Ickham 21k & Mama Feelgood’s
Saturday. Out for a very early start today, meeting my walking friends in Ickham at 6 am for a longer hike on the trails. We’re planning to tackle the London to Brighton Ultra Challenge this summer, so this is the first of our training walks. Mild but breezy weather, and largely overcast. It stayed dry, but there was a persistent south-westerly wind that made itself felt on the exposed stretches of the route. Things brightened up a bit mid-morning, with bursts of sunshine breaking through the clouds.
We met up at Tina’s place in Ickham; she knows the local trails very well, and led us out across the fields towards Wingham, then Wickhambreaux, and a quick loop around Stodmarsh village. After that, we marched on to Littlebourne, and then Bekesbourne, where we stopped at Chalkpit Farm for lunch at Mama Feelgood’s cafe. Finally, a gentle stroll back to Ickham after our break, 21 km and five hours of walking in total. The gang were absolute troopers and managed the distance with no complaints: in fact, when a friend asked if anyone had dropped out, I replied that we were a band of steely-eyed ninja speed walkers… and the name kind of stuck. Thanks to Tina, Sophie, Charlotte, Billy and Pandora for joining the walk today.
Ickham and the Little Stour Villages
Ickham sits about five miles east of Canterbury in that quietly prosperous belt of East Kent where the chalk gives way to brickearth and the fields have been under continuous cultivation since before any written record exists. The name derives from the Saxon words yeok and ham — a measure of arable land and a dwelling — and the parish's earliest documented appearance is in 781, when King Offa granted the land to Christchurch and the monks of Canterbury. For much of the medieval period Ickham served as something of an outlying treasury for Canterbury Cathedral, a function still visible in the street names — Treasury, Rectory — that persist around the village centre today.
The church of St John the Evangelist stands at the heart of the village on The Street, which widens slightly at that point in the manner that often signals a medieval market place. A church here is recorded in Domesday Book, though the earliest surviving fabric dates from the mid-twelfth century, when the monks of Christ Church Priory began enlarging what was probably a simpler Saxon structure. The building grew substantially through the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, acquiring a new chancel in around 1230 and a pair of transept chapels — each with a canopied tomb — in the decades that followed. One of those tombs is thought to be that of William of Heghtresbury, a fourteenth-century logician and Chancellor of Oxford University, who held the rectory here in the 1350s and, at his death in 1373, chose this village church over any more prominent resting place.
The route north from Ickham passes through open arable country before reaching Wingham, a village of some standing in the medieval ecclesiastical landscape of Kent. Wingham's church of St Mary the Virgin was one of the ancient minster churches of the county, with a cluster of dependent parishes radiating outward from it, and in 1282 Archbishop John Peckham elevated it further by founding Wingham College — a collegiate institution whose fourteen chancel stalls still survive in the church today. Over its 265-year existence the College produced four Archbishops and three bishops, which is a considerable return for a small market town in East Kent. The college was dissolved in 1548, but the church retains its medieval timber spire and a collection of post-medieval monuments that bear witness to the families who filled the power vacuum it left behind.
From Wingham the path turns back south-east towards Wickhambreaux, one of the more immediately satisfying villages in this part of Kent. It clusters around a green in the classic pattern — church, manor house, rectory, inn, and mill all within a short walk of each other — and has changed relatively little in its essential layout since the medieval period. The name is a compound of two histories: the Saxon Wicham, referring to a settlement on or near a Roman road, and the Breaux suffix added in 1258 when William de Briouse acquired the manor. The village sits close to where one of the first Roman roads in Britain crossed the Little Stour, and the Domesday Book records fisheries and salt pans here, evidence that the river was then navigable and the settlement was closer to tidal water than it appears today.
Wickhambreaux's medieval history carries a certain dynastic weight. The manor passed through the Earls of Kent and eventually came into the possession of Joan of Kent — the Fair Maid of Kent — who later married Edward the Black Prince and became the mother of Richard II. Local tradition holds that Richard met his future wife at Wickham Court, the manor house that still stands beside the green. The church of St Andrew is worth pausing at: its Art Nouveau east window of the Annunciation, installed in 1896, was the first commission in Europe given to American glassworkers, and remains an incongruous and rather beautiful surprise in an otherwise thoroughly medieval building.
The loop around Stodmarsh takes the route north towards the Great Stour valley, where the landscape opens out into a different register entirely. Stodmarsh village is small and quiet, but the National Nature Reserve immediately to its north is one of the most significant wetland sites in southern England. The name comes from the Saxon stode and merse — stud-marsh, pasture for mares in the marshes — and the land's association with horses appears to go back at least to the Augustinian monks who grazed animals here in the medieval period. The reserve's character as a wetland owes something unexpected to industrial history: subsidence from the Chislet Colliery, which operated through the twentieth century, caused the land to sink and flood, creating the reedbeds and lagoons that now attract over 200 recorded bird species. It is an accidental nature reserve of the best kind.
Heading south again, the path drops back down into the Little Stour valley and into Littlebourne, a village whose name has nothing to do with its size — which is considerable — but refers to the Lesser Stour, the burna or stream that runs through it. The manor was given to St Augustine's Monastery in 690 by Widred, King of Kent, in exchange for the monks' prayers, and those ecclesiastical connections persisted in various forms until the Reformation. The church of St Vincent of Saragossa — the patron saint of winemakers, a dedication that reflects the vineyards the Canterbury monks once maintained here — is largely thirteenth century in its present form, though its origins are almost certainly pre-Conquest. It contains a notable wall painting of Saint Christopher and a collection of stained glass windows by Nathaniel Westlake, a leading figure of the Gothic Revival, considered one of the finest assemblages of his work in the country.
The river itself, the Little Stour, is the thread connecting this cluster of villages. It rises on the chalk downs south of Canterbury and runs north-east through Littlebourne, Ickham, and Wickhambreaux before joining the Great Stour near Plucks Gutter. For most of its length it is a modest, unhurried stream, bordered by water meadows and willows, and the footpaths that follow its course make up much of what is good about walking in this corner of the county. The Roman engineers understood this — their road crossed the Little Stour at Wickhambreaux precisely because the valley floor offered the most practical route — and the medieval monks who farmed this land understood it too. The fields between these villages have been worked for long enough that the landscape carries its history quietly, without announcing it.
The final stretch back into Ickham from Bekesbourne is gentle, the route passing through farmland that would have looked broadly familiar to any of the monks who walked it in the thirteenth century, give or take the telegraph poles and the distant hum of the A2. By the time the Duke William comes into view at the top of The Street, twenty-one kilometres have a way of feeling entirely reasonable.
