Diagonal Walking

by Nick Corble

  Resisting the temptation to have the final two days of my walk blessed in the village shop, I took a short footpath through the heart of the village. At the other end of this I spotted a poster. This advertised the Bethersden Gardeners’ Society (good use of the apostrophe, folks) Autumn Show that coming Saturday – all entries to Helen or Eleanor by Wednesday. Surnames were superfluous here. A raffle, plant exchange and refreshments were all on offer. Life in Bethersden was clearly one long social whirl. A few yards along the Ashford Road my route took me around the back of the village, where the last house before open fields had a cricket net in the garden. I’d seen tennis courts and even swimming pools, but never a private cricket net before.

  About half an hour later I came across a breed of animal I’d not seen for a while: a miserable landowner. Grey-haired and probably in his late sixties, he was wearing a tatty blue jumper and a permanently annoyed expression. He was also riding a quad bike, and for a while I considered the possibility that this was to corral walkers across his land rather than livestock. I sensed an encounter was imminent, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  This was not a landowner who welcomed walkers. That much was evident from the broken stiles and lack of fingerposts and direction arrows, which was almost Staffordian in its distain. He watched me from a distance as I studied my map. I managed to keep the correct course for most of the passage across his land, but on the one occasion I got it wrong, he was on me in a puff of blue smoke and the gunning of the engine of his souped-up lawnmower.

  ‘Chinese map you got there?’ he bellowed, in a tone that didn’t suggest easy banter.

  ‘Unmarked footpath and no arrows,’ I replied.

  ‘Eh?’

  I repeated my assessment of the problem.

  ‘Why would you go that way?’ he demanded, shaking his head.

  Once again, I repeated my earlier diagnosis.

  ‘Eh?’ he repeated above the sound of his turbo-charged hairdryer.

  It continued like this for two more exchanges. He either had a hearing or a cognitive impairment, it was difficult to be sure which. Perhaps both.

  This was his opportunity to concoct the correct response, which would have gone something along the lines of: ‘Yes, you’re right. I’ve been meaning to get around to fixing those, thanks for reminding me, I’ll get onto it this afternoon.’

  Instead, I got: ‘You’ve got a map haven’t you?’.

  It appeared the ethnicity of my map was now irrelevant. Despite umpteen opportunities to come up with a zinger of a response, this had been the best his diesel-deranged brain could manage. By this time, I’d spotted the gap in the hedge in the corner of the field so, taking a leaf out of cousin Simon’s book, I thanked him loudly for his help, although I added, ‘You miserable old git’, as he spluttered away.

  There was to be more to follow. A footpath across a field was planted to maize, and although it wasn’t exactly as high as an elephant’s eye, it was high enough. Memories of struggles through rape fields came to mind and I didn’t have the fight left in me, so I took a detour along country lanes around Brissenden Green. This led to a long byway heading south-east through a forest of small beech and ash trees, following a rough track.

  Unusually, the sign pointing down the track featured silhouettes of a four-by-four, a walker, a cyclist, a horse and, get this, a horse and carriage, the horse in full knee-in-the-air dressage mode. I initially thought nothing of it, pleased to be walking along a defined path where it looked impossible to get lost. As I went on however, the heavy shade thrown by the trees conjured up an eerie atmosphere, one which took on something of a children’s fairy tale feel; without the gingerbread house, but retaining an option on a big bad wolf. I suddenly began to feel quite vulnerable, miles from anywhere, where the only sounds were creaking wood and birdsong.

  It was as this feeling came over me that I realised that the strange silhouette on the byway sign represented a Traveller’s carriage. If one of those came down the track with evil intent, I was in trouble. Barbed wire removed the option of a dash into the woods and besides, I’d seen those carriages in action and they were fast and manoeuvrable. A notice carrying the logos of both Kent Police and the County Council was pinned to a tree and announced ‘Operation Freedown’, reminding users that under the Road Traffic Act of 1988 all driving documents were required and that consequences would follow for transgressors.

