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A small village, admittedly, and not always noticed in guide books - not even those that mention the Yockletts Bank Kent Trust for Nature Conservation reserve there. Waltham is one of those tucked-away East Kent villages - little more than a North Downs hamlet consisting of a few houses clinging to the pub at a crossroads - in which it is easy to think yourself back in the days of Wat Tyler and his revolting peasants in 1381, until you find yourself wondering how on earth people in so remote a place ever became embroiled in the mainstream od such momentous events.
Yet the village was the subject of a Victorian three-volume novel by GR Gleig, published in 1835 and entitled The Chronicles of Waltham. The story opens with a description of the village: 'There are not many villages in England of which the general appearance is more attractive, without in the most remote degree bordering on the romantic, than Waltham in Kent.'
It goes on: '...if ever village bore about it an air of perfect innocence and contentment, Waltham may fairly lay claim to the honourable distinction. It consists of a single street, broad, unpaved and shaded on either hand by by rows of stately trees. This, about the centre, makes a curve so as to place the fine old church at the base, as it were, of a triangle.' And there, save that the single street is now paved, you have it.
This is one of a chain of Upper Medway Valley villages where the river is very much a part of everyday life. From Allington Lock, below Maidstone, to Tonbridge, the river is well trafficked all summer by holiday cruisers and the riverside at Wateringbury is always lined with them.
For centuries, though, the village played a very muted second fiddle to the other settlements in the parish, one of which was Chart, a community that has now vanished virtually without trace. It has been suggested that the houses at Chart may have been burned down at some time, possibly deliberately because of an epidemic that raged through them. However it was, the most we can say today of Chart, in the parish of Wateringbury, is that it was probably somewhere near the Pizen Well end - which is itself probably older the present Wateringbury village - that it anciently held a charter for a weekly market and an annual three-day fair, and that the rarest of Wateringbury's historic relics originally belonged there: the Dumb Borsholder of Chart.
Today, the Dumb Borsholder, a three feet five inches long wooden staff fitted with metal rings and a wicked looking iron spike in one end, is loged in Wateringbury's church of St John the Baptist. Its history reaches back to Saxon times, when it was customary for small communities to appoint an elder to be the borsholder and represent them at meetings of the Hundred Court. As time went by, the staff that originally symbolised the office that became known as the Dumb Borsholder, and was carried by a deputy to the court meetings. One man held the Dumb Borsholder for a year at a time, and was paid a penny by each of the other householders of his community to do so.
The practice continued through the centuries until one Thomas Clampard, blacksmith, became the last holder of the office in about 1740. He died in 1748 and was buried in Wateringbury churchyard, remembered with an epitaph shared with blacksmiths all over the country (see Blean). It was about that time, too, that Wateringbury emerged as the chief village of the parish and took charge of the ancient relic, which is thought to be the only one of its kind left in England.
Pizen Well is a road at the west end of the parish. The name is not as ominous as it sounds, probably deriving from a family name - Peizen, perhaps - and the well that bubbles up there. The water is locally thought to have remarkable properties and until quite recently it was the custom for local newly-weds to go to drink its water in order to ensure that they had healthy children. Perhaps the custom is carried on still, though, it's doubtful whether a modern bride would admit it if she did nip out under cover of darkness and take a sip.
For much of the history of Wateringbury, researchers are indebted to former Clerk of the Parish Edward Greensted, who died in 1787 - or, as his memorial stone preferred to put it, 'dropped like ripe fruit into its Mother's lap.' It was he who left a very graphic account of a disastrous summer storm that swept across this part of Kent in August 1763, . It only lasted about half an hour, but in that time the wind rose to hurricane force, the thunder and lightning ere almost continuous and hailstones up to ten inches round battered trees, crops, houses and wildlife. According the Greensted, some of the hailstones lay in heaps for more than a month and still measured four of five inches at the end of that time. They provided a tourist attraction while they lasted and some were sent as curios to be exhibited in London.
