by Nick Corble
The rucksack off my back, it was good to feel the sun on my face. Feathery clouds set off a deep blue sky threaded with plane vapour trails. It felt good to just be in the moment, rather than simply following a line on a map. How lucky was I to be able to enjoy these views and to undertake this walk? The view, the mood and my feet (apart from a blister on one of my little toes) were all at one with the world. After a few minutes luxuriating in all this I stirred myself. If I stayed any longer I was in danger of writing a haiku.
I might have waited longer if I’d known what was in store: a steep chalky-white path down through a meadow so sheer I practically broke out into an undignified run. As there was only a barbed-wire fence to break my fall, this wasn’t exactly optimal. Undaunted, I made it without ripping myself to shreds and paused to regather my wits. I wasn’t the only one in a good mood. Overhead, a small light aircraft was performing aerobatic manoeuvres. I was joined by a man walking his dog and we both looked up. As this was Kent, there was a distinct possibility that the plane was a Spitfire. It wasn’t, but it was good to imagine for a while that it might have been. To my unsophisticated ear the dog walker’s accent still sounded rather ‘London’, a sort of Danny Dyer-lite.
From here I headed due south again, through over-ripe wheat fields, the path clearly marked but undulating. I left the Wealdway at Great Buckland to head east in order to regain my diagonal. When planning my route, I’d tried to use long-distance paths wherever they were practicable, on the basis that they were harder to get lost on. Other options were available, but it felt perverse to follow these merely to stick a few hundred yards closer to the diagonal. Mine was a pragmatic rather than dogmatic route.
For a few hundred yards this meant following the North Downs Way, but it was to be a brief visit. It turned out to be enough to take me up perhaps the steepest, most knee-grinding bit of track I’d encountered during the entire walk, and in the end I wasn’t sorry to leave it. North Downs? North Ups Way more like. Inevitably, this was followed by a steep downward path, through a spinney along a footpath through a private estate. I knew it was a private estate because a sign told me. It was also keen to tell passing walkers that the estate was doing all it could to maintain the path and make it conducive to the local wildlife. Good for them, I thought, and thanks for the heads-up.
It then became clear why I was being channelled so effectively, and why they were so keen to make things perfect for the local wildlife. Dozens of lively game birds, blissfully unaware of the date. The eleventh of August. The next day men in Barbour jackets and carrying hardware that would have put the two men at the beginning of the day into delights would be able slaughter wildfowl without sanction. Although officially the start of the shooting season for red grouse, the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ is widely accepted as the start of the shooting season generally. I felt blessed to have arrived a day early, if a little sorry for my little birdy-chums. On the other hand, given the noise they were making, perhaps like the chickens in the Aardman film Chicken Run, they were actually planning their escape? I hoped so.
Another ascent followed, with mature beech trees clinging to the hillside as if they were concerned about sliding down. This brought me out onto woods with a view of my destination, as well as a series of yet more worked-out chalk quarries along with the North Downs to the north-east. High hedges then lined the final path into Snodland.
Yes, Snodland. Only one letter off being mucus-tastic. If Bean was (as it were) a great name, Snodland definitely trumped it. As I approached the end of the lane excited, imploring, male voices could be heard: the unmistakeable sound of a football match in progress. The start of another season, that for football. This was the Saturday in August once labelled ‘The Big Kick Off’, although these days, due to the demands of television, it was more of a ‘Medium-Sized Kick Off’.
My bed for the night was at an Airbnb owned by a high-octane actress called Gilda. Terrific fun to be with, Gilda’s energy was at the same time revitalising and exhausting after a hard day’s walking. I eventually managed to get away and grab a shower, and after catching up with myself went for a wander around Snodland, as was now part of my routine. Not quite a town (the locals call it a village), Snodland wasn’t short of Co-ops. It already had two, but had evidently decided this wasn’t enough, so it was building another. This was in the car park of an old pub which, amongst about a million other pieces of information, Gilda told me locals had campaigned to be converted into a gastropub. Alas, their lobbying fell on deaf ears.
