Oast to coast
From Kent’s High Weald to Sussex’s lost shores, the barrel-aged story of hops and beer.
‘ HOPS AND PICKEREL, carp and beer, came into England all in one year’ ...so goes one version of an old rhyme. In another, we get heresy instead of fish. Like so many sayings from ye olden days, it’s largely bunkum. But there’s a grain of truth in it.
That grain was fermenting in my head as I stepped from the bus into Cranbrook’s weatherboarded high street. England’s tallest smock mill watches over this small town in Kent’s High Weald. I was here for beer. That is to say, the story of beer – how English taste buds warmed to that bitter alcoholic beverage. It’s an intoxicating saga I was following on foot. And by that, I don’t mean a pub crawl.
Nowadays we say ‘beer’ and ‘ale’ interchangeably, but at one time there was a strict distinction; so strict in fact, it was decreed by Henry VIII (though it’s a myth that Tudor England’s tubby tyrant outlawed hops). In short, beers were hopped, ales were not. Ale was an English drink, beer was newfangled and foreign.
Beer first came to England from the Low Countries in the 1300s, when Edward III invited Flemish weavers to settle in the south and east. Some would set up shop in Cranbrook, bringing prosperity to the town. Not only did they produce Europe’s finest woollens, these clothworkers from Flanders brought over brewing know-how. Within decades Flemish brewers were making and selling beer here with imported hops. But it’s not until 1520, so tradition has it, that England’s first ‘hop garden’ was planted in Kent, with cultivation spreading to the West Midlands. A mild climate and well-drained soils made conditions in the Weald ideal, and hop growing flourished here into the 20th century.
Once maligned as a ‘pernicious and wicked weed’, hops are the flowers of humulus lupulus
– ‘wolf of the woods’ – a member of the hemp family. When dried, they’re added after the ‘mashing’ of water and malted barley to give beers their bitter flavour and piney aroma. Hopped beers last longer than ales too. Drying hops requires a kiln and in Kent they’re known
as oast houses. These pencil point farm buildings pepper the county, though most have now been converted into rustic homes. Outwardly, the earliest purpose-built oasts looked more like barns and the oldest surviving example (from the 17th century) stands in Golford, a mile from Cranbrook.
All this got me wondering: could I walk from this Kentish crucible of brewing to a port where hops and beer first arrived in England? Yes, it turned out. Fortuitously there’s a ready-made route: the High Weald Landscape Trail. This 90-mile path from Horsham to Rye on the Sussex coast weaves across the full breadth of England’s fourth largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. From Cranbrook I would walk the last 24 miles over two days. With a nod to Alfred Wainwright’s famous sea-to-sea traverse, it was to be a journey from oast to coast.
Hop to it
Between Cranbrook and Benenden, three miles to the southeast, the High Weald Landscape Trail negotiates a rumpled quilt of pasture and ripening barley. It’s a landscape sprinkled with large ponds and tile-hung farmhouses, typical of the Weald. At intervals the path plunges into cool, streamthreaded dells of jagged-leaved hornbeam and sweet chestnut. Doglegging into Benenden, I briefly follow the sunken line of a Roman road running north to south from Rochester to Hastings. Benenden lay at a junction of trade corridors exploiting the Weald’s rich iron deposits at a time when these undulating sandstone hills were still thickly wooded. For many years the Forest of Andred (as the Saxons later knew it) was a hive of bandits and outlaws, where many feared to tread.
Only traces of this ancient wildwood survive, but its former extent lives on in local place names. ‘Weald’ itself is an Old English word for forest, sharing its roots with the ‘wolds’ of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the West Country. We also have Germanic settlers to thank for the proliferation of ‘hursts’ and ‘dens’ in these parts. The latter is a peculiarly Kentish place name denoting woodland pasture grazed by hogs. Had I been walking through Benenden 1500 years ago, I might have bumped into
Bynna – reckoned to be the swineherd-in-chief around here way back then. His pigs may well have snuffled out sweet chestnuts originally brought to England from southern Europe by the Romans. What does all this have to do with beer, you might ask? More than you’d imagine.
In later centuries sweet chestnut trees were widely planted in Kent and Sussex for coppicing , which supplied the long, straight poles from which hop bines were traditionally strung – and the stilts used to perform this task. Coppicing also provided fuel. Charcoal and seasoned wood cut from Wealden copses fired the oast houses that dried the hops that flavoured the beer. All the ingredients for the perfect pint were on hand.
A swift half was in order as I emerged onto Benenden’s triangular green, with a square towered church at one end and the Bull Inn at the other. On summer weekends it hosts village cricket. You could hardly want for a more quintessentially English scene. From Benenden’s main street, the trail drops into Strawberry Wood, crossing an old stone culvert that likely carried heavy wagonloads of ironstone in the past. It forges east through apple orchards up to Rolvenden.
Seldom far-ranging and boundless, Wealden views tend to take you by surprise. It can be a deceptively slight hillcrest or a break in the trees that reveals gloriously shaggy oakwoods and billowing, jigsaw fields. Further west, the North and South Downs are ranged on opposing horizons. But as I descend from Rolvenden Layne, it’s the pancake flat expanse of the Rother Levels that unfolds to the south as the trail nears Tenterden. Had I come this way 600 years ago, I’d already be at the coast by now. Up until the 15th century, when storms began the silting of the River Rother, a tidal lagoon came right up to the town’s outskirts. ▶
“Drying hops requires a kiln and in Kent they’re known as oast houses. These pencil point buildings pepper county.” the
Cut at near ground level, new growth from the ‘stool’ (tree stump) can be harvested every 15 to 18 years.