Wateringbury Place is a lovely Georgian house built by Thomas Style in 1707 to replace the older building. The property remained in the Style family until 1851 and then returned to it after a break, although it is now in other hands again. The Style family became linked with the Winches in the Maidstone Brewery of Style and Winch and the old Phoenix brewery at Wateringbury was closed in 1982 and given permission for redevelopment for housing in 1984. Its distinctive gold-coloured weather-vane lives on, though, completely out of proportion but still splendid on a neighbouring public house.
As well as the Dumb Borsholder, Wateringbury used to boast about a particularly fine and unusual sundial which stood on a plinth near the porch of the church for about a hundred years. It was about two hundred years old, the work of a local man, Thomas Crow, who was born in 1772. It told the time all over the world, accurately to within a couple of minutes, and was valued at about £600 at the time it was unscrewed from the plinth and stolen in 1981. It has never been recovered.
This very pleasant little village lies on rising ground off the main A28 road that links Canterbury with the Isle of Thanet. It has been claimed that beer took its name from the village where the first hops to be cultivated commercially in Britain were growing during the 15th century at Hopland Manor.
It is one of those claims that villages make but which do not bear too close examination. Another explanation of the name is that it derives from an Old English word for swine pasture, 'boer', lying to the west of the original settlement.
The village sign is an unusually shaped one that imitates the outline of the church, All Saints, with three bells in a little open bell-cote. Below the bells, the sign depicts a swan and local fauna on and around the nearby Westbere lakes.
In 1990 the owners of Westbere House transferred ownership of a small plot of land in order to give the village a little green, which was opened in June 1990 and the village sign was erected on it in July 1991. The enclosed green is opposite a very attractive old thatched cottage and the church, which is of mainly flint construction, has the date 1673 over its door although it is mainly 13th and 14th century. There are a number of picturesque old timbered houses, too.
Opposite the church is a graveyard which has been designated a wildlife conservation area and a survey in 1994 identifies more than sixty different species of trees, flowers and grasses, and very many insects and other forms of wildlife flourishing there.
West Farleigh is situated 4 miles south west of the centre of Maidstone on the south side of the River Medway Valley. William Cobbett pronounced the Medway Valley west of Maidstone the finest in England and West Farleigh bears testimony to that opinion. It has a population of about 430.
The village remains traditionally agricultural, has an unspoilt Norman church, a Village Green with excellent views and some fine houses including Smiths Hall which has been the setting for several films.
This link to West Farleigh will give more information about the village.
West Malling used to be known as Town Malling and the approach road to its centre from the A20 is still called Town Hill. Residents are divided about whether they want to be villagers or townsfolk, so, for the purposes of this account, decided they are villagers.
It is a very distinctive and picturesque most of the centre of which is a designated conservation area, fully deserving the smart paving brick surface that so angered traders while it was being laid. The work went on rather longer than it was meant to and the shop keepers claimed they lost trade as a result. Now that the work is done, though, there is pretty general agreement that it was worth while, after all.
Town Malling was first mentioned in AD 945, but the nunnery was founded by Bishop Gundulph of Rochester in the 11th century. It was destroyed together with most of the rest of the houses in 1190 and rebuilt, again by Gundulph, for a community of Benedictine nuns. Legend has it that Becket's assassins hid in the during their flight from Canterbury after they had launched the Archbishop upon his gory way to early canonisation.
The Abbey in Swan Street is still occupied by Anglican Benedictine nuns, who have as close neighbours the Anglican Cistercian monks of Ewell Monastery in nearby Water Lane.
There have been attempts in recent years to get permission to re-establish the weekly market in the High Street, which widens out conveniently into what was once a market square, but so far the local council has resisted them. The High Street is lined on both sides with some fine Tudor, Jacobean and Georgian houses. Just outside the village, the 18th century manor house built by Thomas Augustus Douce is now a commercial training centre, separated from the parkland it overlooks (now a local authority country park) by the road that goes through the hamlet of St Leonard's on its way to join the Maidstone-Tonbridge road at Mereworth.
