Blean Woods & Canterbury 24k
The London to Brighton was behind me by this point, but the diary was not short of reasons to keep going. The Folkestone Downs Challenge was in September, the London Summer Walk in August, and there was the London to Brighton Off-Road Bike Ride for the British Heart Foundation to prepare for as well. Tuesday mornings were, in the usual run of things, my own time: after the school run dropping Gabriel and Dash, the day opened up. On 11 July 2023 I parked in Canterbury, started the watch at 08:43, and headed for Blean.
The route out of the city followed the footpaths from Kingsmead through St Stephen's, climbing the long hill that runs north towards the university. The weather was overcast — records from Manston show cloud cover solid from before dawn through to early afternoon, temperatures around 17–19°C with a light south-westerly — a warm, grey July morning of the kind that is more comfortable for sustained walking than any amount of sunshine. Humidity was high, as it tends to be in July, but there was no rain. The air had the particular quality of a summer overcast: thick and still in the lower streets, with a little more movement once the path gained height above the rooftops.
The climb out of St Stephen's offers, once you reach the top, one of the better views of Canterbury available without getting in a hot air balloon. The cathedral dominates from most angles, as it has done since Bell Harry Tower was completed in 1498, but from the higher ground to the north the city spreads out below it in a way that gives a clearer sense of its layout — the line of the old walls, the gap where the River Stour cuts through, the mass of Christ Church to the south-east. The university campus begins beyond the crest of the hill: the University of Kent, founded in 1965 on a site that was farmland within living memory of anyone who attended in the first decade, its buildings sitting on the ridge in a way that the planners of the 1960s thought was sensitively done.
Beyond the campus, the path drops through open ground before the woods begin. The transition from the exposed ridge into the canopy of Blean is immediate: within a few paces the light changes, the temperature drops a degree or two, and the sound of the city disappears entirely. Blean is one of the largest areas of ancient woodland in England, covering around 4,000 hectares across a complex of interlinked nature reserves. The core of it is ancient oak woodland on heavy London clay, a soil type that has made large-scale agriculture difficult and so left the trees largely intact since the medieval period. The woods are managed jointly by several conservation organisations and are home to one of England's few remaining populations of the heath fritillary butterfly, a species that requires the specific conditions of coppiced woodland and came close to extinction in the twentieth century.
I had walked the black trail through Blean earlier in the year with the group — the 13km circular route that takes in the deeper sections of the wood before looping back. On a Tuesday morning in July, alone, it covered the same ground differently. The trees were in full leaf, the path in places little more than a tunnel between the coppiced hazel on either side, the canopy closing overhead. The wood has a quiet consistency that longer routes sometimes lack: unlike a walk with obvious landmarks or destinations, Blean keeps returning to the same conditions — the same quality of light filtering through oak leaves, the same soft surface underfoot, the same absence of anything much beyond the immediate path. This is not a criticism. There is something settling about a walk that does not demand your attention for anything other than the walking.
The carved duck on the picnic table was an exception to that general consistency. Someone had fixed a wooden sculpture of a duck to the table in a clearing — a piece of work detailed enough to be clearly intentional, anonymous enough to raise questions about who put it there and when. It was the kind of object that feels more at home in the woods than any manufactured sign or waymarker, and considerably more interesting.
The route out of Blean followed footpaths through Rough Common, the hamlet that sits on the western edge of the woods, before descending the hill into Harbledown. This is one of the better-documented approaches to Canterbury, for reasons that go back to the fourteenth century. Harbledown is the village Chaucer places at the start of the Manciple's Tale, calling it Bobbe-up-and-doun, under the Blee, in Canterbury weye — a description that still makes reasonable geographical sense, the village being a sequence of rises and dips on the western approach to the city. The Blee is the old name for the Blean plateau.
More specifically, Harbledown grew up around the lazar house founded in 1084 by Archbishop Lanfranc — the same Lanfranc who oversaw the rebuilding of the cathedral after the fire of 1067. The Hospital of St Nicholas was established for the relief of lepers and remained in operation for several centuries; when leprosy declined in England the hospital was gradually converted into almshouses, which it remains today. Before the Reformation, the inmates supported themselves in part by displaying a slipper said to have been worn by Thomas Becket; pilgrims on the road from London would have the relic brought out for them to kiss as they passed. Erasmus, who visited in 1512, described the transaction with some scepticism. Henry II, it is said, walked barefoot through Harbledown on his penitential pilgrimage to Canterbury after Becket's murder in 1170 — a story which also accounts for one popular etymology of the village name, rendering it as "hobble down". The actual derivation is Old English Herebeald's dun, Herebeald's hill, which is considerably less satisfying.
There is also a cricket connection, which feels almost compulsory for a Kent village. Richard Culmer, a Puritan curate in Harbledown in the late 1630s, denounced his own parishioners for playing "crickit" before his door — one of the earliest documented references to the game in England. The parishioners, one imagines, were not greatly moved by the denunciation. Organised cricket in Kent was first recorded at nearby Hackington in 1835, leading to the formation of what became Kent County Cricket Club in 1842.
The descent through Harbledown village brought the route back towards the city, picking up the path along the old city wall before turning east towards Northgate and the final stretch back to Kingsmead. The city wall at this point follows the line of the Roman enceinte, rebuilt in the medieval period and surviving in varying states of completeness around the northern and eastern circuits. Walking along it in the shadow of the gatehouse towers brings the scale of the medieval city into focus in a way that the street-level route through the centre rarely does.
Lady Wootton's Green sits between St Augustine's Abbey and the city wall, at a point where the route back to Kingsmead passes through what was, for centuries, the ceremonial approach to the abbey. The Green takes its name from Lady Wootton, who lived in the former abbey lodgings from her widowhood in 1626 until her death in 1659; the garden in front of her gates passed back into public use and eventually became the small public space it is today. The medieval buildings that enclosed it on the Broad Street side were destroyed in the bombing of 1942, opening the view towards the cathedral that now makes the Green such a distinctive stopping point on the route between the abbey and the cathedral.
The two bronze statues installed here in 2007 — King Ethelbert and Queen Bertha, sculpted by Stephen Melton of Ramsgate — depict the moment at which the Christianisation of England effectively began. Bertha, great-granddaughter of Clovis, founder of the Frankish monarchy, was already Christian when she married Ethelbert in 580. She adapted a former Roman building on the eastern edge of the city as her chapel — the site of the current St Martin's church, the oldest church in continuous use in England. When Pope Gregory sent Augustine to convert the British in 597, it was Bertha's chapel that he used as his base, and it was from her influence on Ethelbert that Augustine's mission derived much of its early success. The statues show Bertha bringing the news of Augustine's arrival; Ethelbert welcoming it. Their clothes are reconstructed from contemporary archaeological finds. They are shown standing about a dozen paces apart, as the Canterbury Commemoration Society specified, on the walk that now bears Bertha's name.
The Starbucks at the end was not in the historical record. After 24.42km of walking and a long descent through a warm July morning, it served its purpose adequately. Total moving time: 4 hours 44 minutes. Elapsed time: 5 hours 36 minutes.
