BEYOND CHERITON HILL

The North Kent Downs is a complicated landscape.

Surrounded by encroaching housing developments – the irrepressible march of bricks and mortar that emanates from the minds of uninspired utilitarian planners, one might gain the impression that this land mass is hopelessly boxed in, tamed so that its natural echoes are lost amongst the hubbub of human babble. Almost. Yet driving South Westward out of the soulless satellite village of Hawkinge, its deadening influence soon recedes as the straight line marked exit road narrows into a winding track edged by high hedges that leads upwards at a steep gradient until, at the top of Cheriton Hill the hedge line falls away to reveal the exposed panorama of broad high scarps that fall dramatically down to the wide coastal valley. Finding a place to park, I see the town of Folkestone laid out before me like a scrappy cartographer’s sketch, and in front of this are the many engineered lines of the Euro tunnel tracks that slice through a huge swathe of the coastal valley floor. The disturbing frequency of all this activity is in marked contrast to the coast line beyond which stretches far out to the shining tip of Dungeness, and beyond this to the chalk cliff edge at Fairlight. To the left, the right and behind me lies a landscape of open rolling fields, woods and coppices, and dropping precipitously towards the coastal plain is the hedge bounded single track road that winds down to the old village of Newington butted against the busy A20 that rudely announces a return to 21st Century efficiency. Before taking this descending route however, I note several pillboxes irregularly placed along the tops, their machine gun gaze now dimmed by time, are nonetheless a sobering reminder that this was one of the first stop lines placed here to impede the threatened Nazi invasion.

In Newington the hotchpotch of old and new vernacular housing styles are sufficiently aged to lend them a degree of unity to complement the village’s central feature, the parish church of St. Nicholas. With some time to wait for my friend to arrive, I take in the scene by walking the full length of the village, but in all of its sixty metres or so there is not one building that draws my attention and I am soon back at the church, so I venture though its gate to get a better view of the ancient yew tree. I am rarely disappointed by the loving attention that yews receive in churchyards and this one is a fine example, its thick sinewy fluted trunk though partly eaten away by insect infestation is still standing with the aid of thoughtfully placed metal rod supports. Though multifarious reasons are given for these trees being on sacred ground and nowhere else, it is well known that their worship preceded that of Christianity, their species being prized as symbols of longevity and fertility, and their subsumption into the Christian church suggesting these characteristics were now provided solely through this foreign religion. The church tower too is strangely foreign as its onion-like cupola has a slightly oriental appearance.

Soon my friend arrives, dog in tow, and we snake our way back up to the top road, park our cars in a lay-by, then set off on foot across the edge of the escarpment. There is a distinct shift in scale from the rows of bushes, tight primped gardens and enclosed meadows at the base of the hill, with views on the upper reaches expressing themselves more in terms of tectonic proportions. Larger themes are evident here through our ability to make out distant land masses in relationship to each other, so that we can survey Tolsford and Summerhouse Hill against Etchinghill and Brockman’s Bushes without having to turn our heads. The huge becomes small which in turn makes us appear minuscule. But the dynamic behaviour of the elements is the best expression of this massive scale as seen in the marriage between land and the sky where cloud shadows and patches of gold and silver sunlight glide over the undulations of the terrain augmenting their forms which, from time to time suggest that the earth itself is a moving living giant.