The mansion was a rest base for the airman operating from WW2 West Malling airfield, and its cellar was the war-time Twitch Inn. the ceiling of which is covered with the names of some of the air aces of their day, written in candle flame soot.
St Leonard's is chiefly notable for its Tower, perhaps the finest early Norman keep in the country and all that remains of the house that Bishop Gundulph built there. The local pub is called The Startled Saint and its inn sign shows the saint looking appropriately startled by Battle of Britain Spitfires flying overhead.
West Malling was rather more obviously deserving town status in the days when local industry included tanning, brewing, glass blowing, clock-making and the manufacture of straw hats. Today it is almost wholly residential, but it still contends with several other Kent villages for the honour of being the one where cricket was first played in the county, claiming that the game was first played on the local ground in 1705.
The 1974 government reorganisation combines the former Malling rural council with Tonbridge urban council to form Tonbridge and Malling district (later borough) council and in 1998 it was decided to sever yet another link with the past by closing the West Malling magistrates' court, opened in 1866, from January 1999.
In no way a twin of East Peckham, West Peckham is quite small and rather remote, clustered around a very fine village green where its unpretentious little village church of St Dunstan presides over the occasional game of cricket with an air of studied impartiality.
The entrance to the village is guarded by a big timber-framed house now known as Duke's Place, which was once the Commandery of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem. They were given the manor by Sir John Colepeper in 1408. Sir John also built a mansion house which he called Oxenhoath some distance from the village and he founded a chantry, with a chaplain to pray for himself and his wife., Katherine, and for King Henry IV and his second wife, Joan of Navarre, and one or two others, just to make sure he got full value from the chaplain for his fee. Sir John and Katherine were buried in the chantry vault and so were late owners of Oxenhoath and also of Hamptons, another of the local big houses.
One of the descendants of the Colepepers married into the family of Lord Edmund Howard, whose daughter Catherine became Henry VIII's fifth wife. She is said to have stayed at Oxenhoath and to have met there a distant relative, Thomas Colepeper of Bedgebury, who was accused of misconduct with Catherine and executed for it in 1541. She followed him to the scaffold in 1542.
It was not long after that, in January 1594 that John Comper of West Peckham earned a sort of reflected immortality from the names with which he baptised his three children. His son was called Remember Death, and his two daughters rejoiced (if the family allowed any such emotion) in the names Lament and Sorrow. Whether or not they all lived happily ever after we do not know.
When the old Colepeper chantry inside the church was being restored in 1887, a Mrs Maximillian Dalison offered £1,000 towards the cost of removing the two hundred year-old steps leading from a square pew for ten people down into the chancel.
The pew had been built in the 17th or early 18th century over the Colepeper vault, after the chantry was demoted to a chapel of the church during Henry VIII's Reformation. So that it could be reached from the chapel, a flight of steps had to be built to a platform outside the pew door, and another flight of steps led down into the chancel of the church. The steps included some old memorial stones bearing the Colepeper arms.
The vicar and churchwardens - who may well have had an eye on the £1,000 that would help pay for other renovations as well - agreed that the steps should be removed, but Sir Francis Geary, who owned the pew at the time, did not. The church authorities wanted access to the pew to be from outside the church only. Sir Francis claimed his right of access from inside the church.
The issue became one of some moment and in the end the vicar and churchwardens took the matter to the Consistatory Court, where Sir Francis won the day. The Geary family continued to use the pew until the last one, Sir William, died in 1944.
Actress Fay Compton used to live in West Peckham. She claimed her house was plagued by a poltergeist and had it exorcised. The vicarage has also been said to have been haunted in the past and in the mid 1900s a local man claimed he saw a ghost near the Hurst which was thought to have had something to do with a notorious highwayman called Jack Diamond.
In 1997, an intemperate outburst by the vicar of East Peckham caused a row when he said thieves who stole twelve wooden statues, worth about £2,000, from his church should have their hands chopped off. The publicity attracted by the outburst resulted in the return of the statues by a North London antiques dealer who had bought them.
