September 3, 2003: Sutton Valence to Little Chart
The Swan in Little Chart
With only two days needed to complete the Greensand Way I was anxious to undertake these stages while we still had lots of available daylight, and so I was happy when the Lees agreed to resume this quest on a sunny summer Wednesday.
I took Fritz for his first walk of the day before heading off at 7:30. I had reached Charing Cross by 8:00 and I could already see an announcement for our 8:30 train. I was too early to take advantage of my senior rail card (as I had been with my tube pass) but I bought a return to Ashford and went in search of lunchtime sandwiches and some extra water in a nearby shop. When I returned I found the Lees, who were just finishing breakfast at a kiosk cafe and here I bought a cappuccino and an apple Danish to take with me as we headed for our train.
Mistakenly I put the return half of my ticket into the turnstile but this problem was soon remedied and we boarded one of the slam door specials of the despised Connex Southeast train company – which had recently announced the cancellation of a number of trains in order to improve its punctuality on the rest of its schedule.
Our train took off on time and headed south and we gossiped for an hour (ASL, the Hutton Inquiry, the Jerry Springer Opera) as we traveled south. I was hoping to hop a bus upon our return to Headcorn station though it was scheduled to depart at the same moment, 9:33, that our train was due to arrive. Fortunately the train was a minute early and we had just reached the station forecourt when the Number 12 Arriva service for Maidstone pulled in. Harold gave the driver a fiver for three tickets – and received change, a mistake on both their parts, since we owed £5.70 for three tickets.
The drive took only fifteen minutes of so – the driver chatting with all his regulars as they got on and off – and we were soon back in Sutton Valence and making preparations for our walk at the bus stop. It was a warm sunny morning and I stripped to my t-shirt and arranged my guidebook and maps in the plastic case. It was 9:50 when we started off – an early start for a walk so far from London and especially well-placed because today we had a longer stage than those of late – eleven miles to go.
We headed up a back street and soon reached the grounds of Sutton Valence School, an attractive pile perched on the hill to our left. Then we passed through a playing field with views of the village and the Weald available through the trees on our right. Eventually we dropped down to a road and continued in an easterly direction. At the Mill House I paused to remind everyone that Harold had just completed his mile 2200.
At a crossroads we met up with a woman who was walking a terrier. Our route traversed a field diagonally (after the crossing the first of innumerable stiles), though the instruction to pass to the right of a lone tree seemed to be contradicted by the path itself, which passed to the left of what turned out to be a small grove in the middle of the field. Near the end Tosh encountered another mystery crop, a feathery fernlike plant that she identified as asparagus. When we reached tarmac we encountered the lady with the terrier again and she confirmed Tosh’s diagnosis.
We now followed a road past East Sutton Park church and East Sutton Park prison, though the latter seemed more like an open farm than a castellated dungeon. At a T-junction we continued forward on a bridleway and descended a hillside with an apple orchard. (The promised hop vines were not in evidence any longer here but these came later in the walk.) After crossing several stiles we reached the bottom of a hill and began to climb up the opposite side, emerging onto a road where we headed left past Morry Cottage and Morry House. We now reached a turnoff and continued this upward trend as we marched through more orchard territory before things leveled off. Tosh, against my advice, actually plucked a red specimen – we all had a bite and it was delicious; thereafter we gathered only windfall specimens.
We now descended to a roadway leading us past Church Farm. Ulcombe Church was off to our left as we pressed on, with small ups and downs, using stiles to keep to a footpath that clung to field edges (everything was yellow brown after so little rain), lines of tall trees and the occasional copse. Things were quite overgrown as we headed through the foliage that clung to our next roadway, which we reached by fighting our way over a stile and onto the tarmac that lead up to Upper Hill Farm.
The path was a tad more level after we had turned east from the latter, entering brief patches of woodland and continuing in our easterly direction at a good pace – one that never lagged below two miles an hour. We had to pass through a number of orchards and it was interesting to see that the heavily laden apple boughs were hanging from trunks tied to short posts so that harvesting, which was imminent, would not require the mounting of a single ladder. Had they crossed the apple with the runner bean?
