National Cycle Network - a bicycle tour around Great Britain

To read part 1, click here

Day 1, part 2.
Journal Note written a few miles south of Canterbury
Orchards filled with fruit, willows waving in the wind. I rode on the narrowest of country lanes, between walls of poplars planted on either side of the road and so close together that their trunks made a wall. Villages were filled with beamed houses and roses climbed whitewashed walls. I rode alongside a river whose clear waters and green weeds waved like hair in the wind. Then there was a wood to ride through, and some water meadows and no one was anywhere. I think I’m the only person alive today.

Defoe on Canterbury
“Its antiquity seems to be its greatest beauty. The houses are truly ancient, and the many ruins of churches, chapels, oratories and smaller cells of religious people, makes the place look like a general ruin a little recovered.”
The City will scarce bear being called populous were it not for two or three thousand French Protestants, …. which they tell me decrease daily……”

Journal Note - Butter market, Canterbury.
I’m sitting on the steps of the Butter Market Cross, flanked by two Eastern Europeans eating their Subway chicken sandwich and drinking orange Lucozade. They are part of the large team of builders repairing the Cathedral, from which a cacophony of drillings, hammering, and shrieking of metal can be heard. Behind us, two tourists with iron-grey hair and saggy skin clothed in sandals, summer shorts and anoraks have gone into a shop to look at plates. There is a big notice outside its door which the elderly couple took an age to read.
“Please use the sanitising gels inside.
“Everyone must wear a mask inside the shop”.
Many shops are closed.

When Defoe visited, and had he sat here, he would have sat beside the stake to which bulls were tied prior to their baiting by dogs. It was believed that baiting bulls produced a more tender meat. The Shambles, a series of cobbled medieval lanes just off the market, was where the old butchers used to be. Now the timber-framed houses and shops are tourist junk shops, alternating with ubiquitous coffee chains.
Most are closed.
There are no bulls tied to a stake here today.

A mandatory Covid activity
I had to book a visit to the Cathedral
yesterday
- a mandatory Covid activity with booking the day before, rather than visiting - and guessed a time of half past three.

Today, at twenty past the hour, I chanced my luck and entered the room of purification.

A tall, smiling lady welcomed me into what was once a shop, checked my phone number on a list, tested my temperature, by pointing a gunlike thing at my head, squirted sanitiser into my hands, and told me about the one-way system now in place.
Her voice was heavily accented. German perhaps.

Defoe on Canterbury Cathedral
I observe here;
“That the first Christian bishop, if not the first Christian preacher, that ever came to England (for I know not what to say to the story of Joseph of Arimathea, and his holy thorn at Glassenbury) landed in this country, and settled in this place. I mean St Augustine, sent over by Gregory, Bishop of Rome. This Gregory it seems was a true primitive Christian Bishop of Rome; not such as since are called so; long before they assumed the title of popes, or that usurped honour of Universal Bishop”.

Journal Notes written at various places in a nearly deserted Canterbury Cathedral.
Guide books and information boards are so bland.
‘St Augustine, the missionary monk had been sent by Pope Gregory the Great because he'd seen some Angles in the slave market in Rome, and struck by their beauty dispatched Augustine to convert the country to Christianity.’
What?
1. What the heck was a Pope doing in a slave market, looking at blondes?
2. What were British slaves doing in Rome?

‘Bertha, a Christian and the wife of the pagan Kentish King Ethelbert, persuaded her husband to give land to Augustine so that he could build a church’.
1. What methods of persuasion did she have to exert upon her pagan husband?
2. Were her pleasures of the bedchamber withdrawn until such time as the Christians had their church?
A cathedral is like a body we inhabit - a thing, sometimes beautiful, sometimes mysterious, sometimes cold and impersonal.
I find Canterbury always cold and always impersonal. Perhaps the result of leading too many school trips here and being herded around by the bored guides.