Whitfield village lies aloof from the A256 Sandwich-Dover road and the roadside development would deceive the traveller into thinking Whitfield was almost entirely modern. In fact, the village is part of one of the oldest of all Kent parishes. Excavations have unearthed evidence of Roman and Saxon settlements although the name is derived from 'white field' and is explained by the chalkiness of the land here on top of the White Cliffs of Dover.
The village was still being called Beauxfield (Beuesfield or Bewesfield) until the time of the Commonwealth and that was the name of an early owner of the manor. The Domesday survey in 1986 recorded two separate manors of Bevesfel and Pineham. Early in the 14th century, the manor was held 'by service of holding the king's head between Dover and Wissant whenever he travelled between the two' - not all English kings were good sailors by any means.
In AD 772, King Offa of Mercia (who held sway over Kent at that time) gave part of the area to St Augustine's at Canterbury and there was a church here, St Peter's, in about 1070. The present building still has two of the original Saxon windows. The church has never had a tower and a single bell has been housed in successive wooden bell-cotes. The present bell is said to be the oldest in Kent, dating from the early 13th century and possibly a little earlier.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Whitfield became a favoured home for some of Dover's most prosperous residents and it was they who built homes along the then, new main road which bypassed the village.
A curiosity of Whitfield is its village sign, alongside the main road. The sign itself is a painting of the church, with the name of the village under it, but it is mounted on a stout wooden upright which is studded with dolls' masks. The faces recall the five sons and six daughters of William and Jane Cross, who all died in infancy between November 1821 and August 1835. Only one of their daughters, Marian, survived to maturity and even she died before her parents did.
There is something almost toy-like about Wickhambreaux (pronounced 'Wickhambroo') which is beside the Little Stour and between the A28 Canterbury-Thanet road and the A257 Canterbury-Sandwich road, which together make fairly certain that no unnecessary traffic finds its way into the village. The local pub is The Hooden Horse, a reminder that this is 'hoodening' country, where farm labourers used to go from door to door collecting money or gifts from neighbours for a Christmas Feast (see Lower Hardres).
Wickhambreaux was once one of the Kentish estates of the original Fair Maid of Kent, Princess Joan Plantagenet, who was born in 1328, daughter of Edmund, Earl of Kent and grand-daughter of Edward I. The French chronicler Froissart called her 'the most beautiful woman in all the realm of England, and the most loving.'
She was married, while still very young, to Sir Thomas Holland, one of the first Garter Knights, but it was a marriage that did not have the royal consent necessary for couples of their rank, and when the king had her married to the young Montagu of Salisbury, Joan was too afraid for her husband's future to confess she was already married. Sir Thomas, though, threw himself upon the Royal mercy and disclosed his own prior claim on the lady.
It was a perilous situation. The marriage could have been judged treasonable and Joan might have been widowed forthwith. As it was, the king took a lenient view of the whole affair and pardoned Sir Thomas. A Papal Bull ruled that Joan's first marriage to Holland was valid and that the second one to Montagu was not.
The couple had a son, Thomas, who succeeded to the Earldom of Kent in 1361. When Sir Thomas died, Joan was wooed and won by Edward the Black Prince, and they were married with great pomp at Windsor in 1361. Joan had two more sons, the second of whom was Richard of Bordeaux, who became Richard II.
His mother was very much a power behind the throne and was well-loved for her influence over the young king. So much so that when she returned to London from a pilgrimage to Canterbury in 1381, which included a visit to her Wickhambreaux estate, and found her way barred by Wat Tyler and his rebels on Blackheath, the mob not only let her through unharmed, but saluted her with kisses and provided an escort for her for the rest of her journey.
Joan died in 1385 and was buried beside her first husband at Stamford. But her second husband, the Black Prince, built a chantry for her in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, and to this day all the wives of Men of Kent and Kentish Men are given the courtesy address of Fair Maids.
