Blean Woods Black Trail
Eight of us gathered in the RSPB free car park off Rough Common Road on a grey Sunday morning, the 12th of February 2023, at something close to nine o'clock. The temperature was around seven degrees, the sky was a uniform pale overcast, and the woodland ahead gave nothing away. It was the first outing for our walking group without a name. We just had a route, and vaguely sensible footwear. That, it turned out, was enough to begin.
The walk we were about to do was the black trail — a waymarked circuit of approximately 13 kilometres through Church Wood and the surrounding woodland of the Blean, the markers being small black arrows fixed to wooden posts at intervals along the way. We set off north-west through the trees, the path soft underfoot with leaf litter and the compacted soil of a well-used trail, the low winter light filtering through a bare deciduous canopy that offered little colour beyond the russet of the bracken and the occasional dark column of an evergreen. The route threads through the landscape rather than over it: undulating, mostly between seventy-five and a hundred metres in elevation, dropping into the valley of the Sarre Penn stream at the lowest point before climbing again through the higher ground to the east.
The Blean is the largest area of continuous ancient woodland in southern England — eleven square miles covering the ridge north-west of Canterbury, a remnant of the great forests that once dominated this part of Kent. The name appears in a charter of 785 AD referring to woodfuel for salt boiling at Seasalter on the coast, and the first definite written record comes from 724 AD, when the nuns of Minster Abbey in Thanet were granted rights of pannage — swine pasture — in what is recorded as land 'on blean'. Whether the name derives from the Old English 'blea', meaning rough ground, or from an older Welsh or Celtic 'blaen', remains uncertain; what is clear is that people have been moving through and working this woodland for well over a thousand years. The Domesday Book records a large wood near Canterbury that was the king's, estimated at a thousand acres. In 1189, Richard I gave Canterbury Cathedral Priory 'totum boscum nostrum de Blen' — the whole of our wood of Blean — as an endowment, and for centuries it was worked, managed, argued over and gradually parcelled between monasteries, the archbishop, and the Crown.
Church Wood itself, historically known as Short Wood, has a documented history of over eight hundred years traceable in Canterbury Cathedral Archives. Its history goes back further than that in the ground: field-walking near the Fishbourne Stream — the local name for the Sarre Penn where it runs through the wood — turned up worked flints identified as Mesolithic and Neolithic, suggesting that people have chosen to be near this water for thousands of years. The road that crosses the stream here is of Roman origin, running from Canterbury's Westgate towards the north Kent coast, probably towards Seasalter or Whitstable. We crossed it without particular ceremony, but it is the kind of thing worth knowing.
The woodland in February has a particular quality. The broadleaves are bare to the branch tips, the canopy thin enough to give a sense of sky even from within the wood, and the floor between the path edges is thick with bracken in its winter colours — bronze and rust and pale ochre — alongside the leaf litter that has been building since autumn. It is a working landscape, and in that sense it looks like one. The coppice stools along the path edges — mostly sweet chestnut, cut and regrown in the dense multi-stemmed form that centuries of woodland management produce — are themselves a kind of archive. Sweet chestnut is traditionally believed to have been introduced to Britain by the Romans, and it became a defining feature of Kentish woodland, coppiced on rotation to supply fencing, hop poles, and fuel. The active management of this understorey, keeping clearings open and the coppice on a regular cycle, is not incidental to the wood's ecology. The heath fritillary butterfly — nationally rare, with the Blean holding approximately sixty per cent of all UK colonies — depends on exactly this kind of open, sunny clearing structure. In February there are no fritillaries; the management that keeps the habitat suitable for them is all that is visible, in the coppice panels and cleared margins along the route.
We crossed the Sarre Penn at the lowest point of the walk. The stream rises near Dunkirk and runs 13.4 kilometres north-east through the Blean Woods before joining the Wantsum Channel near Sarre; here in the wood it is known as the Fishbourne Stream, and it flows through the valley under the Roman road. In the haze — humidity had reached something close to a hundred per cent by mid-morning — it had a muted, enclosed quality, the water low and clear between its banks. We did not linger. The path climbed again east and then south through the higher ground of the wood, the markers appearing reliably at each junction.
By the time we were into the second half of the loop, the cloud had thickened slightly without changing colour — still that same pale grey — and the path ahead had a quality of receding into the wood indefinitely. Around half past twelve there was a brief light drizzle, soft enough to be barely worth mentioning, and we were far enough into the trees that little of it reached us directly.
The RSPB purchased Church Wood in the 1980s to safeguard what the organisation described as 'a large part of the remaining woodland in the Blean area'. In 1991, a consortium of Kent County Council, Canterbury City Council, and Swale District Council purchased further sections, now managed together as a single unit. The reserve carries multiple designations: Site of Special Scientific Interest, National Nature Reserve, Special Area of Conservation, and RSPB reserve. A short distance to the west, in West Blean and Thornden Woods, something else had recently begun: in July 2022, Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust had introduced European bison as part of the Wilder Blean rewilding project — the first free-roaming bison in Britain for thousands of years. The project was barely six months old at the time of our walk. We were not in that part of the wood, and we saw nothing unusual in the trees.
We were back at the car park before early afternoon. The route had done what a good route does: given us enough distance to settle into the walk, varied the ground sufficiently to sustain attention, and returned us to the start without drama. The wood around us was quiet and ordinary in the way that ancient places sometimes manage to be. We had no name for ourselves yet — that would come later, after the Ickham walk in March, when the group would acquire the name it has used ever since. For now, we were eight people in a car park in the Blean, zipping up jackets against the February chill, and this had been the first one.
Thanks to Tina, Tamara, Sophie, Megan, Naomi, Billy and Vanessa for coming along on the walk today.
