Ash 7k Loop & Algar Lodge
Sunday 3 May 2026 · 09:11 · Ash-next-Sandwich, Kent
Time for another outing with the Steely-Eyed Ninja Speed Walkers. We met in the car park of Juliet's Farm Shop and Cafe on Queens Road at the southern edge of Ash village, with plans to return there for brunch after the walk. There were eight of us on a fine May morning, along with two dogs — Bento and Teddy — whose enthusiasm for the day was considerably less complicated by weather anxiety than our own. It had rained heavily in the early hours: Manston recorded rain at 7am and the fields were still visibly wet when we set off just after nine. The sky was thick cloud in every direction, and there had been some quiet discussion about whether we were in for a damp few hours. It cleared as we walked. By ten the clouds were breaking apart to the south-west and we finished in sunshine, the morning's rain doing nothing more in the end than leaving the soil dark and the air clean.
The route loops to the south of the village, dropping away from the higher ground on which Ash-next-Sandwich sits and crossing the open farmland that lies between it and the hamlet of Coombe to the south-east. This is as purely agricultural a landscape as any in east Kent: the broad arable fields — cereals, brassicas, occasional root crops in rotation — stretch out with little to interrupt them, the horizon defined by hedgerow trees and the occasional farm building rather than any rise in the ground. The elevation profile is gentle throughout, no more than 66 metres of ascent in the full circuit, but the sense of openness is considerable. On a day when the skies are working through cloud and clearing, the light moves across the fields in long sweeps, and several people commented that this was one of the nicest walks we had done together. It is not a walk of dramatic scenery, but it is one where the quality of the light and the scale of the sky do a great deal of the work.
Ash itself sits on a ridge of sandy and loamy ground between the former Wantsum Channel to the north and the drainage basin of the Lesser Stour to the south, and its history reflects the fertility of the surrounding land. The parish — one of the largest in Kent at nearly 7,000 acres — has been occupied continuously since before the Roman period. At Richborough, on the north-eastern edge of the parish where the Stour once emptied into the sea, the Romans built Portus Rutupiae, their principal landing place in Britain, the harbour through which the legions arrived and through which much of the province's trade subsequently moved. On the higher ground immediately west of the church, at a place known as Guilton, a Roman burial site was identified in the 19th century, the excavation of which produced urns and glass vessels. Guilton also yielded an earlier set of finds: a Saxon burial ground, long known to local history, in which pagan weapons, ornaments and other relics of the early medieval period have been found at intervals since its discovery, and from which objects are still occasionally recovered.
The village has accumulated a considerable weight of history around its church of St Peter and St Paul, where a succession of the principal manors of the parish are commemorated in monuments, brasses and tomb effigies. The manor of Overland, the principal estate, passed through the hands of a Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a woman known to her contemporaries as the Infanta of Kent, and eventually a priory dissolved by Henry VIII before settling into private hands. The manor of Molland, near Guilton, has its own chancel in the church with the monuments of its medieval owners. Hills Court, half a mile east of the church, was held by knights in the reign of Henry III; the Wroths, the Slaughters, the Harfletes and others held it in succession across three centuries before Edward Peke of Sandwich acquired it in 1608. The church itself, with its cross-shaped plan, embattled tower and roach spire, appears in the 1901 account of the village as the dominant feature of a settlement just large enough to be called a town, complete with three windmills, a brewery of some local reputation, and a market garden economy built around hops and soft fruit.
The farmland we crossed to the south has the same character it has had for centuries: the Ash soil was described in 1901 as notably rich, producing hops and market garden crops in addition to the arable staple, and the broad fields visible from the first mile of the route — young cereal in the foreground, worked earth receding to a long treeline — suggest a landscape still organised around the same productive logic. The dogs were running free across the open sections, ranging ahead and doubling back, and had thoroughly tired themselves out by the time we returned to the village. This is the kind of route where dogs and open farmland align particularly well: no livestock in the fields we crossed, good drainage even after a wet morning, and enough variation in the path — headland tracks, field boundaries, a stretch of tarmac through the village outskirts — to keep things interesting for four legs as well as two.
The southern leg of the loop runs along the edge of the fields south of Coombe before turning west along Hammill Road, with views back towards the village and north across to the wooded ridge above Woodnesborough. Hammill itself, a small settlement to the east of the route, has its own layer of history: it was at a clay quarry operated by the Hammill Brick Co. in 1946 that a Roman-period ritual shaft was excavated by the archaeologist Major Burchell, containing pottery and organic material deposited in layers consistent with a second or third-century ceremonial structure — the more significant given the proximity to Richborough, barely four and a half kilometres to the north-east and at its height one of the most intensively Romanised sites in Britain. The brickworks itself had an earlier history of ambition and failure: a colliery was begun nearby in 1910 by a company expecting to find coal, construction work stopped when the First World War broke out before a single tonne had been raised, and the site was eventually absorbed into the brick works, which ran until economic conditions brought production to an end. A spur of the East Kent Light Railway had been laid to serve the colliery that never opened, and was later used instead to transport clay to the brickworks.
The return leg of the circuit swings west and then north, rejoining the village at the Guilton end and passing back through the older settled part of Ash before arriving at the car park. The weather had behaved itself perfectly — warm by the time we were walking the second half, a light south-westerly keeping it from feeling close. It was the kind of morning that justifies the habit of going out regardless of what the early forecast suggests.
The group photograph was taken somewhere along the western return, at a field track beside a fallen dead tree that arched dramatically over the group — a photogenic accident of timing rather than anything we sought out. Behind us, looking north, the tower of Ash church is just visible above the treeline, about a kilometre away across the fields.
The original plan had been to eat at Juliet's afterwards. The farm cafe at Park Farm has a well-established reputation for good breakfasts — eggs from its own hens, generous portions, locally sourced produce — and closes at 2pm on Sundays, so a 9am start had seemed to leave comfortable room. It did not account for how busy it would be on a May bank holiday weekend. We arrived back at the car park to find the cafe at capacity with a queue outside, and having forgotten to book a table, (sorry,guys!) there was no prospect of being seated any time soon. Plan B was Algar Lodge Farm Shop and Cafe on Sandwich Road near Deal, roughly twelve minutes' drive to the south-east. Algar Lodge is a family-run operation combining a farm shop, butchery, deli and bakery with a cafe serving breakfast through to mid-afternoon; it was also busy, but we managed to get a table and eat well.
Charlotte's french toast — brioche soaked and fried, dressed with raspberries and pistachios, drizzled with both a white glaze and what appeared to be a matcha or pistachio cream — was, by general consensus, the most visually arresting item on the table and a reasonable argument for the detour. Seven and a half kilometres, eight walkers, two dogs, and a brunch that required a twelve-minute drive to find: not a bad adventure for a Sunday morning in the east Kent countryside.
7.43 km · 66 m elevation · 2:08:12 moving time · 9,790 steps
Thanks to Tamara, Caroline, Charlotte, Julia, Ben, Anna, Marcus, Teddy and Bento for joining the walk today.
