Kentish Villages and Towns
The Village of Yalding
Yalding is one of the 'dumb-bell' villages with the two parts joined by the High Street. It grew up where the rivers Beult and Tiese join together before the flow into the river Medway, and it may have derived its name from an old expression meaning 'twin ford.'
There is no need to ford the rivers now, nor has there been for centuries. They are crossed by bridges Yalding Town Bridge, which has been there since the 15th century, and Twyford Bridge which is generally regarded as one of Kent's - indeed, one of the south-easts - finest medieval stone bridges. It has a new look about it now because of its rebuilt parapet of red brick and, too, because of the traffic lights that control the road traffic crossings. But it is still basically the same bridge that has borne wheeled vehicles from one side to the other for at least five hundred years.
No-one knows just how old Twyford Bridge is, but is was certainly there in 1325 although it has changed a bit since then. It has had to be repaired a number of times. In 1939 part of it collapsed into the river and as recently as 1980 £180,000 was spent on the renovations that included the new brickwork.
The old core of the village is south of the river Beult which is crossed by the Town Bridge, but there are fine old buildings throughout the village and its immediate neighbourhood, including the church, Court Lodge and Cleaves, the 17th century school house where the Kent poet Edmund Blunden was brought up and where his father was schoolmaster. An engraved memorial to Edmund can be found in the window of the church.
The rivers which helped to locate Yalding where it is have done their best, over the centuries, to sweep it away again. As you walk along the street, you cannot help noticing the raised footways which have, over and over again, made it possible for pedestrians to go about their business when vehicular traffic has been forced to negotiate carefully the seasonal floods.
The Lees is swamped every summer weekend with visitors who come for the fishing or to hire cruisers and other river craft to spend a day or a weekend just messing about on the river. The lure of the water as it tumbles over the weir at Yalding always proves irresistible to children who play in it despite warning signs and it's really rather shocking reputation for claiming lives.
One of the highlights of Yalding's year is the annual raft race from East Peckham Lock downstream to The Anchor at Yalding. The rafts usually display some ingenious construction techniques, several of which often prove to be fundamentally unsound and during the two and a half mile 'race', crews come under fire from opponents and spectators lining the banks, giving as good as they get in water, soot, dyes, flour and other messy missiles. It's all great fun, which would be justification enough even if it did not raise something like £2,000 or £3,000 for charity.
Yalding's village sign overhangs the entrance to Court Lodge, Old Barn and Hop Barn, a modern development of an old site. The sign has been there since March 1948 and depicts an oast house, a bridge, and two pairs of crossed keys and swords, symbols of the church's patron saints, on a green ground.
Still developing at Yalding are the organic gardens of the Henry Doubleday Research Association. A series of themed gardens, all cultivated organically, are open to the public just off the B2162 where it turns south (to the left) across Town Bridge.
The vaguely exotic onion dome (cupola) on the top of the tower of the church of St Peter and St Paul makes it a very distinctive landmark in a landscape that was once in the heart of the orchards-and-hops countryside. Although hops are still grown locally, they are much less a feature now than they once were. A wooden ball, now housed within the church, is thought to be the original which was placed above the cupola on the tower when the weather vane was erected in the 17th century. It was replaced when the bells were renovated in 1978 and kept as an example of early craftsmenship.