Stour Valley & The Penny
It was a Wednesday, which already made it unusual. Our walks tend to happen on Saturday or Sunday mornings, when there is time to settle into the day before lacing up boots. But the first week of September 2023 brought warm, clear evenings that felt too good to waste, and so four of us arranged to meet at the Starbucks in Kingsmead at five o'clock, still in our work clothes, and head out along the river before the light faded. It is a different feeling, walking after work rather than before the weekend has properly started — slightly improvised, slightly lighter on the planning, but no less welcome for that.
The weather cooperated entirely. The thermometer stood at 25°C when we set off, with a light easterly barely registering as a breeze. The sky was clear and blue, the kind of early September day that seems determined to prove summer has not yet finished. By the time we returned to Canterbury, the temperature had eased to around 20°C and a soft haze had crept across the horizon, but the heat of the afternoon still lay pleasantly in the air. We covered 6.87 kilometres, almost entirely flat — a total elevation gain of just four metres — following the Stour Valley Walk south-west from Kingsmead towards Thanington and back.
Kingsmead itself carries more history than a casual evening stroller might notice. For centuries the area formed part of the water meadows along the western approach to Canterbury, admired in the nineteenth century for the views it gave across open fields towards the Cathedral. The 1940s were less kind: the council used the land to deposit rubble from the Blitz bombing of the city, and the area spent decades as rough, restored grass playing fields before a proposal in 2012 to develop the remaining land provoked a local campaign that successfully protected 80% of it as open space by 2015.
From Kingsmead the path runs south-west, following the Great Stour through the Tannery Field area of Westgate Parks. It was here, just a few minutes into the walk, that we came across the bull — or rather, it came across us. The sculpture is large enough and strange enough that you do not walk past it without stopping. Made by local sculptor Steven Portchmouth in 2016 and commissioned by Canterbury City Council as part of a Heritage Lottery parks project for Westgate Parks, the bull stands in the open grass of Tannery Field, a welded lattice of steel with a body you can see through and a solidly plated head that fixes you with a pair of turquoise glass eyes. The eyes were a late decision by Portchmouth — he had originally drawn the face without them, but found the empty sockets looked too aggressive. He wanted the bull to seem happy and proud rather than threatening. The glass does the job. The expression is oddly content.
The reason the sculpture is a bull relates to the ground it stands on. Tannery Field was formerly known locally as the "Slub Bank," a waste tip for the adjacent St Mildred's Tannery, which only closed in 2002 having produced leather for House of Lords seating and Rolls-Royce interiors. The tannery used internal railway tracks to transport trucks of waste out to the bank. When volunteers were installing a wildflower meadow on the site in 2014, those tracks were unearthed, and Portchmouth built the bull's body from sections of that same rail. The steel is the waste; the bull is the memory. Tanneries favoured bull hides for their quality, which is why the animal is a bull rather than a cow, and why its body appears skinned — the form is literal as much as decorative. The sculpture is now part of the Canterbury Sculpture Trail and has, in a pleasing sign of local affection, its own Facebook page.
The river path south-west of the city — photographed in spring, when the willows were in fresh lime-green leaf. By September the same scene would have shown the willows in their fuller, darker late-summer green, the light a little more bronze.
The Great Stour rises near Lenham in west Kent and runs for 57 miles to Pegwell Bay, the second longest river in Kent. The name "Stour" has been in use since AD 686, given by the Saxons and meaning "stirring" or "moving," displacing the older British name Durwhern, meaning "swift river." Canterbury's own Roman name, Durovernum Cantiacorum, derives from the British words duro (fort) and verno (swamp), which gives some sense of how thoroughly the river defined the character of the place before anyone had thought to build walls around it. That the city was named partly for a swamp is something the medieval pilgrims probably did not dwell on.
The river defined the city in practical terms too. In Roman and medieval times the Stour connected Canterbury with the sea via Fordwich, the inland port at the city's edge, making it a transport artery to mainland Europe. The river braids through Canterbury in several channels — at some points three separate branches run in parallel — and those channels historically powered sixteen watermills along the Great Stour section alone, processing corn, paper, and cloth. King's Mill was granted to St Augustine's Abbey by King Stephen in 1144; thirty years later the Crown repossessed it and gave it to Rohesia, sister of Thomas Becket. The Great Stour is also one of only around 200 chalk streams in the world — a globally rare habitat, supporting kingfishers, grey wagtails, water voles, and rare invertebrates including mayfly species. We did not see a kingfisher on this particular evening, but the possibility is always there.
The path south-west of Tannery Field follows the Great Stour Way, a surfaced shared path opened in 2011 running from Canterbury to Chartham along the river, forming part of National Cycle Network Route 18. As the city fell behind us, the valley opened out around the Hambrook Marshes — a local nature reserve occupying former gravel pits worked between 1979 and 1985, during which time a mammoth tusk was discovered on site. We turned around near Thanington, a civil parish extending south-west along the Stour valley towards Chartham, where St James's Hospital for lepers was founded in the reign of King John by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The return followed largely the same path, with the light going amber and the river running quiet alongside us.
We finished at The Penny Theatre on Northgate, on the King's Mile at the edge of Canterbury's centre. The building is Grade II listed and has one of the more compressed theatrical histories you are likely to find: originally the Alexandra Music Hall, operating from around 1750 and rebuilt in 1850 with a balcony added in 1860, it ran as a variety venue in an auditorium no more than 18 feet wide and 35 feet long. The pub had completed a £300,000 refurbishment in early 2023, a few months before our visit, and the new heated outdoor area was where we settled. The temperature was around 22 or 23 degrees by then — still warm enough that when the cold drinks arrived, they sweated immediately on the blue slatted table. Only one photograph from the day itself: an empty, condensation-frosted glass, which is perhaps the most honest record of a warm evening's walk well finished.
Thanks to Charlotte, Sophie and Ben for coming along on the walk today.
