I live near Whitstable on the North Kent coast, which is where I do most of my walking.
Kent, also known as the Garden of England, is situated in the far south-east of the region known as the Rest of England. I think that’s because Kent doesn’t have any mountains or even really big hills and, of course, ups and downs are very important to serious walkers.
I’m quite new to walking for leisure, having started just under three years ago when I was given a GPS watch for my 64th birthday. I immediately began to record my walks and I set myself endless targets involving combinations of distance, periods of time and speed. I wanted to explore every footpath and lane in my area, and then those further afield.
I’ve recorded about 600 walks in Kent so far and the track for each one has been added to Google Earth. Initially, I did that mainly to be able to see at a glance the areas I hadn’t been to yet, but as time went on I developed the aim of walking in every part of the county. My map shows that I’ve quite literally still a long way to go, but that’s the great thing about aims – there’s always something to aim towards!
My usual routine is to do five walks a week, at least one of which is somewhere I’ve not been before. My other walks are local coast and countryside routes. I’ve walked some of the tracks on the map hundreds of times, others only once, and the rest somewhere in between.
But to get to the point at last: I’ve been writing up many of my walks on my own blog, but I’m not here to get people to visit it because it seems wrong to me to use this forum for that purpose (each to their own though!). Instead, I thought I might post occasional updates about my walks in order to give a flavour of what the Rest of England has to offer – starting with a walk I did yesterday…
I parked in lovely medieval Lenham (where the source of the River Stour is), a town about halfway between Maidstone and Ashford, and followed the Stour Valley Walk from its start until just north of Egerton. I picked up the Greensand Way in Egerton and followed it to Ulcombe, then made my way back to Lenham via Fairbourne (not shown on the map) and Harrietsham. I planned the route to link up with my previous walks in the surrounding areas.
Looking back soon after leaving Lenham on the Stour Valley Walk. The Stour is a trickle in the hedges on the left and the Lenham chalk cross is just visible on the far hillside (it's a lot bigger than it looks!):
Here the Stour makes a wonderful water feature in someone's garden:
Cattle are probably the most vexing things on any walk. Bogs, exposed mountain ridges, midges - bring them on, they're nothing compared to having your way blocked by cattle (and they always seem to congregate at the very point where the path exits the field)...
...but on this occasion I was able to bypass them by trespassing slightly on an adjacent field.
Some time later I joined the Greensand Way, which left Egerton through a nice orchard with a welcome from a walker-friendly notice. I must have been tempting fate, because I'd just been thinking that one of the great things about walking through orchards is that I never encounter dogs - only to meet three (all off their leads) in the next hundred yards!
It's so much nicer being out of dog-walking range (which equals 'most-people-walking' range).
Not much later, I approached cattle guarding a gate for the second time today. This time I had no option but to go past them very carefully - I bravely took a photo from the other side of the gate.
I always like to take photos of crops. Here the Greensand Way heads up the hill through a field of beans:
Sheep, and a nice view:
I liked that there was no doubt about the route through this hop field:
I passed an area where there were lots of sunflowers. There were too few to be a crop, so I'm not sure why they're there (unless it's for photo-ops?).
The Greensand Way passes through a great many orchards, which makes for a fantastic walk at this time of the year:
I see a lot of alpacas on my Kent walks. However, never has a path gone through a field where they are and I'm not sure why because they always seem friendly. Looking at the photo, these alpacas seem to have been sheared recently, but not on their heads:
I'll finish with a photo taken in the tiny hamlet of Fairbourne. Rural Kent in a nutshell!