I assumed the new Co-op was going to consolidate the other two, but wondered what would replace the sites they left behind. Based on current evidence, it was likely to be esoteric. There was already a Tricky Dave’s Discount Store, a shop called Petaholics and A ‘n’ D’s Bargain Food, which I dodged. Other than that, there was the usual collection of hair salons, male and female, betting shops and, of course, a bespoke tailor. Because Snodlandites take their tailoring seriously.
In truth, Snodland wasn’t too bad a place. It has a mix of housing, with some historic buildings including an old fire station converted into a museum (it was shut), and even its own water company. It also has a clock tower. This was erected in memory of Charles Townsend Hook by his mother and sisters, upon his death in 1877. The Hooks owned a paper mill in Snodland from the middle of the nineteenth century, eventually producing over 5,000 tonnes of paper a year, which was a thousand-fold increase from when the family took it over. This was symptomatic of wider growth. Over the twenty years from 1861 the village trebled in size, its growth aided in part by the railway.
The clock tower remains an impressive red and white brick rectangular edifice with a cockerel weather vane on top and arched entrances at the bottom on each face. Its position was probably once quite important, but these days it’s crammed in a corner between two modern houses, a matter of less than six feet from the front door of one of them. Their own personal campanile. I hoped it didn’t strike the hour.
The gastropub gambit having failed, I investigated the local pubs. This being Saturday night, I probably should have anticipated that none of them served food. As in Toddington earlier in the walk, there was nothing for it but to revert to the old standby, the local Indian, the Agra. As I was a singleton, they sat me in the corner opposite the fridge and hoped I’d behave. As I perused the menu (there was a minimum charge of £8.50 for ‘dinning’ in the restaurant), I noticed that the fridge was well stocked with Mateus Rosé and catering-sized packs of After Eight. I was going to be all right.
Snodland was okay, it just lacked a dimension. By nine in the evening it was deserted, even the fast food shops, which had been heaving earlier in the evening, were packing up. Given the prominence of the Co-ops, I called in on one to pick up some plasters. It was busy here, mainly with people buying ready meals. I empathised. Snodland was caught in the trap of having nowhere to go at night, which in turn drove the demand for at-home dinning. It was a Huntsman’s Chicken and egg dilemma.
*
The weather forecast for the next day was revised upward overnight. I could only assume the forecasters had looked out of the window and rushed to their computers, as it was gloriously sunny. Rather than encasing myself in Gore-Tex, I was debating whether to zip off the bottom half off my convertible trousers. I decided against it, there was a limit to how much you could thumb your nose at the weather gods. I got going early to make the most of it, passing through the placid Leybourne Lakes, created from old gravel pits, where a group I’d assumed to be anglers (although these are usually solitary beasts) turned out to be scuba divers, all wearing wetsuits as if they were about to search for a dead body.
The recent rain had tickled nature back into action, and there were little tufts of emerald amongst the otherwise scorched grass. My route channelled me down a narrow path by the side of the railway line, where buddleia was growing triffid-like, enough to require sudden spread-eagling against the fence to dodge urgent cyclists com
ing the other way. To my right, a huge paper mill was in the process of being decommissioned, a euphemism for demolished. This was the site of the former Aylesford Newsprint, or Aylesford Paper Mills. At one time, this produced newsprint for The Times, Mirror and Observer and produced a totally recycled product, making it the largest paper recycling plant in Europe.
The business was once a significant employer locally and was the victim of both a decline in newspaper readership and overcapacity in the industry. A large new plant in Norfolk owned by investors with deeper pockets finally did for the facility. In the end, it was a victim of both market and social forces, and although exchange rate fluctuations with the Euro had complicated matters, for once no one was pointing the finger at the EU for the demise of an iconic employer. Plans to build houses on the site had recently been rejected, with the council holding out for a more mixed-use solution. For now, the site existed as a mess of twisted, skeletal, metal bars and giant boulders of concrete. The back of the building was ripped off, as if caught in a tornado, exposing the interior. It was all very post-apocalyptic.