We reached the houses and gardens of Liverton Street (Tosh had been warned not to expect any nearby pub) and used open fields and hedge lines to continue on to the farm buildings at Boughton Place. It was obvious that gentrification and or restoration was about to take place here but we avoided the estate agents and the suits and headed into the graveyard of Boughton Malherbe (pronounced Borton Mallerby) church – where we found a shady corner in which to have our lunch. It was shortly past noon.
The Lees had made their own sandwiches but I dined on my Charing Cross chunky chicken and prawn mayonnaise variants – as tasty as the plastic they came in. Some tourists arrived to inspect the tombstones and Harold assured one chap that we weren’t ghosts.
I was enjoying the lichen blossoms on the graves but I was also getting quite stiff sitting on a cold stone platform and the others didn’t seem to want to linger. We packed up and returned to the road in front of the church, turning right on a metaled track that soon became the drive to a private home. I suspect that the owners of the latter had found a quicker way to get walkers off their property and our next stile was certainly not mentioned in the text I was using.
Our next major landmark was something called Pope Hall Cottage –but getting there was a chore. There was little evidence of path on this hillside and the text failed to mention the need to head downhill. Also as we scrambled along on very uneven surfaces we must have missed a guidepost for we soon ran up against a fence and I had no way of knowing whether the cottage in question was up the hill on our left or down the hill on our right.
I threw down my pack and extracted my compass – through this didn’t help much. Next I called for a retreat – following the
time-tested strategy that requires a return to the spot where you were last sure you weren’t lost. In doing this we encountered the missing guidepost and this confirmed the need for a descent – our new dominant direction being southeast and Pope Hill Cottage now identified as the abode below us.
I had noticed that Harold was wearing white trainers instead of boots and asked him about this. He said that his anklebones were wearing away and that his boots rubbed against them. I thought about this for several hundred yards and then suggested that if his anklebones were wearing away this should make it easier for his boots to fit, not harder. He laughed, but I was not amused – my left heel was beginning to throb – just as it did in the first hours of our Cotswold Way walk in June. In spite of the many miles I had walked in these new boots something was always raising a blister on this one foot.
We pressed on but matters were worsened by the huge field that lay between the cottage and Coldbridge Wood. It had been recently ploughed and any evidence of a footpath erased. We had to fight our way across it, the uneven surface further punishing my heel, finding a little relief in the hard shoulder at the edge of the wood in the few spots where the tractor hadn’t erased that too. We walked into woods ourselves soon thereafter and the path exchanged woods for meadows or open fields several times before climbing steps up a steep bank to reach a field to the west of Egerton House.
A chap was helping himself to firewood in the front lawn of this lovely yellow structure. The guidebook suggested a right turn on the road in front of the house but I could see that a brief left was needed if we wanted to continue forward into a shaded lane that lead us to the churchyard of St. James’ Church. The Greensand Way circles this structure to the right but as we did this we could see men in dark suits setting up chairs at the entrance of the church and we soon discovered that we had walked into a funeral! Mourners were just beginning to arrive as we threaded our way in embarrassment out the front gate. At least none of us was in shorts, but had we arrived an hour later we would have had to retreat in confusion, I fear.
Egerton has a pub, the George Inn, and, at the seven-mile mark, we turned right and walked down the main street to its open doors. It was 2:15. A lot of people on their way to the memorial service were having a stiffener here; we could see droves of people heading toward the church as we supped our Stella. I took off my left boot, pulled off my sock and put a padded bandage over the torn skin of my heel. The Lees followed their half pints with cups of coffee.
When it was time to leave Tosh fell into conversation with one of the many parking attendants directing traffic down the hill. He said the deceased had been a barrister and that 400 people were expected at the service, scheduled for 3:00.