There are houses of all periods in Wingham's wide T-shaped High Street, from timbered Tudor to modern. The street is tree-lined and Canon Row, opposite the 13th century church of St Mary the Virgin, with another of those unmistakable green copper spires, is 13th century, too. It once belonged to Wingham College, which was founded by Archbishop Pecham for a provost and six secular canons.
In about 1540, when the church had been allowed to get into such a state that one day it just fell down, a Canterbury brewer called George Foggard sought and was given permission to collect money for rebuilding it.. He was evidently a persuasive collector for it seems he raised £224, quite a considerable sum for that time - so considerable, indeed, that Master Foggard could not bring himself to part with it when the time came and the money never did find its way into the fabric of the rebuilt church. One consequence of that was that the Oxinden family memorial inside the church had to be built with wooden columns instead of stone ones, in the interests of economy.
The manor house, across the road from the church, was once a residence of Archbishops' of Canterbury at which crowned and mitred heads rested at different times. Once, though, it watched a greater curiosity than any of them plod past when an elephant, the gift of a king of France to a king of England, came through the village on the way from Sandwich to the royal menagerie at the Tower of London.
Shakespeare referred to 'Best's son, the tanner of Wingham' as being among Jack Cade's rebels in Henry VI Part II, and although it is a very little claim to fame, Wingham has made it gratefully and catalogued it, along with all the others.
A 14th century widow of the Earl of Kent, who retired to a convent, broke her vows and secretly married at Wingham a French Wars veteran called Sir Eustace de Aubrichecourt. The marriage caused quite a scandal at court and outraged the church which imposed penances upon the pair. As part of those penances they had to eat nothing but bread and drink nothing but water for a whole day once a week, and recite the psalms every day. In addition, the bride had to walk barefoot to Becket's shrine at Canterbury. The couple seem to have accepted the penances stoically and to have fulfilled for more than fifty years, during which time they had one son.
In 1795, William Miller was born in Wingham. Probably nobody thought very much about it at the time - except, no doubt, his parents - but some years later, after he had grown up, young William joined the army and travelled to South America where he became friendly with Simon Bolivar, the Spaniard who became the first president of Colombia in 1821 and then went on to free part of Peru from Spanish dominance and gave his name to the new state of Bolivia.
Miller fought with Bolivar and earned himself quite a reputation for his bravery. He so impressed the Spaniard that he was given command if his whole army in South America, but the call of Kent proved too strong after a year or two and he returned to be made a freeman of Canterbury. He did not stay long, though. He was a rover at heart, and died at sea in 1861.
Between 1925 and 1947 Wingham was unique in Kent for having three railway stations. That was because the village hovered on the verge of becoming one of the county's mining villages and a railway station was built to serve the intended colliery. But Wingham colliery was never developed and the project was abandoned in 1914. The three stations remained open for more than twenty years, until they were all closed when the railways were nationalised and Wingham went off the rails, in the nicest possible way, for good.
Although normally included among the Romney Marsh villages, Wittersham is really the largest village on the Isle of Oxney, and area of slightly higher land which was once a true island among the shallow sea in the delta that became the Marsh. Part of the village is a conservation area, including the 13th century church of St John the Baptist and several nearby listed buildings. Among them, the 19th century Wittersham House is one of Sir Edward Landseer Lutyens designs, encasing and earlier building.
Palastre Court is 16th century, altered during the 18th century - a rambling old farmhouse on a hilltop overlooking the Rother Levels. It is most notable for being one of the few south Kent place-names of Latin origin, deriving from vivi palustres, which translates pretty freely as men of the marsh. The Domesday Survey identified Wittersham as one of only four places in the Weald with a church, the others being Benenden, Hadlow and Tudeley.
The church clock was donated in 1960 by the parents of Flying Officer Michael Fitt, RCAF, who died at the controls of his crashed Sabre jet because he chose not to bale out in order to make sure the plane did not crash on a French village.
Stocks Windmill, a mile or so outside the village, was probably built in 1781 and was restored with Kent County Council help. Now it is preserved by a local committee and opened to the public on Sundays for part of the year.