Scribbled into the Journal whilst sitting in the Crypt
On the stairs down to the crypt, a girl asks her parents,
‘What’s a crypt?’
‘It’s like a graveyard, but inside.’
‘I don't like graveyards’, she says. ‘Do we have to go down there?’
‘Yes, I think so’, comes the reply, ‘the dead people are saints and they are good people. Come on.’
They arrive in the dimness of the low spreading arches.
‘Please mummy, I don’t like it here. Can we go?’ She tugs the arm of her mother and turns.
They leave and climb the stairs.
Dad, who’s been quietly following behind, stares at a notice, which says - No Photography.
He looks around, takes a surreptitious photo
and runs upstairs.

In the chapter house.
A clergyman, dressed in his black cassock, talks loudly to a visitor in an orange coat about pubs in Coventry. They laugh a lot together. Loudly.

Journal Note written at the place of St Thomas of Canterbury’s shrine.
For a man of absolutely no religious faith, I am always moved by this lone flickering candle in its red glass vase, resting on the black granite floor near to the High Altar. The story of a proud man born of humble origins, who rose to the second most powerful position of all (after the king); who sought to defend his principles and beliefs against a boss who was set on further extending his regal powers; of his murder, four knights - instructed by an obstinate king- in full armour clattering down the dark winter nave, towards a priest dressed in his hair shirt and a couple of monks praying at the high altar. The initial blows breaking a sword point on a pillar, the next topping off Becket’s skull. Brains and blood upon the altar. Europe in shock that England’s most senior churchman could be killed in such a way, the continent-wide out pouring of grief, the mania for subsequent pilgrimage and the bejewelled shrine later to be destroyed by another power-crazed king, Henry VIII.
Such drama. Such human tragedy, filled with all the foibles and sins conjured by man - and all that now remains is a lone flickering candle.

Defoe on the murder of Becket
“That Thomas Becket, archbishop of this see, and several archbishops before him, plagued, insulted, and tyrannised over the Kings of England, their sovereigns in an unsufferable (sic) manner.
That the first of these, having made himself intolerable to King Henry II, by his obstinacy, pride and rebellions, was here murdered by the connivance, and as some say, by the express order of the king, and that they show his blood upon the pavement to this day”.

Continuum
As the early autumn sun began to cast its brazen shadows across Kent, I set off through the quiet streets of Canterbury, through the University grounds, closed to students due to Covid, and onto an old railway track which once linked Canterbury to the Coast. It is an eight mile, rural and entirely traffic-free route through woods and fields.

A notice copied into Journal at Avery Farm
“Dear Crab and Winkler.
Welcome to Amery Court Farm,
This is a food production area and the fields/orchards
you pass beside may have had recent (or be having)
application of pesticides. Please keep to the path.
The track is owned by the farm and farm vehicles and
staff have right of way. Farm machinery could be on the
path at any time. Please look, listen and keep dogs and children
on the path. Any accident could lead to losing the cycleway lease. We suggest you take out your headphones and cycle at less than 15mph.
Thank you.”

I find myself angered by this note - the assumption that any accident will be due to reckless cyclists - not of the walkers. And as for the wholesale poisoning of our food and countryside……….

Journal Note on the Crab and Winkle Way.
There are two men ahead of me, riding in traps, ponies pulling them along. Dressed for the ride, they wear red neckerchiefs and flat caps, beards and bushy grey sideburns. One wears a wine-red shirt, the other pine green. Whips like CB radio aerials wave in their hands gathering leaves from the overhanging trees. I tried to pass because I was faster than they. They turn to see me trying to pass and crab the trap to the side as I try to winkle past so that I nearly end up in the ditch. I try again and crab again they do as I winkle. So it goes on, along the Crab and Winkle way.

Journal Note in the country somewhere near Faversham
Huge skies, slim and streamlined racing clouds, green marshland fields dotted with cream-white sheep. Hop gardens, feathery headed purple-brown reeds tussle with the wind, distant downs topped with poplar trees losing their leaves, huge and timbered houses, fields of stubble, a pea-hen and a peacock in a field, the latter’s tail looking scrubby. St George flags attached to window frames of square brick houses, Poplars and willows, ash and oak, Oh England, you beautiful land!

A sign in a field
“No Solar Power Station!’
Danger. Poison. Cleve Hill.”
There is a large picture of a gas mask.

A Google search
Judicial review found against The Kent Wildlife Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England in July. The park (Solar Power Station) will go ahead. I’m unclear about references to Danger and Poison.

