FROM THE FRONT door of our modest 50-year old home, we can walk up on to the High Weald of Kent in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
We didn’t know we could do this, until coronavirus prompted a lockdown and non-essential journeys were banned. Normally, we would jump into a car and drive to Hastings, or the Ashdown Forest or Bough Beech Reservoir or somewhere else in Kent or Sussex … places that were not too far away, but were not exactly on our doorstep either.
Since lockdown, we have been taking our exercise on foot, leaving the quiet little close that tumbles down the side of a greensand ridge and then climbing the hill to the A264 Pembury Road and dropping down the other side of the escarpment into a pretty park with a boating lake at the bottom of the valley.
We walk through the park (originally designed as a landscaped garden for some unfinished mansion) past some tidy allotments and an indoor green bowls centre and then up to High Wood, which just at the moment is hazed with bluebells. It’s a pretty place, and we have occasionally stopped to sit on a bench and listen to the wind in the trees and the chiffchaffs, wrens and robins singing.
The weather has been kind to us since lockdown began, and the colours of the wildflowers glow in the sunlight - yellows, whites, pinks and blues. After the first few outings, I decided to learn their names and they were transformed from mere ‘flowers’ into violets, paradise apple, forget-me-nots, lesser celandine, herb Robert, stitchwort, yellow archangel and periwinkle.
Up here on the ridge, a tarmac road weaves between high, ancient hedges of hawthorn and beech, and the land falls away on either side.
To the north, the ridge we have just climbed, with the A264 running along the top of it, rises inside its parkland cover to a line of trees on what was once called Millionaires’ Row, until the developer ran out of money. To the south, the Weald rolls away in a quilt of farmers’ fields and forest.
Over a ploughed field of Wealden clay, a skylark rises, singing its bright bubbly song until dropping back down to earth where, camouflaged, it simply disappears. A cool wind plucks at the rim of my hat and ruffles my wife’s hair.
The tarmac road services four farms and finally peters out into a public footpath that crosses a field to link up with another metalled road. So far, this has been the limit of our exercise walks. But I can see the possibility of a - perhaps eight mile - walk that falls down into the valley and back up on to the ridge that holds up the village of Pembury.
From there, you can walk through the village, past the Royal Tunbridge Wells hospital and then back over a footbridge over the A21 into Blackhurst Lane, on the eastern edge of Greggs Wood where we recently stumbled across a female roe deer. She stood perfectly still and looked at us warily.
From Blackhurst Lane, it’s a short stroll to another decent walk - the five-mile Pembury woodland circuit that takes in a greensand gorge, a reservoir as still as a mirror in its parkland setting and a fruit farm with apple trees in full blossom.
Lockdown reminds me of my childhood in the North-east of England and the days when there were few cars on the road and, without any other means of transport, we would have to walk from home up on to the moors by Eston nab, feasting on bilberries and drinking water from a chalybeate spring. The birds seemed to sing louder in those days too.
The motto of Tunbridge Wells, inscribed on the road signs bearing the town’s name, is “Love where you live”, and do you know … I’m beginning to get it.
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