  I picked the pace up a bit and it was a relief when I made it to Hamstreet. There wasn’t too much there for the casual visitor, it was true: a pub (shut) and a coffee shop, the Cosy Kettle (also shut). I ploughed on. The Old School House was now an Indian restaurant and there was a Church of the Good Shepherd, leaving no other option but to try the local village store and post office. Here the routine was for the woman standing by the till to shout ‘post office’ in a weary drone every time someone approached the weighing scales three metres to her right. It was almost Pavlovian. This happened three times in the minutes it took me to buy an apple and a Toffee Crisp. The apple later turned out to be rotten.

  A walk across a field and through (and I mean through) some brambles, brought me to a bridge over the Royal Military Canal, which I was about to follow north-east, back to my diagonal. The product of an earlier rejection of the idea of a united Europe, the canal was built as a response to the Napoleonic threat. Initially, it had been thought that there was no need to defend Romney Marsh as a potential invasion point, as at the first sign of danger it could be easily flooded. Later investigations suggested that at least ten days’ notice would be required to make this plan feasible, and then there was another thing. What if there was a false alarm and the marsh was flooded accidentally?

  The prospect of a colossal bureaucratic foul-up was enough to convince the powers-that-were at the time to try something different. Something different turned out to be cutting a canal linking Seabrook near Folkestone, around the back of the marsh and on to the River Rother near Rye. The plan was to create embankments from the spoil that resulted from digging the canal, behind which soldiers could hide. Kinks were also incorporated into the canal, to ease raking fire at the enemy should they be mad enough to try to cross it. Mad enough because it was built nineteen metres wide and three metres deep – although it was doubtful that metres were the preferred unit of measurement at the time.

  The then Prime Minister, William Pitt, was persuaded of the merits of the scheme, and in a reflection of his popularity locally, the canal became known as ‘Mr Pitt’s Ditch’. It was reasoned, with a very English pragmatism, that even if an invasion never took place, the canal would be a good way of draining the marshes. And so it proved. From its completion in 1809 to today, the canal carries water from the various drainage ditches in the vicinity (known charmingly as sewers) out to sea. Once the French threat was over, the canal was opened to navigation, but it never proved that popular and its commercial potential disappeared altogether with the coming of the railway, a tale familiar to any canal enthusiast.

  As I walked along the raised banks of the waterway, my greatest threat looked like it might be coming from the sky rather than from across the Channel. The clouds had turned the sort of grey normally seen the morning after a barbeque: a light ash. The land was, as might be expected, distinctly flat, and the only wildlife I could spot were anglers lining the bank, doing what anglers do, namely not a lot. I left the canal and followed the Sedbrook Sewer, where a cob and pen were marshalling their five mature cygnets, each the colour of the sky overhead, along the narrow ditch. This emerged onto a newly ploughed field where, lulled by the impending end to a long day’s walking, I promptly got lost. The ploughing had removed any obvious sign of the footpaths and once again, any signs had gone AWOL, adding an extra half an hour to the end of the day to sort myself out.

  Luckily, a well-trodden path across my last field drew me into Newchurch – that and the tower of the eponymous church, which in fact dates bac
k to the twelfth century, but was no doubt new at the time. I’d also been guided in by a limp RAF flag, light blue with the Union flag in the corner and the RAF roundel to the middle. I’d assumed this belonged to one of the locals, possibly a retired airman, but it was in fact the centrepiece of a memorial. Any frustration with the footpaths paled into insignificance as I read how the same fields I’d been walking had been an Advanced Landing Ground during the Second World War.