Journal Note in Faversham
Evening walkers with their dogs. The latter see my wheels glinting in the evening sun as I ride atop the old sea wall and race towards them eager for some sport ears folded back teeth bared snap, snap, bark, bark.
Owners smile unrepentant from afar;
‘Sorry’ they lie.
The wind wobbles me, the grasses lean and the clouds scurry towards their stations from where they’ll fire their squalls.

I head towards the corona spire of Faversham Church which like a lantern has safely pulled in ships from the dangerous seas and cyclists who’ve been chased by dogs across the sheep-filled, dyke-filled marshes. Icing on the cake sort of spire made by a clever patissiere.

Journal Note in Faversham
Faversham is very beautiful in a Kentish way weatherboarded housing frozen in the act of tumbling onto the streets, their beams supporting the gibbets from which blood-red geraniums swing.

‘Find it in Fav!’ shouts the Tourist Board window
‘Visit Britain’s oldest brewery’, it urges
- but I can’t stop now.
It’s nearly dark
and I still have a long way to go.

Journal note - Faversham - the Market Town of Kings
The bones of Stephen of Blois, one-time king of England, and Matilda of Boulogne, his wife, who usurped the throne from Maud, England’s legitimate queen in 1135, lie in the mud of the oozing creek of Faversham, their bodies dug up from their Abbey’s resting place not long after their internment - by the men of the market town and chucked as rubbish to rot - unmarked and unremarked upon. There they still lie - somewhere.
(The tourist board would like to find them. Nothing like a dug-up king to bring the curious into town - as Leicester would testify).

James II, whilst fleeing in disguise to Europe in an oyster smack, after his deposition in 1688, ran aground in the marshes of North Kent and was brought ‘roughly’ to Faversham where he was detained in the house of the then Mayor, Thomas Southouse, for three days.

Defoe on the detaining of King James
“the king was taken prisoner, and I must mention it to the reproach of the people of Feversham (sic), let the conduct of that unfortunate prince be what it will, that the fishermen and rabble can never be excused, who treated the king with the utmost indecency, using him with such indignity in his person, such insolence in their behaviour, and searching him in the rudest and most indecent manner, and rifling him……..”

Journal Note near Sittingbourne
I can’t help myself. I have to stop, despite the approaching dusk and uncertainty about the way ahead. (Signage is haphazard. Youths have twisted the finger-posts the wrong way round, or removed them altogether.) The evening is too lovely. I keep pulling over to eat plums from overhanging trees and to watch the light play on the poplars which are shedding leaves as balding men shed hair. The remaining beams of evening light skitter across fields of brown seed heads and grasses, and to stain my hands and lips with blackberry juice. Sheep bleat and eat, their wool like milk in a glass. It’s a magical land of sky and grass and stands of trees.

Journal Note in Sittingbourne written in haste whilst looking at a map
Lost. Can’t find the bloody route. What a filthy dump. Rubbish everywhere, all along approaching roads fly-tipped rubbish everywhere.

An imaginary conversation in a house in Sittingbourne.
‘Just going out love, to fill up the car.’
’OK, and don’t forget the rubbish.’
‘I won’t - I was going via Swale Lane to toss it out there.’
‘Great - see you later.’

Journal Note
Darkness raced me to the end.
Darkness won.

Journal Note written over supper in Pier 5, Chatham
Reading Kent Online - the Medway towns have some of the worst child poverty in the country - 18,153 children are living in poverty - 31.4 % of all under 16s.
KentLive.news -’it’s not that they (the Medway towns) are awful places, it’s just that, well, on the surface, there isn’t any reason to visit.’
‘There’s a lot of people you don’t particularly want to be walking around that you try to avoid and, if they're not drunk, they’re probably on something”, said Sarah Kisser, 30. “There’s arguments, there’s shouting and it’s not very nice because you see a lot of women with young kids around and you fear for their safety as well as your own.” she added.
Jamie Cook, 29, ‘It's full of prostitutes, crack-heads, smack-heads, that’s about it.’

Chatham - National crime deprivation ranking: 97/317.

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To ride the route, click here

NCN 1 Canterbury to Chatham