Amid peeling bells we left Egerton, cutting through a parking lot, across a suburban cul de sac and uphill on a footpath to a country road. Our route, which took us over more forgiving surfaces now, passed from farmstead to farmstead and it was pretty well marked. This was just as well since, after my pint, I was having trouble concentrating on the complex guidebook text. Out in front Tosh made most of the decisions anyway but just as we neared Elvey Farm we turned right along the edge of a harvested field when we should have made a diagonal half-left – and as we pulled parallel to the farm itself I ordered a left turn to make up for this. Elvey Farm was now a country hotel and our way was not well marked through its outbuildings. Harold asked a chap for directions (“Just follow your noses” not being a particularly useful response) while I tamed the barking farm dog – who now followed me about with his nose buried in my trousers.
The weather was far more overcast at this point and it was rather humid in the mid-afternoon but rain never threatened. Ahead of us we had another hill to climb and a stretch of recently ploughed field to cross – very recent indeed, since the tractor was still active at the bottom. Of course there was no path and so it was rough going to struggle up this slope; I only hope subsequent GSW walkers will be grateful that at least one walking party had reasserted the right of way.
Our objective in this climb was the village of Pluckley and when we reached a road we turned left and soon found the Black Horse pub on our right – time for another pit stop at 4:00. Even the pub entrance required a hike up some stone steps. Tosh ordered a dessert described as “sickly sweet chocolate gateau” by the brassy proprietress in blue jeans (half of her menu was finished or unavailable), a glass of UHT milk, and another cup of coffee. “You realize,” she said to Harold with some satisfaction as she smacked her lips, “that this means there’s no supper tonight.” “I thought so,” he replied resignedly. I just drank a Diet Coke.
At the Black Horse I removed my sunglasses, which I had worn all day, and placed them in their case. We weren’t in the place for long – as we were leaving our hostess was explaining to a new couple that she couldn’t do them any garlic bread as the grill was broken.
We had less than a hour to go, just a mile and a half, and after topping the hill most of our surfaces were level or downhill. The sun returned and the air freshened and it was a lovely afternoon again. We passed the splendid formal gardens of Sheerland Farm House and passed through several more orchards. As we were on our final stretch I stopped to put a few windfall apples in my pack and Tosh discovered some nice plums as well. The trees made a straightforward passage difficult and we had to detour to the left around one orchard and should have done this a second time a little later. I discovered our mistake when we reached the end of the orchard but I had a good landmark to aim for off to the left – the square brick tower of the unlovely church at Little Chart.
We passed a woman walking three dogs just as I was rediscovering the Greensand Way and off to the left I could now see the Swan Inn. I had always assumed that I would have to call for a taxi here, having never succeeded in getting reliable bus information from the Internet, but as we crossed the street, our walk over, I noticed a bus shelter at the end of the pub car park. There was a bus to Ashford due at 5:23 (this was also the number of the route, ironically); it was now 5:15 – so we decided to wait and see if arrived on time. It did, right on time. This service, the last of the day in this direction, didn’t go directly to the train station but the driver, another friendly and helpful chap, said that if we waited just a few minutes at the end of the line, he’d pass the train station on his return journey.
So this is what we did; we were the only inbound passengers, though after we had twisted around a number of urban roundabouts and parked for a while, a lot of people got on for the outward journey, including a little Marks and Spencer girl stinking of cigarette smoke and reading a romance novel.
We got off at Ashford station at about 5:50 and I saw at once (on one of the station monitors) that there was a Victoria train shortly after 6:00. The platforms were crowded with passengers and after a minute or so I became curious about a train that was just sitting there. A railway official confirmed that it was a Charing Cross train (although half an hour late because of a signaling failure) so we boarded it. It took off soon thereafter and, though it paused mysteriously at a number of times on its journey to London, it made decent progress. Tosh read her Metro (which had an article about “despicable” Connex and its signal failures) and, after calling Dorothy on the mobile, I finished a Cadbury’s Bourneville chocolate bar – which didn’t really seem to be at all like earlier versions of this product, which I remembered from 30 years earlier.
We arrived at 7:20 or so and I must say I had trouble unstiffening at the hips in order to get off the train for the long march to a Bakerloo platform. The Lees accompanied me only as far as Piccadilly, where we said goodbye. I was home at 7:50 after a very pleasant outing.
To continue with the next stage of our walk you need: