1
A RAMBLE AROUND
THE COUNTY
JUST FOR STARTERS
Kent takes its name from the ancient Britons who occupied the country before the arrival of the Romans. In their Celtic language the word canto meant 'edge' (modern Welsh still has cant for border or rim) and so presumably they thought of what came to be Kent as the edge of the known world. Julius Caesar, writing in 51 BC, referred to the area as Cantium, the home of the Cantiaci people. The city of Canterbury takes its name from the same origin and the Coat of Arms for the Kent County Council refers to the county as Cantia.
THE BASICS
Kent occupies the extreme south-eastern tip of England and is surrounded on three sides by water: to the north by the Thames and the North Sea; to the south-east by the Dover Strait and to the south by the English Channel.
Its length from east to west (maximum) is 65 miles and the distance from north to south at its maximum measures 35 miles. Its total area is 1,442 square miles and it is the tenth largest county in the country.
Kent's population is just under 2 million.
There are more castles in Kent than in any other county in England.
Faversham has just under 500 listed buildings
SOME ILLUSTRIOUS VISITORS & RESIDENTS
Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaist artist most renowned for his 'ready-mades', visited Kent twice. His first visit was to Herne Bay in 1913, and his second to Folkestone in 1933 as a member of the French national chess team, but unfortunately he lost most of his games. His performance caused him to say 'not all artists are chess-players, but all chess-players are artists.' The competition was held in the Leas Cliff Hall and the winners were a team from America.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited Bourne Park House near Canterbury in 1765.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), the American statesman, scientist and general polymath, visited Tenterden in 1783.
Mahatma Gandhi visited Canterbury in 1931.
Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor to Kent.
Agatha Christie was a frequent visitor to The Grand, a hotel on The Leas coastal walk in Folkestone.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1725, had a burning ambition: he wanted to Westernise Russia and as part of his grand plan he set about creating a navy to equal any of those possessed by the European powers of the day.
In May 1698 he turned up at Deptford, then part of Kent, with a huge entourage, intending to study the art of ship-building for himself. He was offered the house of a certain John Evelyn, a noted landowner, gardener and diarist, as accommodation during his sojourn - but John Evelyn lived to rue the day he had been moved by such feelings of welcoming generosity. He had spent a great deal of time, energy and money creating a palatial home with magnificent gardens, but it appears that his royal guests had little respect for other people's property. When they left the house was in a dreadful state; most of the furniture had been destroyed, the carpets had been ruined and the beautiful gardens had been laid waste. At today's value, the cost of repairs was something in the region of £20,000
Oast houses such as these are synonymous with Kent and much loved by calendar publishers.
King Edward VII liked Kent and spent a lot of time in Folkestone which he used as a bolt-hole for discreet meetings with his mistress.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, co-authors of The Communist Manifesto (1848), made at least nine visits to Ramsgate.
Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the well-known author of the Gothic novel Frankenstein, left London in 1832 and took up temporary lodgings in Sandgate near Folkestone. Her stay in the town was occasioned by the outbreak of cholera in the capital.
Marlon Brando, Hollywood actor and star of The Godfather was a real-life godfather to a boy in the tiny village of Selling near Faversham. The actor visited the village several times in the 1980s as he had fallen in love with the place on an earlier visit.
The writer H.G. Wells built and lived in Spade House in Folkestone between 1901 and 1909. It is now an old folks' home. H.G. Wells also has a crater named after him on the dark side of the moon.
Sir Francis Drake, renowned for his exploits against the Spanish in the sixteenth century, learned his seamanship in the River Medway. Although a Cornishman by birth, his family lived in Kent for a while and young Francis spent many hours messing about on the river.
The Post-Impressionist painter van Gogh taught French at a school in Ramsgate (actually at 6 Royal Road) for a few months in 1876.
William Willett (1856-1915), who lived most of his life in Chislehurst, was responsible for dreaming up the idea of British Summer Time. He is commemorated by a sundial set up in his honour in Petts Wood.