Although it has grown a great deal in recent years, Woodchurch is still an attractive village with its big triangular green in the middle, its unusually tall spired All Saints Church and, of course, its windmill.
The windmill is as much a landmark as the church's broach spire which, as a result of subsidence of the tower, leans some two feet from perpendicular. The mill was in working order until 1926 and at one time it was the only windmill in Kent to be listed as an ancient monument.
Windmills are particularly vulnerable to the ravages of time and weather because of the necessarily exposed hilltops on which they are usually built, and the one at Woodchurch was no exception. It was doomed to collapse when Ashford Borough Council stepped in and began a rescue mission. Restoration has been undertaken by the Friends of Woodchurch Windmill and the old structure has had to be completely dismantled, a new tower built, new floors laid and an outside gallery provided. The new cap was built in 1983.
There is still more work to be done, but the mill is open to the public and inside most of the mill machinery is on view, together with photographs and other relics of bygone Woodchurch. The mill is, in fact, the survivor of a pair that once stood close together and were known, as many such pairs of mill were, as Jack and Jill. The present one was probably built in 1820 and one of the millers, John Parton, met his death in 1831, at the age of forty-nine, when he was beheaded by one of the mill sweeps. The last of the Woodchurch millers, though, was a man called Albert Tanton.
The windmill is to be found along a short public footpath which starts between the Bonny Cravat and the Six Bells public house. How, you will naturally ask at this point, does a public house in this corner of England come by a name as obviously Scottish as The Bonny Cravat?
The explanation is that the name has nothing at all to do with Scotland or cravats. It is probably a local version of The Bonne Crevette (which can be interpreted as The Good Prawn and which no doubt sounds less ridiculous to a French fisherman than it does to a Kentish landsman). It is usually explained as the name of a French fishing boat once active in the smuggling industry in these parts.
Currently, the windmill is a rather less popular attraction than the nearby South of England Rare Breeds Centre.
It is a rather grand-sounding name for a very small built around a minor crossroads between Ash and Eastry or Sandwich and Chillenden, depending on which of the roads you travel, amid open East Kent countryside, but it invites speculation about its origins.
The little church of St Mary the Virgin stands on a slight knoll which is generally supposed to be the site of a Saxon grove sacred to Woden worshippers. The area may well have been a gathering place for the out of doors worship practised by pagan Saxons, from which the name derived. It is largely conjecture that the site had religious or mystical significance for the Britons even before the Saxons arrived here. There is a local tradition that the last British king of south-east England, Vortigern, expressed a wish to be buried here, so that his remains would deter the Saxon raiders who were ravaging this coastal area.
In fact, the Saxons finally drove Vortigern and his people out of Kent altogether and although we do not know where the British king was buried, we can be fairly sure it was not at Woodnesborough which, of course, must have had a different name, if tradition is to be trusted, before the Saxons introduced Woden to Britain.
Certainly, nearby Eastry was the centre of the Saxon royal manor to which it gave its name and Sandwich was the chief port of this part of the south coast - in fact, it was the most important port in the country for centuries - so the tradition has plenty of circumstantial evidence to support it.
But apart from that, it is very easy to imagine that there is something about the place, and particularly about the church, with its odd little cupola-capped wooden addition to the almost elegantly balustraded tower, as though it were aware that it is, in some slightly eerie way, special.
The present church is probably restored 12th century and there are those who believe the local traditions justify their conviction that it is somewhere beneath its foundations, inside that knoll on which it stands, that lies buried the fabulous golden Woden that remains a persistent feature of East Kent legend.
Considering how many quite large villages in Kent have no village sign at all, it is slightly surprising to find that a village as small as Worth, just outside of Sandwich, has one. A very distinctive one it is, too, because both the illustration and the lettering are reminiscent of a particular kind of seaside postcard or, perhaps, a slightly dated advertisement poster.
