistibly to to the almost grotesque two-piece spire on top of the squat little church tower. The first tier of the spire is normally pyramidical, but then, half way up, it disappears into a octagonal second storey that seems to have been plonked down on top of it. A plaque on the porch recalls that the clock and chimes were erected by the people at Upchurch as a thanksgiving for Victory and Peace at Christmas 1918.
Upchurch village is a quite jumble of rather pleasant houses on the inland edge of the Medway estuary marshland between Sittingbourne and Rainham. In 1560 its vicar was a man called Edmund Drake, father of Sir Francis Drake as well as of eleven other sons. Before the family arrived in Upchurch from Devon, Edmund had been prayer-reader to the fleet in the Medway and had lived on one of the hulks. It may well have been during this time that young Francis, the eldest of the vicar's twelve children, learned his love for the sea that made him one of the great Elizabethan seadogs even before he distinguished himself for all time as vanquisher of the Spanish Armada.
Old photographs of Upnor show it as a riverside resort of some popularity in the 1920s, with a pier and a tea garden and a miniature train. The old Medway Queen paddle steamer used to pick up and set down passengers at Upnor pier and the arrivals went up into the neighbourhood woods, on Upnor Hill, for picnics. The riverside is still busy, but now its visitors are more likely to head for the marina which harbours hundreds of small craft of all types.
In 1998 the village High Street underwent improvements costing £144,000. The street leads down to 16th century Upnor Castle which stands like a monument to its own shame. For the castle was built in 1567 to a design by Sir Richard Lee, a notable Elizabethan military engineer, who employed Humphrey Lock to oversee the building work.
The castle's specific job was to add to the defences of Chatham dockyard on the other side of the river and the only time it was called upon to do that was in 1667 when the Dutch fleet under de Ruyter sailed contemptuously past it up the Medway and attacked the British fleet, burning several of the ships and actually carrying of the pride of the fleet, the Royal Charles, back to Holland in triumph.
As Pepys recorded the event on June 12, 1667: 'Powell doth tell me ill news is come to Court of the Dutch breaking the chain (the protective boom) at Chatham, which struck me to the heart, and to Whitehall to hear the truth of it, and there, going up the park stairs, I did hear some lackeys speaking of sad news come to Court, saying that hardly anybody in the court but doth look as if he cried. For the news is true, that the Dutch have broken the chain and burned our ships and particularly the Royal Charles, other particulars I know not, but most sad to be sure.'
In fact, as became known later, the Dutch raiders sank or burned three of the English big ships, raided the Isle of Sheppey, and destroyed the fort at Sheerness, as well as carrying off the Royal Charles.
On June 30, Pepys travelled to Chatham and from there, in heavy rain, went by boat to Upnor to see for himself where the boom chain was broken.
Diarist John Evelyn called it 'a dreadful spectacle as ever any Englishman saw and a dishonour never to be wiped off.' He was somewhat prophetic in that. Whenever Dutchmen and Englishmen meet, the Dutch can seldom resist the obvious temptation of recalling the event, good-naturedly now, to be sure, but it still smarts.
During the Civil War some prominent Kent Royalists were held prisoner in Upnor Castle and in the risings that began on May 23, 1648, Upnor was one of several Kent castles that were taken by the insurgents. Now the castle is maintained by the Department of the Environment as a museum and is open to the public during the summer.
A hundred and fifty years ago the river off Upnor was full of the infamous hulks: pensioned-off ships of the fleet, stripped of their masts and guns and anything else that could be sold, and used as floating compounds for prisoners of war and, later, for ordinary criminals.
The City of London claimed legal authority over the Medway as far as Upnor, where the upper limit of that authority is still marked by the London Stone, down on the river front. Today, the river at Upnor is full of small craft as the streets of Rochester or Chatham are full of vehicles, for this is the water sport resort of the Lower Medway.