Folkestone Downs Challenge
Saturday 2 September 2023 · 36.10 km · Elevation gain: 541 m · Steps: 52,730 · Moving time: 8h 34m
The Folkestone Downs Challenge is an annual charity walk organised by Pilgrims Hospices, the east Kent palliative care charity that has been providing hospice care to the region since its Canterbury house opened in June 1982, founded on the vision of a local nurse, Ann Robertson. The circular route of approximately 36 kilometres starts and finishes at Folkestone Harbour Arm and takes in the North Downs escarpment above the town, the high ground above the Channel Tunnel terminal, and the long coastal return along the Royal Military Canal and the beach path from Hythe. It is well-organised, well-signed, and thoroughly absorbing — and it is considerably harder than its distance suggests. Several of us in the walking group had planned to do it; in the end it was Sophie and I who made it on the day. We met at Folkestone Harbour for the eight-thirty start, with bacon rolls and coffee from McDonald's doing the necessary work beforehand.
Folkestone Harbour Arm has a long and layered history. Trading ships have been landing at East Wear Bay since at least Roman times, and fishermen are recorded near the mouth of the Pent Stream from around 1100 AD. Lord Radnor petitioned Parliament in 1804 for permission to build a stone harbour — the Act was granted in 1807, partly to provide warship anchorage during the Napoleonic Wars — and the civil engineers William Jessop and Thomas Telford designed and completed the western pier by 1810. The South Eastern Railway purchased the by-then-derelict harbour in 1842 and transformed it into a rival to Dover for steam packet services to France, the harbour branch line — one of the steepest railway lines in the country, descending 111 feet in under a mile — following in 1843. The Harbour Arm itself, the long granite-faced concrete pier that extends into the outer harbour, was completed in 1904 and is now, since a regeneration project that began in 2014, home to food stalls, bars, and a programme of events that has given the pier a second life after decades of neglect.
The route departs the harbour heading west and almost immediately begins to climb. The Folkestone Downs Challenge frontloads its elevation gain into the first fifteen kilometres with an efficiency that the legs do not quickly forgive: by the time the path reaches the high ground of the North Downs above the town, it has accumulated the bulk of the day's 541 metres of ascent. The reward, at least, is immediate. The view from the first ridge back over Folkestone and the Channel — the town spread out below, the sea beyond, and the French coast visible on a clear day — is one of the better prospects on this section of the Kent coast.
The route continues west across the high ground above Etchinghill and Peene, and for a stretch of the upper section the landscape opens out to reveal the full engineering scale of the Channel Tunnel terminal at Cheriton — the Le Shuttle marshalling yards and the tunnel portals clearly visible from the ridge, the M20 running alongside. The tunnel itself, opened in May 1994 after six years of construction, runs for 50.5 kilometres beneath the Strait of Dover, with the main undersea section of 38 kilometres making it the longest undersea rail tunnel in the world. The view from above is one of the few places on the Kent side where the full extent of the surface infrastructure is visible in a single sweep — the scale of the approach roads, the enormous holding areas for freight vehicles, and the precise geometry of the rail tracks converging on the tunnel mouth.
The descent from the high ground leads eventually down towards Lympne and the edge of the Romney Marsh, where the route picks up the Royal Military Canal heading east towards Hythe. The canal runs for 28 miles between Seabrook near Folkestone and Cliff End near Hastings, following the line of the old cliff that once marked the edge of the sea before the marsh silted up. Construction began at Seabrook on 30 October 1804 — the same year Folkestone's harbour Act was passed — conceived by Lieutenant-Colonel John Brown of the Royal Staff Corps as a defensive barrier to prevent French forces from using Romney Marsh as a bridgehead. It was completed in April 1809 at a total cost of £234,000, by which point the threat of Napoleonic invasion had receded; Nelson had died at Trafalgar in 1805, and the canal never saw the military purpose it was designed for. It was opened instead to barge traffic and a passenger service between Hythe and Rye, and remained in commercial use until the Ashford to Hastings railway took most of the traffic in 1851. It is now, for most of its length, a quiet and beautiful waterway, the towpath shaded by willows and the water reflecting the sky above the flat marsh. After the morning's exertion on the hills, the flat kilometres along the canal felt like a different kind of walking entirely — the legs still tired from the climb, but the gradient finally on our side.
From Hythe the route follows the beach path eastward back to Folkestone Harbour, the shingle and sand of the Strait of Dover underfoot for the final stretch. By this point the effort of the earlier ascent had made itself felt in a way that the distance alone would not quite account for: a front-loaded route of this kind produces a particular kind of fatigue, the legs having spent their reserves early and then been asked to carry on for another twenty kilometres of descending and flat ground. We finished in good order nonetheless, collected our medals at the harbour, and found supper.
Totals for the day: 36.10 km, 541 metres of elevation gain, 52,730 steps, and a moving time of eight hours and thirty-four minutes — a Historic Relative Effort score of 275, which places it, despite the shorter distance, among the more demanding days in the record. The elevation-to-distance ratio tells the story: at fifteen metres of gain per kilometre it is steeper, overall, than either day of the London to Brighton. The Folkestone Downs Challenge is not a walk to underestimate.
