Mama Feelgood’s 11k Loop
Sunday. It’s time to meet up with my walking group friends for our first walk of 2024. We started at Chalkpit Farm on the edge of Bekesbourne. The familiar smell of coffee from Mama Feelgoods was a reasonable incentive to return promptly at the end of the trek. The temperature at the start was barely 2°C, with a westerly wind just strong enough to make it feel colder than the thermometer suggested and humidity hovering near saturation. Overcast skies showed no real intention of lifting. By mid-morning a brief window of thin, wintry sunshine opened, then closed just as quickly. This was a January walk in every respect.
The route covered 11.75 kilometres in a rough loop, heading south and west out of Bekesbourne through Patrixbourne, then climbing north along Hodes Lane towards Canterbury, before looping back east and south across open fields to return via Bekesbourne once more. What it lacked in distance, it made up for in variety of surface, gradient and (as the final section demonstrated) depth of standing water.
The climb north along Hodes Lane is the dominant feature of the first half. The lane rises steadily through chalk farmland, gaining height from the valley floor towards the southern edge of Canterbury, and it does so without much ceremony. The reward at the top is arrival at the Appledown Way, a 22.5-mile recreational walking route that runs the full length of the Elham Valley from Hythe on the coast to Canterbury Cathedral, passing through the chalk valley carved by the River Nailbourne in the North Downs of East Kent. The route from Bekesbourne follows a section of this long-distance path as it descends into the city, and for a short while the walking feels purposeful in a way that cross-field paths sometimes do not.
The path brought us out onto New Dover Road on the south-eastern outskirts of Canterbury, where The Old Gate Inn served as our halfway coffee stop. The pub has been standing in one form or another since 1728, built close to the Gutteridge Gate toll on the road south out of Canterbury towards Dover. Its first landlord, Richard Howard, was both toll collector and a trained tallow chandler — a practical combination on a busy coaching road. The inn was then known as "The Sign of the Gate", the gate in question being the toll gate itself. By 1781 it had become a coaching inn where travellers could stop for the night, and Rigden's brewery rent book from the early nineteenth century records it simply as "Turnpike House", with the innkeeper paying £8 rent and £1 15s 7d in property tax annually. It is now part of the Vintage Inn chain, which describes it as having provided "a warm welcome to travellers for almost three centuries" — a claim that is, at least, accurate. The welcome on a cold January morning was much appreciated.
The return leg began well enough, crossing fields east and south from Canterbury back towards Patrixbourne, with the wind beginning to strengthen towards its early-afternoon reading of around 12 mph. The ground was soft but passable. The difficulty came later, on the final loop that adds the last portion of distance to the route.
January 2024 had been a wet start to the year, with the Met Office noting significant flooding across Kent and much of southern England during this period. The low-lying ground on the valley floor between Bekesbourne and Patrixbourne, drained by tributaries of the Nailbourne and the Little Stour, holds water readily in saturated conditions. The Nailbourne itself is an intermittent stream — a so-called "bourne" that flows only in wet years, when the chalk water table rises sufficiently to feed it. In early 2024, it was certainly running. On the final loop, a field that presumably contained a footpath delivered something closer to a ford. We waded it, gingerly, to boot-depth, and everyone arrived on the other side with a good idea whether or not the Goretex in their boots was working.
The final approach back to Chalkpit Farm passes through a tunnel beneath the railway line — a low, functional underpass that marks the last moment before the walk is over. The line overhead is the Chatham Main Line, running between London Victoria and Dover Priory. Bekesbourne station sits on this line between Canterbury East and Adisham, and the line through here was opened by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway on 22 July 1861. The LCDR was one of two rival Victorian railways competing fiercely for the Kent traffic — the other being the South Eastern Railway — a rivalry so intense that it shaped the railway geography of east Kent for generations, producing a duplication of routes that persists in outline to the present day. Near the station, the line crosses the Nailbourne on a small viaduct before continuing south towards Adisham. Ducking through the underpass and emerging into the field on the other side feels slightly anticlimactic after all that history, but it is a satisfying end to a circuit that has, by that point, covered most of the valley in one direction or another.
Back at Chalkpit Farm, we had a lovely Sunday lunch at Mama Feelgoods. The temperature had climbed to around 5°C by early afternoon, not warm, but considerably more acceptable with food in front of us. The walk — 11.75 kilometres of chalk hill, flooded meadow and Victorian toll road — had been, by any measure, a proper January outing.
Thanks to Tina, Tamara, Sophie, and Charlotte for coming along on the walk today.