A large block on the map outside Aylesford suggested another factory, but this one had been already replaced by housing: the Ashlin Estate, where a brand new four-bedroom colonial-style detached house could be had for between £450,000 and £500,000. These looked out over the road onto an inter-war development of semis, which had three bedrooms and cost roughly £100,000 less, where presumably newsprint workers and their families once lived. The two developments graphically summarised different phases in Aylesford’s history, with the owners of the new houses much more likely to commute into London on the rail line than earn a living locally.
Remembering my visit to the National Memorial Arboretum earlier in the walk, and the nation’s reawakening of empathy for the armed forces, I took a short detour to look at the Royal British Legion Village. This was founded just after the First World War to take soldiers discharged from the nearby hospital. These days, it also acts as the HQ for the Poppy Appeal, and includes a social enterprise which, amongst other things, makes road signs.
The site provided a surreal experience. It was like wandering around the Keele University campus all over again. There was even a baronial pile, Preston Hall, which had been the original hospital, with a good reputation for also treating TB. On the village site itself, there were blocks of flats in halls named after prominent people, again like Keele, although there were considerably more cars here. It was a quiet and contemplative place, and I again reflected on the rise of Help for Heroes and other charities. The English weren’t a callous people. Compassion and respect for those who serve in the armed forces wasn’t a new phenomenon. We’d just grown complacent, assuming those needing help would be looked after by the state. It had just taken a dubious, divisive, war to wake us up. At the risk of sounding obsessed, I wondered whether Brexit would have a similar effect, acting as a form of shock therapy taking us into a fresh place. The only problem was, no one could predict whether that place would be better or worse.
When I’d first started planning the walk, a paucity of convenient crossing places had suggested the River Medway was going to be a problem. In the end, it was to be no Mersey or Thames, the crossing achieved in under a minute (yes, I did time it), without the aid of a bus, walking over an old bridge that led into the pretty village of Aylesford, a quite distinct entity from its namesake on the other side of the river.
Just before crossing, I spotted something on the ground. It was a brightly coloured rock, about the size of a goose egg. A crude picture was painted on it, a red and black affair a bit like a Tasmanian Devil, coupled with some writing. This spelled out ‘Love on the Rocks’ and instructed the finder to visit a Facebook page. I did, but I knew what was coming. I’d picked up one of these on a local walk earlier in the year. It was part of a trend for placing decorated stones as a form of treasure hunt for the social media age. Finders were encouraged to take a photo, post it on Facebook and place their find elsewhere for someone else to find. I put the stone back where I’d found it, but was reminded that I’d been carrying my stone, which belonged to the ‘Wokingham Rocks’ chapter, in my rucksack for days now. Much smaller, about the size of a child’s thumb, it had got lost at the bottom of a pocket snuggling up to handbag-sized bottles of antibacterial gel and sun cream, as well as a mini First Aid kit.
Having crossed the Medway without incident I set about exploring the village. It was picturesque, with half-timbered houses, a tea room (shut) and what looked like some alms houses, where an inscription identified them as the Old Brassey Hospital. My curiosity sated, if not my thirst, I made for the north shore of the Medway, which was going to guide me into Maidstone. Initially, this followed a relatively recently laid asphalt path popular with cyclists. I once again detected the hand of the cycling lobby: as on the Liverpool Loop, there was a dearth of benches to sit on. I eventually found a wall by the edge of the river, which was low and muddy, to take on refreshment and water.
