A MEDWAY MOSAIC
Flaming June it was not! A grand day out it certainly was! We picked our guide up at the Bluewater shopping centre, which is built in a former chalk quarry owned by Blue Circle. The centre is triangular in shape with John Lewis, Marks and Spencer's and House of Fraser at the comers. There are 330 retail outlets, 40 places where you can eat, 13 cinemas and 13,000 car parking spaces. It is one of the largest shopping malls in Europe.
With Carol safely on board we set out for Cobham in Kent, our morning coffee stop. I know our trip was called a "Medway Mosaic" but it could easily have been a "Dickens Delight' as many of the places we visited were connected with Dickens and featured in his books.
Cobham Hall was built in the 13th century but has been added to over centuries and is now an imposing red brick mansion. Needless to say Elizabeth 1 slept there. Enthusiastic cricketers will know it as the home of Ivo Bligh who captained the first English team in an Ashes series to be played in Australia. England won the series and No was presented with an um thought to contain the ashes of a bail to bring back to England. He kept it at Cobham Hall for many years.
We had coffee at The Leather Bottle a pub well known to Dickens who featured it in Pickwick Papers. After coffee we visited the 13th century church, St Mary Magdalene, which is noted for the fine brasses and was filled with the scent of flowers that decorated the church. Beside the church on the remains of a chantry built for seven priests in the 14th century are 16th century Alms Houses. There are twenty lodging rooms and a chapel with an endowment income of £220.
The Alms Houses are for local people and named after local villages. The original residents were regularly tested on among other things the Lords prayer and the Creed. They were expected to attend church and a bell called them to meals in the Hall. They wore jackets decorated with the family emblem and needless to say, they were mostly men.
We next visited Gravesend going through the longest village in Kent called Meopham on our way. The area we drove through, between the Medway and the Thames was the centre of the cement industry with 23 cement works situated in the area from the late 19th century until the late 20thcentury when the last one closed.
Gravesend is the gateway to the Port of London where the Thames barges would take on "Hustlers" who were muscular young men who helped to lower the masts of the barges as they went up the Thames to the docks.
Alas I did not manage to see any "Hustlers" but maybe those on the other side of the coach had better luck!
I always associate Gravesend with the Indian princess Pocahontas, who is buried in St George's churchyard. It is thought she died of the plague whilst waiting to sail back to America with her husband John Rolf, but a more romantic story is that she thought that her first love John Smith had died, but she saw him again when she was in England and died of a broken heart knowing that she would never see him again. That gets my vote.
I expect that like me you will have enjoyed eating Gravesend Grass, which was grown in the fields on the outskirts of the town. It is better known nowadays as Asparagus.
As we drove up Windmill Hill we were reminded again of Charles Dickens as many of the roads were named after characters in his books. When he was a boy he walked in this area with his father and one day their walk took them past a house called Gad's Hill Place and Dickens told his father that one day he would live in that house.
In 1856 the property came up for sale and he bought the house and grounds covering 231/2 acres for £1,750. In. one room he had a false bookcase painted on a door in which there appeared to be a set of books entitled "Cats' Lives 1-9": apparently he did not like cats.
One day the porter at the local station informed Dickens that a packing case was awaiting collection. He sent one of the servants down to collect it. When the servant returned with the final packing case, the 57th, work began on erecting the miniature Swiss chalet contained in them, on the opposite side of the road to Gad's Hill. Dickens used the chalet when he was writing. To avoid being held up crossing the road he had a tunnel built under it and the steps leading down to the tunnel are still there although they are no longer used. The chalet has now been moved to Rochester.
On our journey to Rochester we passed a sign to the village of Borstal, a name synonymous with young offenders' institutions. In the late 19th century Sir Evelyn Ruggles Brise of Essex devised a system whereby young offenders could be housed separately from older criminals. The idea of these institutions was to educate rather then to punish. However the regime was strict with the emphasis being on discipline and authority.
There was a settlement at Rochester before the Romans landed in Kent although it was the Romans who built the first stone bridge across the Medway. The bridge has a connection with St John de Cobham, who in the 14'h century paid for the building of a new stone bridge and left an endowment fund for its maintenance.
Sir John's house The Bridge Chapel is still used for meetings of the "Bridge Fund". Rochester may be old, as it was mentioned in the Doomsday book, but when we got out of the coach at the visitors' centre things were definitely up to date as there, in the gardens, we saw a clock counting down to the Olympic Games.
A walk along Rochester High Street is a walk through the centuries. Coming out of the 21st century Visitors' centre we pass the Poor Travellers' house built in the 16th century to give free lodging for one night.
Further down the road is the 20th century built French Hospital providing 60 self-contained flats for people of Huguenot descent. We then see Eastgate House, one of the many buildings in the town to feature in a Dicken's novel. Turning out of the High Street we come to Restoration House, the home of Miss Haversham, so called as it is where King Charles 11 stayed on his way to London to claim the English thrown. Opposite Restoration House is the Vines Gardens, the area where the monks had their vineyard. One of the trees damaged in the 1987 hurricane has been carved into a monk.
Walking through the Vines we passed the Kings School, the second oldest school in England but the oldest choir school; then along Minor Canons row where one of the 20th century's most famous actresses, Sybil Thorndyke lived as a child; then onto the castle and the cathedral. Both the castle and the cathedral were built by Bishop Gundulf, the castle being one of the first to be built of stone and at 113 feet has the tallest keep in England. One of the four square towers was destroyed during a siege that lasted for two months in 1215. It was rebuilt in about 1226 as a round tower to strengthen it against future attacks.
Rochester cathedral, standing opposite the castle, is the second oldest in England being built between 1179 -1238. The cathedral has its own saint William of Perth who was murdered by his adopted son whilst on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Miracles were attributed to him and his grave became a place of pilgrimage.
Following a quarrel with the monks, which led to the town's people being banned from the cathedral, they built the church of St Nicholas near the cathedral. An ancient Catalpa or Indian Bean tree stands guard over the entrance to the cathedral.
Leaving Rochester we drove up Bluebell Hill where at dawn on May 1st a ceremony known as "Waking of Jack of the Green" takes place. It was left to our imagination as to what went on!
Our final stop was for a cream tea at the Carmelite Friary at Aylesford. There has been a friary on this site since the 13th century but since the dissolution of the monasteries it has had a chequered history. In 1949 the site came on to the market and the Carmelite order were able to buy back their motherhouse. Since then the site has once again become a place of pilgrimage and peace with services held regularly in the open air chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption. Monthly night vigils are held and at the end of each school term a service for children from the local schools.
Now it only remains to give our thanks to Patrick for organising another grand day out. Judith Boniface.
(Thanks also to Linda Knock for her help on the coach - Patrick)