My secret valley
Gavin Stamp shares his dream retreat around the River Darenth
The desire to keep places we love secret, fearing, with reason, that they might be ruined by too many visitors, is selfish and wrong – and, in the case of the enchanting Darenth Valley in Kent, simply absurd. A railway runs along it, as does the A225, while the M25 is close by, although out of sight. And yet, despite being less than an hour from the centre of London, it remains somehow a precious survival, a beautiful and special stretch of countryside, largely unspoiled and full of wonders. For half a century it has been, for me, a precious secret. Hooray for the Green Belt!
To get there, the train from Blackfriars first trundles through uninspiring suburbs – Catford, Bellingham, Bromley, Bickley – then through some open country to Swanley, where the line branches to the south. Then through a long tunnel to emerge as if by magic into another world, halfway along the valley of the river Darenth or Darent. The first stop is Eynsford. The village itself, winner of frequent prizes for the Best Kept in Kent, lies some way to the north. It boasts the ruin of a Norman castle, and the austere parish church is largely Norman, too, enhanced with a later slim shingled spire. The handsome, painted Royal Arms are of George III: ‘Fear God Honor ye King’.
The trouble with Eynsford is that it is separated from the railway station by a long ribbon of modern houses. Better, perhaps, and more romantic, immediately to take the footpath to the west towards Lullingstone, across the fields and past a farm, with hills in the distance and the prospect of the handsome red-brick railway viaduct of 1862 marching across the river and over which you have just travelled. It is a structure of Roman grandeur – and that is appropriate as the Romans were once here. Watling Street was not far to the north and, soon after Claudius’s conquest of Britannia, many villas were built along the river in this distant outpost of Empire. And the extensive foundations of one of them miraculously survive at Lullingstone.
Lullingstone Roman Villa seems
to have been begun a few decades after the conquest. For a time it may possibly have been the residence of Pertinax, governor of Britannia, and, later and typically briefly, emperor. By now much enlarged and modernised, the villa was eventually abandoned in the fifth century after a fire and the withdrawal of the Legions. But what is left of it today is not just a somewhat boring archaeological site, for some fine mosaic floors survive almost intact. The peculiar importance of this villa is that plaster fragments were found of the Chi-rho symbol, very early evidence of Christianity in Britain and suggesting that there was a Christian house-church here. What seems extraordinary is that, although its existence was suspected earlier, the remains of the villa were only discovered in 1939, and only excavated after 1949 and opened to the public in 1963.
South of the villa, the road (a deadend) soon arrives at Lullingstone Castle – which is not really a castle at all, though a most lovely place. A weathered redbrick battlemented gatehouse of c 1500 leads to a spacious lawn (once there was an inner moat) and to a large red-brick Georgian mansion beyond, which, we are told, does in fact embrace the remains of a castle. Two things at Lullingstone make the place very special as well as adding to its enchantment. One is St Botolph’s Church, part mediaeval and part Georgian, standing on one side of the lawn. There is a 16th-century rood screen, some unusual stained glass, brasses and, in the chapel north of the chancel, some splendid grand monuments – one, a recumbent figure cased within an arch, to Sir John Peche, who built the Gatehouse. But the most intriguing is that to Percyvall Hart Esq, who died in 1738.
Occupying the whole of one chapel wall, it extols at length the virtues of this former Member of Parliament for Kent within what John Newman, in his ‘Pevsner’ for this part of Kent, rightly calls ‘Rococco-gothick arcading’. We are told of his devotion to the Church of England and to Queen Anne, and of his ‘steady Attachment to the old English Constitution’ and how he lost his seat soon after the Hanoverian succession. Even a dismayed Remainer like myself is moved to read of how this old Tory, ‘Conscious of having always preferred the interest of Great Britain to that of any foreign state, He passed the remainder of his Life in Hospitable Retirement’. He also became the ‘munificent Repairer and Beautifier of the Church’, giving it splendid new enriched plaster ceilings decorated with cherubs’ heads, crowns and mitres.
The other special attraction at Lullingstone Castle is the ‘World Garden’, the creation of the horticulturist Tom Hart Dyke, son of Guy Hart Dyke, the present owner and custodian (and the first cousin of the actor and comedian Miranda Hart). In 2000, travelling in Panama hunting for rare orchids, he and a friend were kidnapped and held hostage by suspected FARC guerrillas. While in captivity, constantly threatened with execution, Hart Dyke dreamed of creating a new garden back home at his beloved Lullingstone which would contain plants from all over the world. And, following his eventual release, he realised that dream. The World Garden opened in the old walled garden at the castle in 2005 and thousands of different species are planted in areas vaguely resembling the continents of the globe.
Onwards south from Lullingstone, the footpath running along a large ornamental lake through which the Darenth flows. Then on to Shoreham, either by footpaths or country lanes. One September, doing this walk, we found the roadside hedges groaning with ripe blackberries: nobody was picking them as everyone seems to drive. How foolish! Eventually, gorged, we reached Shoreham. Although it claims to have been the most bombed village in England in the Second World War – it lies under the direct Luftwaffe route from the French coast to the capital, and it has the Shoreham Aircraft Museum, full of relics from the aerial battles that took place overhead in 1940 – it still seems a charming and typical Kentish village. There are weather-boarded and plastered cottages, half-timber and tile-hung gables, and houses of mellow red brick scattered around the Darenth – and four good pubs. There is an idyllic churchyard below the squat brick Georgian west tower of the medieval parish church, together with a fine yew avenue leading to its remarkable timber south porch, a Perpendicular Gothic structure made of huge pieces of oak. Inside there is a spectacular wide rood screen and the organ from Westminster Abbey played at the Coronation of George II – for the Dean and Chapter of Westminster are the patrons of the living.
For many of us, however, Shoreham is, above all, inextricably associated with the name of the artist Samuel Palmer. After his death, his son affirmed that, ‘What Wharfedale was, as Mr Ruskin has said, to Turner, Dort to Cuyp, Albano to Claude, what North Wales was to Wilson, Ville d’avray to Daubigny, and Barbizon to Millet, such, to Samuel Palmer, were Shoreham and Otford-on-the-darenth.’
In his 1948 County Book on Kent, the poet Richard Church wrote that he knew of only one disturbance in this village ‘which sleeps on as it has slept for a thousand years ... It took place in the year 1828 when, after William Blake’s death, a farm-wagon carrying Samuel Palmer and other disciples of the poet-artist-mystic rumbled into Shoreham’. And here this visionary Romantic stayed, on and off, for seven years, sometimes with his fellow modernity-rejecting artist members of ‘The Ancients’. In between the cottages and in the fields around, especially in the autumn, it is still possible to appreciate what inspired Palmer to produce those intense poetic depictions of landscape and nature at sunset or by moonlight which are some of the greatest glories of English painting.