  Amongst other things, they’d been used by planes providing cover for the Normandy landings. More remarkably to my mind, they’d also been used by planes whose role it was to intercept V1 Flying Bombs, or Doodlebugs. When they ran out of ammunition, the pilots would tip the bombs off balance using the ends of their wings. Such inconceivable courage. It would also have been in these skies, now grey, but then blue, that the Battle of Britain took place – a salutary reminder, along with the reasons behind the digging of the Royal Military Canal, of how badly things can turn out when relations between our island and the Continent beyond break down.

  *

  I was able to spend a little more time in Newchurch the next day, appreciating its ivy-clad old school house and its almost baronial village hall (the largest building in the village) and its leaning church tower. As with its counterpart in Pisa, its propensity to lean had become clear during construction, so the builders had done what builders tend to do – they botched it by carrying on building closer to the true, giving the tower a kink in the middle.

  After a short stretch of lane walking, before long I was back out into open fields, where I encountered that curiosity, a pair of walkers – all the more unusual in that they were dog-free. We stopped and chatted, exchanging tales of long-distance paths completed and how often we got out to walk. They used to go out with walking groups, but the membership of these was aging, limiting them to an unsatisfying three miles – in their book hardly worth getting their boots on for. I wondered whether walking was a bit like church-going, an occupation dominated by those of more advanced years, destined to a slow decline. On the other hand, maybe they shared another characteristic in that it attracted those with more time, or need for companionship.

  The old ploughed field problem reared its head again, but the local landowner had applied a simple solution, laying a thin layer of straw across the freshly exposed earth to mark the way, the first time I’d come across this. Simple, but effective. In theory, this day was to be a short one on account of the extra miles completed the day before – I’d originally intended to stop at Hamstreet, but had pressed on. In reality, progress was slow. Not only was I meeting more people, but I was also recording reflective podcasts and videos recognising the fact that this was to be my 39th and final day of walking.

  Neither was I in the mood to rush things. Along with a day bag, I was carrying mixed emotions. The walk had dominated my summer – much more than I’d anticipated at the outset. The planning before a stage, its execution, the updating of social media during and afterwards, followed by renewed planning for the next stage, had pretty much become a full-time job.

  I’d loved it all. The challenges, the ups and downs, the time to think and the opportunity to interact with others. The glorious weather had been a bonus; a pain at times, sure, but better than rain. I’d been challenged, occasionally frightened, frustrated at times and even annoyed and angry; but most of the time I’d been happy. Content. Fulfilled. Whether I’d achieved my goal of understanding my country any better as it stood on the cliff face of a ‘brave new world’ was something I was still considering. I had found some … peace, I supposed. Some understanding, a reconciliation. More on this later, but for now, there was a walk to complete.

  Next up was St Mary in the Marsh. In a day of ‘lasts’, this was significant, as it marked the 85th and last of my photocopied sheets from the Ordnance Survey maps that had been my constant guide and companion. These maps, along with our footpath system, really are a national treasure. Only very rarely had I been misled by them, and when I had it was always my own stupid fault, either through a misread, or because I’d been too tight to buy the most up-to-date map.

  An unprepossessing sort of place, St Mary in the Marsh has a pub, a bridge and a church. It does have one point of interest, however. In a good example of the sort of serendipity walking can bring, the churchyard was also home to the grave of Edith Nesbit, author of, among other books, The Railway Children. Finding it was easy once I adopted the advice offered by Indiana Jones when searching for the Holy Grail – seek the least obvious, the most humble. Like the village itself, the grave was modest. It consisted of a carved plank of wood attached to two wooden pillars, almost a stile, which declared that the ‘Poet and Author’ was ‘Resting’, although I was pretty sure she was dead.

  Following another chatty encounter (where had all these people been during the rest of the walk?), I promptly got lost again. My most recent chatees, Phillipa and Sue, came from New Romney and warned of a diversion just outside town. They pointed out the direction they’d come, and I foolishly followed it, despite the fact that it wasn’t the route I’d marked out for myself beforehand. Rectifying my mistake took twenty minutes, and brought me back to within twenty yards of where we’d been chatting. Oh well, it was just as well I wasn’t in a rush.