A couple of miles further on, there was no doubt about it. There was rain on the air, something confirmed by a glance at the water’s surface. I ignored it hoping it would go away, and after a few minutes, to my complete astonishment, it did. The next landmark was Allington Lock, which acted as a limit to navigation. Controlling the river’s flow were some large metal sluices, installed in 1937 by the Medway Lower Navigation Company and the River Medway Catchment Board. This explained the low water earlier. After the lock the banks began to be populated with rivercraft, with a fine array of Dutch barges and old sailing craft attracting much attention. A sign on the last of these announced the vessel as the Dutch barge Emanuelle, a 110-foot-long boat which carried cattle food and cereals right up until 1984. It looked in good shape. Out on the water, a pleasure boat and two canoeists drifted gently by.
The walk from the lock into Maidstone was part of a River Park created as a millennium project, and as I carried on along it the rain, like an old car on a cold day, kept trying to splutter into life, but failed to take hold. About a mile before Maidstone, I saw two men throwing a thick yellow cord into the river, something heavy on the end giving it momentum. I asked what they were up to.
‘Magnafishing,’ I was told. Stupid of me really.
This involved tossing an ice-hockey-puck-sized magnet out into the water and dragging it back on an attached rope to see what it might pick up. They described how a friend of theirs had found a nineteenth-century gun, as well as a hand grenade. It must have been fun pulling that out of the water. Military premises once lined the riverbank they explained, so it stood to reason there might be some ordnance in the river. Because soldiers with nothing better to do often throw their weaponry into the nearest river.
Meanwhile, my guy had ‘caught’ something, and a small crowd gathered as he gently hauled his line back to the shore. We all waited patiently until, like a big fish, it fell off the magnet just as it reached the edge. An involuntary sigh went up.
‘No problem,’ our magnafisher reassured us, dropping his magnet back in and then hauling half a child’s scooter, covered in green slime, up onto the bank. Well, it was one way of spending a Sunday afternoon I supposed. I walked on, wondering if the magnet ever hit an unsuspecting fish on the head, thereby truly putting the ‘fishing’ into ‘magnafishing’.
Aficionados of the Maidstone canoe club added a splash of colour to the otherwise sludge-brown of the river outside Maidstone, along with a dark blue latticed metal railway bridge next to the Powerhub Business Centre. Once a munitions factory (were the magnafishers in the wrong spot?), the Powerhub offered office space for local businesses, but looked decidedly unloved and uninspiring. Later reading suggested that the much sought-after technology companies preferred to locate in business parks out of town. Towards the end of the last century, the Sharps toffee factory, said to be the biggest toffee factory in the world (well, it had to be somewhere) had been in the centre, providing many jobs. How things cha
nge.
Maidstone is Kent’s county town, so if it wasn’t doing well the whole county was likely to be in trouble. Luckily, it looked like it was. The walk up from the river took me through a relatively new Fremlin shopping centre, opened in 2006 and built on the site of an old brewery of the same name, another large town centre business now gone. It was a Sunday, and the shops were busy, and indeed Wikipedia carried the claim that the Fremlin was one of the top five shopping centres in the south-east of England by yield. This sounded impressive, but meant little to me. True, it has a House of Fraser as an anchor store, but this one hadn’t been on the list of stores originally earmarked for closure.
The architecture in the heart of the town was varied, with some redevelopment taking place, including the promise of a history trail. Earl Street offered a selection of chain restaurants Luton could only dream of, and later that evening I ate in one of these, having wandered around to take in the sights. These included a plaque to Andrew Broughton, who was Clerk of the Court at the High Court of Justice during the trial of King Charles I, which didn’t end happily for the royal personage. Upon the Restoration he was exempted from the general pardon and lived the final quarter century of his life in exile in Switzerland. The plaque listed him as ‘Mayor and Regicide’, which as CVs go is certainly impressive.
The town was also the birthplace of the nineteenth-century art critic, essayist and philosopher William Hazlitt, after whom the town’s theatre is named. His plaque was affixed to the front of an ‘Ask’ restaurant and was more modest, describing him simply as ‘Essayist and Critic’, stating that he was born ‘near here’ with a lovely touch of vagueness. Behind the post box possibly.
