A ride into Eden
Between the Downs and the Weald - a bike ride into Eden along the most beautiful lost lane in Kent.
16 Oct 2019
A road with no cars in southern England is usually a contradiction in terms, yet these country lanes are virtually carless, making this ride something of a cyclist’s dream. I set off passing quintessentially English houses - oak beams and lime washed daub on uneven walls. A little further down the road at Crowhurst, another essential of the rural idyll - an ancient church with a yew tree by the lychgate. Only this is a really huge tree. Its gnarled and bony trunk, hollowed like an ancient rheumatic hand. There’s a door - today locked - into the trunk which has a measured girth of over ten metres. Tim Hills (www. ancient-yew.org), points to studies which suggests that the tree is at least 1,500 years old. That means that it was a seedling just after the Romans left Kent to the Saxon invaders. Some go further and say it is 4,000 years old, which makes it older than the Ancient Egyptian pyramids.
This is Eden, the Garden in the East. (of England). A Jan Breughel version of paradise, with its greyer skies and oaks and elms rather than the bright blues of Cranach or James Dyer. There are ‘all kinds of trees growing out of the ground’,(1) both ‘pleasing to the eye and good for food’, such as the orchards of apple trees, branches weary with their weight. There are ‘birds of the air’, buzzards, black crows and cawing jackdaws. And here, ‘the beasts of the fields’; Sussex’s, Herefords and Holstein Freisians, horses of various shapes and hands, and Downland sheep graze the sweet, green grass. A ‘river waters the garden’, its source the dark Atlantic storm clouds lumbering across the skies above. Only the happy couple are missing. Perhaps as it was cold, both Adam and Eve had gone in search of a covering to ‘hide their shame’.
I cross the Eden river, which crawls like a toddler under a bridge, uncertain and playful. The lanes which wiggle their way in curves and corners are lined with oaks and hazels whose leaves are turning into their spectacular autumn hues. The damp, dank air hangs heavy like a leaf waiting to fall.
And on through the easy and gently rolling countryside to Edenbridge, a small town which mixes the very ugly with the very old. Walls of the ancient bulge and sag with age and the walls of the modern are strident in their straight lines and cheap plastic window frames. A tattoo parlour occupies one of the timbered framed houses and across the road behind a large plate glass window, there is a moth eaten rocking horse for sale along with some other brown furniture - ‘everything must go’, the sign implores. The shop is closed, there is dust upon the sills and the door is firmly locked.
Today, all is quiet in this ‘blessed plot’ of England but it was not always so. The broad-leafed woodland would have shuddered with the fall of axes as Saxons gathered their fuel. Pigs would have fed upon their pannage and later the woods would have belched smoke, fire and flames with the smelting of iron to make England’s cannons. Leather making (using the tannin of the oaks and the hides of the local cattle) and hop farming have all departed leaving a rich gentility covering the land.
The powerful and wealthy have always lived here. The castles on the route, Chiddingstone and Hever, are testament to that. Today was not a day for stopping at them however, as I saw a coach full of school children slowly negotiating the narrow road up to Hever and I did not fancy joining excited little people ‘doing’ the Tudors.
However, the need for lunch did force me to pause at Cowden, where an ancient CTC metal plate is nailed to the wall of the Fountain Inn, confirming its long history of feeding hungry cyclists. In fact the only customers today were another four riders and myself warming up on soup, a local sausage sandwich and a pint of local(ish) Harvey’s Bitter.
Warmed and refreshed, it was a quick 10 km back to the station along the golden roads with names like Furnace Lane, giving further clues to the past. During lunch, the weather had made up its mind. The heavy air and black clouds which had been with me all day, had decided now was the time. It poured. The Eden, now in full adulthood, was bursting its banks. Water meadows were just that bordered as they were by poplars and willows fanning the now very dark sky.
Adam and Eve would have suffered in their nakedness today. They would, had they been properly clad and riding their bikes, have found that England for all its current concerns, is a serene and ‘demi-paradise' - all gold-greens, ancient and wet.
(1) - The NIV Bible
The ride is based on Jack Thurston’s Lost Lanes. ‘36 glorious bike rides in southern England’ by Jack Thurston. (Wild Things Publishing 2013, £14.99)