George Orwell (1903-50) spent time with the hop-pickers near Paddock Wood in 1931. He wanted to experience at first hand the privations of the working man (and woman) during the Great Depression. He was able to draw on his experiences in his novel A Clergyman's Daughter.
John Donne (1572-1631), leading light among the Metaphysical Poets, was Rector of St Nicholas's Church, Sevenoaks, from 1616 until his death.
The novelist Joseph Conrad lived in a house called Oswald's in Bishopsbourne, Canterbury. The house is still standing today. The village hall is called Conrad Hall in the writer's honour.
Then known as Audrey Ruston, the film-star Audrey Hepburn lived at Orchard Cottage, Duck Street, Elham near Canterbury from 1935 to 1940. She attended two schools, one on the village square and the other near Elham Manor. Orchard Cottage can still be seen today, but it has changed its name to Five Bells.
Audrey Hepburn's temporary Elham home.
Other erstwhile notable residents of Elham were the former Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the actress Katie Johnson. She is remembered mainly for her role as Mrs Wilberforce in the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers, which also starred Sir Alec Guinness.
KENTISH CURIOS
The ornately carved wooden desk behind which the President of the United States sits in the Oval Office of the White House has direct links with Kent. The timber used in its construction came from a ship called the Resolute, built in Chatham dockyard, after it was decommissioned and broken up in 1879. Even today it is officially referred to as 'the Resolute desk'.
There is a street in Sandwich named 'No Name Street'.
Kent is to get its own Little Mermaid. As part of Folkestone's Triennial Arts Festival in 2011 the harbour will acquire its own version of the famous statue situated just outside Copenhagen harbour.
The TV personality Bob Holness, who was brought up in Ashford, played James Bond several years before Sean Connery. In 1956 he assumed the role in a South African radio adaptation of Moonraker.
The tiny but picturesque village of Pluckley is supposed to be the most haunted village in Britain. Depending on who is speaking, the village has between twelve and sixteen spooks that make their appearances at fairly regular intervals.
Right on Pluckley's village square this fourteenth-century inn is reputedly the most haunted in Kent.
Folkestone's cannon ball.
Pluckley was also the setting for the TV series The Darling Buds of May starring David Jason, Pam Ferris and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The village of Coxheath near Maidstone hosts an annual custard pie-throwing contest in aid of charity. The event was first held in 1967.
There is a cannon ball mounted on a piece of rock in the centre of Folkestone and the accompanying plaque reads: 'This cannon ball, fired by the English during the siege of Boulogne in 1544 has been returned to us by the people of Boulogne as a gesture of the friendship now existing between us.' Interestingly the cannon ball is made of Kent ragstone rather than iron. Ragstone was frequently used to make cannon balls until the reign of Henry VIII.
One of Ashford's claims to fame is that its inhabitants were the first in Britain to see white road markings. The white lines were painted on the Ashford section of the Folkestone-London road in 1914.
The highest temperature ever recorded in Britain was 38.5°C (101.3°F) in Brogdale, a hamlet near Faversham on 10 August 2003.
St Mary's Church on Romney Marsh is the last resting place of E. Nesbit who wrote The Railway Children.
Horatia, Lord Nelson's daughter, was married to the vicar of St Mildred's Church, Tenterden.
Maidstone Council's coat of arms features a dinosaur, commemorating the discovery of an iguanodon fossil in a quarry near Maidstone in 1834.
HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) and now permanently exhibited in Portsmouth, was built in Chatham dockyard and launched in 1765. It was also at Chatham that Nelson began his naval career.
Only one of the 'seven oaks' of Sevenoaks survived the great storm of 1987. Strangely, the six that were destroyed by the hurricane-force winds were replaced by seven saplings so that Sevenoaks now has eight!
In 1909 Short Brothers built the world's first aircraft factory at Muswell Manor on the Isle of Sheppey. It was here that John Brabazon, also in 1909, became the first Briton to achieve powered flight. He flew a magnificent 500ft. The Short Brothers factory was moved to Belfast in 1945.
The author Charles Dickens was...