Today Tenterden sits high and dry, nine miles from the sea. It had been a ‘limb’ of Rye – one of the Cinque Ports that enjoyed special privileges from the crown over trade and law in return for supplying ships and men in times of war.
As I skirted the now drained inlet branching from the River Rother, a shrill toot announced a steam locomotive panting across the levels. Originally opened as a light railway in 1900 and now a heritage line, the Kent & East Sussex Railway would have carried trainloads of Londoners down into the Weald to join Gypsies and drifters for the September hop picking season in years gone by. This annual migration of seasonal workers from the East End was vividly described by an intrepid young journalist called Eric Blair (who’d later assume the pen name George Orwell). He experienced it first hand while roughing it undercover as a cockney tramp in the early autumn of 1931.
Far from being the idyllic ‘holiday with pay’ hop picking was sold as, Blair reported unfair wages and unsavoury conditions. Butlins it was not. But for many London families, three weeks’ hop picking meant a welcome dose of country air. This yearly exodus is still remembered fondly. Stripping hops from the bines by hand, pickers were paid by the bushel in tokens. Their meagre pay had to cover living costs and travel, and any leftover earnings were often splurged on a new outfit in the nearest town. It was not unknown for pickers to discard their old, hop-stained clothes in the street.
On many farms in Kent the hop gardens are long gone, but ramshackle and bramble-eaten rows of hoppers’ huts remain. Whole families crammed into these brick or corrugated digs for the duration of the hop harvest, turning their spartan quarters into cheerful homes from home. The hop pickers worked long hours but found time for high jinks. They were known for their raucous sing-songs and bundling unwary victims into hop bins as the harvest drew to a close. As mechanisation accelerated in the late fifties and hop garden acreages dwindled in the Weald, the army of pickers stopped coming.
These days I can only imagine how Tenterden’s broad, Georgian high street might have looked when the hop pickers were in town. ‘The Jewel of the Weald’, as the town unabashedly touts itself, still boasts a respectable tally of pubs and inns. There was ample time for me to sample a few before resting here for the night. The coast could wait.
To the sea
From Tenterden I made a break south, tailing dank and leafy Tilder Gill down to Small Hythe on the edge of the Rother Levels. Hard to believe today, this hamlet was a thriving port in the Middle Ages
before the sea receded in the 17th century. In an earlier blow to its fortunes, its quayside and shipyard were devastated by a fire in 1515. Built shortly afterwards, Smallhythe Place is thought to have been the harbour master’s house. A halftimbered beauty straight from the pages of Country Life, it was later the rural retreat of the celebrated Victorian actress Dame Ellen Terry and is now in the care of the National Trust.
You could once have caught a ferry from Small Hythe over to the Isle of Oxney. Now it’s a journey I can undertake on foot without getting my boots wet. It’s spine-tingling to think I was walking where 1000-ton ships built for kings of England sailed long ago. Across the fields, the trail gains height again as it makes ‘landfall’ on Oxney – an island no more. Like Tenterden and Small Hythe, it too lies landlocked now, miles from the sea. At Oxney’s pie crust southern edge, its cliffs have slumped and turned grassy, centuries having passed since waves last nibbled at their feet.
Crossing the River Rother in its straightjacketed modern course, I stepped from Kent into Sussex, and rose again to a wooded ridge of sandstone. Picking up tracks down into the sheep-cropped valley of the River Tillingham, I glimpsed the sea for the first time – container ships drifting above a false horizon, seemingly cruising in mid-air. A little further on, Rye materialised in front of me. Its jumble of terracotta rooftops spill down from the squat, hilltop church at the town’s medieval core, ▶
“The Kent & East Sussex Railway would have carried trainloads of Londoners down into the Weald… for the September hop-picking season in years gone by.”
known as the Citadel. In the hazy far distance, a line of pylons extends like an orderly queue of dinky Eiffel Towers across the saltmarsh and shingle, out to the Lego brick power stations on Dungeness.
The quayside in Rye heralds the end of the High Weald Landscape Trail. Below the town’s labyrinth of cobbled streets, boats rise and fall on their moorings with the ebb and flow of the tide. Today the open sea lies another two miles downriver, (where a paddle off Camber Sands will soothe sore feet). But it wasn’t always so. In medieval times merchant vessels unloaded their cargo onto the Strand. Hops and beer from the continent passed through Rye’s warehouses, stoking England’s newfound thirst for bitter beverages. And as early as 1525, a local merchant even began to export homegrown hops. So entwined were Rye’s fortunes with this fragrant crop, it was later represented in locally thrown decorative pottery called ‘hopware’.
Taking the weight off my feet in Rye’s Mermaid Inn, where hops were hanging above the bar, I pondered the refreshing pint of amber nectar I now clutched in one hand. I didn’t ponder for long mind you. Beer had shaped my walk: the face of the land and the places I’d passed through.
It’s a beverage steeped in history and I’ll raise a glass to that any day.