The result is cheerful and warmly welcoming at the top of the road that plunges seawards from the A258 Sandwich-Deal road and comes to a slightly bemused end in the village, just past the St Crispin inn. It shows a veteran local yokel leaning on his walking stick in front of a typical five-bar field gate and pointing down the road towards the village, as though some wayfarer had stopped to ask him the way. The legend under the picture promises, 'There's Good Worth in Word', which is about as enigmatic as it could be until you learn the the name of the village derives from the Old English 'word', meaning an enclosure. Even then, it remains a bit enigmatic!
Edward Hasted, the 18th century Kentish topographer, said the parish of Worth had three boroughs, one of which was Worth Street, the present village. Early in its history, Worth was a creekside community and Roman finds have encouraged speculation the some of Caesar's legions may have anchored their ships in the creek. It was certainly a Bronze Age settlement and much later one of the local streams was used to drown Sandwich criminals whose bodies were then borne out to sea by the tide. Now, much of the land on the seaward side is part of the famous Prince's and Royal St George's golf courses.
Some say that Archbishop Becket, when he fled from the consequences of his dispute with Henry II, left England from Worth Creek rather than attempt to take ship from Sandwich, which would have been teeming with loyal subjects of the king.
Local legend also claims the Henry V, returning from his St Crispin's Day (25th October) victory at Agincourt, disembarked at Worth and there met and fell in love with a village ale-wife. The story goes that the two lived together for a time at the local inn which has ever since been known as the St Crispin. Another more believable version of the same story names one of Henry's courtiers, rather than Henry himself, as the ale-wife's beau.
Travelling downstream on the river Medway, along the tidal reach from Allington Lock to the impressive concrete span of the M2 bridge at Rochester, the only village actually to reach down to the water on the Men of Kent's eastern bank is Wouldham. It is worthwhile for any river traveller to disembark to see the village (which has all the casual dishevelment of many waterside communities), if only to visit the church.
Well, the churchyard, really, for it is here that the searcher will find the grave of local man Walter Burke, who had the distinction of being the purser aboard Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar and of having cradled Lord Nelson himself in his arms as the great man died.
The near deification of Nelson that followed his death was enough to reflect such glory upon the Wouldham purser that, ever since, local school children have trooped down from the school to the grave in the churchyard and reverently placed posies of flowers there each Trafalgar Day. The inscription on the stone says: 'Sacred to the Memory of Walter Burke, Esq, of this Parish, who died on the 12th September 1815 in the 70th year of his age. He was Purser on His Majesty's Ship Victory in the glorious Battle of Trafalgar, and in his arms the immortal Nelson died.'
Walter Burke left the Navy and came home to Wouldham where he owned both Purser Place and Burke House. Both were removed to Maresfield in East Sussex in 1937 and materials from both were used to build one new house called Purser Place.
For centuries there was a ferry crossing the river whenever hired to do so from Wouldham to Halling and it may be that there was, before that, a ford across the river at this point, possibly where Romans and Britons fought for the way to London. In 1843 workmen found what, at the time, was thought to have been a Mithraic temple at Wouldham, though later experts decided it was more likely to have been an old farmhouse cellar. They can't be sure now because no details of its location have survived so no-one now knows where it was found
The ferry service ended in 1963, when the Stevens family, who had operated it for many years, gave it up. Nowadays, it is assumed that anyone who wants to cross the river will have the means to travel the few miles north or south to the nearest bridges at Aylesford or Rochester.
The churchyard grave of Walter Burke may soon no longer be the main attraction the Wouldham has to offer its visitors. Out on Wouldham marshes, north of the village, the 14th century remains of the house called Starkey castle have been brought back to life by its new owner, retired barrister Gerald Davies.
The house was original built for Sir Humphrey Starkey, Recorder of the City of London in 1471 and later Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1483. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments described Starkey Castle as a monument of national importance, and one of the few medieval manor houses to have survived more or less in its original condition. It had been converted into three cottages before Mr Davies bought it and began the long job of restoring it to its former glories, with the intention of opening it for exhibitions and conferences eventually.
Today, Wouldham is mostly a village of terraced cottages originally built for 19th and 20th century cement workers. The church is at one end of the village street, its wall prettily overhung by flowering trees. Inside, a list of rectors begins in 1283 and the font is hewn from a solid slab of stone which is capped by a carved wooden pyramid cover with brasswork decoration.
King Henry VIII was staying at Wrotham when he received news of the death of Anne Boleyn in 1536. Eighteen years later, Henry was dead and his daughter Mary was on the throne and planning marriage with Philip of Spain. Some of the supporters of Thomas Wyatt of Allington Castle, just downstream from Maidstone, who opposed the marriage, were intercepted on Blacksole Field at Wrotham and defeated in a pitched battle with soldiers led by Lord Bergavenny.
The protest achieved nothing but the execution of Wyatt in London and the continuation of 'Bloody Mary's' reign of religious persecution during which more than seventy people in Kent were burned at the stake, the last of them being John Corneford of Wrotham, who died at Canterbury in November 1558.
It was probably a potential Protestant victim of that persecution who hid a parchment-wrapped bible behind the wall plaster in a house in Wrotham High Street, where it was not found until 1966.
Wrotham used to have an archbishops' palace, just behind St George's Church, but it was pulled down by Archbishop Simon Islip in 1349 and the materials were carted away to be used for his new riverside palace at Maidstone.
The church, incidentally, is thought to have been one of the first in England to be dedicated to St George. In a niche over the entrance to the porch is a little statue of St George which was sculpted by Willi Soukop, RA, and exhibited at the Royal Academy before it was installed in its present position in 1973. It replaced an earlier one which was stolen in 1971.
Where the High Street dog-legs and Bull Lane offers its invitation to visit the old Bull Hotel, opposite the ornate iron gates of Wrotham Place, there is a stone set into a wall commemorating the day in June 1799 when 'Near this place fell Lieut Colonel Shadwell, who was shot to the heart by a deserter.' The stone relates that the assassin, with another deserter, was immediately secured and brought to justice.
Wrotham (pronounced 'Rootham') has put on a lot of weight in the last fifty years, thanks to all the new building behind the still very picturesque old village centre. Thanks to the lie of the land, though, the new does not intrude on the old which survives very well, visually at any rate, an altogether unproportionate amount of major road building very nearby.
Wrotham was always a travellers' staging point and well-known to the smuggling community, who necessarily travelled rather more than most of their contemporaries. One local man, known as Old Sobers, left a detailed account of his father's involvement in the trade during the 19th century. The family had a legitimate transport business, carrying goods between London and Sandwich, that served as a splendid cover for an equally successful and probably even more lucrative smuggling enterprise.
One Old Sobers' stories told how, at the age of seventeen, he took a cart load of brooms to sell in London and returned next day with £1,000. Most of the money, of course, came from the sale of silks, lace, tobacco or spirits that had travelled with him, hidden among the brooms.
New building has given Wye something of the character of a small town, although the heart of the place, around the church and the neighbouring old Wye College, is still unmistakably villagey, mainly Georgian or later.
Wye is - if a little licence can be allowed - between the Devil and the deep, well not all that deep, river Stour. The Great Stour chuckles across one side of the village while, on the other side, the road climbs abruptly to a stretch of The Downs where motorists are encouraged by provided lay-bys to pause and contemplate the south-westerly distance across that remarkable feature, The Devil's Kneading Trough. The walk down, skirting the incredible scoop of dry valley to the Brook road at the bottom offers breathtaking views.
Due west of the village the Downs display perfectly the tufted chalk crown shaped on the hillside by Wye College students in 1902 to commemorate Edward VII's coronation.
The College was founded by John Kempe, a native of Wye, who was Cardinal Kempe and later Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1447. It has expanded a great deal since then and is now, since 1892, the Agricultural School of London University. It is a famous centre for research into various aspects of farming, horticulture and the countryside generally, and is perhaps especially well known for its work on hop cultivation. There is a splendid museum of farming bygones in a great medieval barn and oast house belonging to the College at nearby Brook.
For your additional interest a website for Wye is provided here.