  As I’d discovered the day before, one advantage of the flat terrain in this area was the ability to use church towers as a beacon and a guide, and New Romney’s proved just as effective as Newchurch’s. That and the sewers brought me to my final field and signs of a lot of new housing being erected on the outskirts of the town, something Phillipa and Sue had commented on, and not in a positive way. My view was we have to build somewhere, and this looked as good a spot as anywhere. There was no sign of the promised diversion, and as I went through a gap in my final hedge I emerged onto the road. A sign announcing New Romney greeted me. This was it. A place that for months had existed only in theory now suddenly become a reality.

  I walked down a residential road, which in turn led to the busier main road linking Romney with Hythe, although as it turned out, it wasn’t the only transport artery with that claim. The road took me past a large Sainsbury’s and into town, where I met up again with Annette for a spot of lunch. It felt appropriate to pause and take breath (as well as a coffee and a panini) before the final, final push.

  New Romney is something of an oddity. If I’d been doing the walk eight hundred years before (unlikely, granted), I would have already reached my end point. A series of storms through the thirteenth century, culminating in the ‘Great Storm’ of 1287, led to such flooding that whole swathes of the south coast of England were effectively re-drawn – an Ordnance Surveyor’s nightmare. The towns most affected were Rye and New Romney. At the latter, the River Rother silted up completely, landlocking what had been a thriving port town. The storm deposited so much silt that even today buildings that existed before it have steps up to the modern land level. Unfortunately we missed the best example of this in the local church where, apparently, you can see evidence of the flood on the pillars inside. We went into the church, but got diverted by an art exhibition inside, and forgot to look.

  New Romney is also one of the Cinque Ports. This is a loose confederation that traces its origins back to a Royal Charter of 1155. Through this, five towns on the south coast (the others are Hastings, Dover, Sandwich and nearby Hythe) were granted exemptions on various taxes (as well as gaining the income from collecting certain dues), all in return for maintaining a standing fleet against possible attack from nasty foreigners. Of course, the Great Storm of 1287 made New Romney’s participation in this obligation a bit tricky, but the designation continues to have some resonance to the present day.

  After a brief tour of the town, there was nothing for it but to take the long straight road into Littlestone, where the sea now meets the land. Initially, Annette set off with me, but when it became clear that the road was very long and very straight, we agreed a better
plan was for her to fetch the car and meet me there, otherwise we’d be walking it both there and back. We were both comfortable with this decision. Annette was carrying a dodgy knee and I quite liked the idea of finishing the walk as I’d spent the vast majority of it: alone with my thoughts and the sound of my own footsteps.

  My eyes were immediately taken by the sight of the immense Marsh Academy, a school with a sign proclaiming that it is ‘Where Learning Comes First’. I tried to imagine the meeting where this slogan was devised. A few men (and they probably were men) gathered around a table. One of them decides to throw an idea into the ring, probably with a half-smile, just to get things moving. The others look at him as if he’s a genius and the chairman announces ‘Smashed it! Pub anyone?’ Next door was the Marsh Leisure Centre, where presumably leisure comes first.

  Other than the sound of seagulls overhead, there was no obvious sign that I was getting closer to the coast. In fact, the air was rent by another sound, that of a steam engine. I was passing a station on the miniature Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, linking these three towns along a 13½-mile track which provided the alternative transport option to Hythe. A fabulously eccentric, and entirely appropriately English, occurrence on the final mile of the walk, this line uses brightly coloured Thomas the Tank Engine style one-third full-size steam engine locomotives along this section of the Kent coast. Over the years it has been requisitioned by the army (they even built their own miniature armoured train), re-opened after the war by Laurel and Hardy, used to ferry schoolchildren to and from their place of learning and, after a series of owners, was adopted by the building magnate Sir William McAlpine. Now, perhaps inevitably, it is mainly a tourist attraction.