Whitfield 33k Loop
The London to Brighton Ultra Challenge was eight weeks away, and it was becoming clear that the distances I had been covering in training were not yet where they needed to be. The solution, on the morning of Saturday 22 April 2023, was to leave the house at 03:56 and walk until the matter was resolved. The route I had mapped out — a 33km loop of the country lanes around Whitfield, taking in Guston, East Langdon, Martin, up through the lanes to Coldred and Shepherdswell, and back via Singledge Lane — was not a dramatic walk in the sense that the Walmer or London to Brighton routes were dramatic. It was familiar ground, chosen deliberately because the point was the kilometres, not the scenery. The scenery, as it turned out, had other ideas.
The pre-dawn stretch along Archers Road and Forge Lane heading south-east towards Guston was done in the dark. Cloud cover had kept the sky overcast through the night and into the early hours — weather records from the nearest Kent station show cloudy conditions right through from 4am to 11am, clearing to fair only around midday — but the cloud was high enough and thin enough that what light existed reached the road. The air was cold, around 6–8°C, with a light south-westerly that stayed gentle throughout the morning. The kind of morning, in other words, that is easier to leave the house for than it sounds.
The light changed somewhere around Guston, as the sky began to separate from the land. The cloud thinned to the east and what came through was not the hard yellow of full sunrise but something softer — pinks and mauves running along the horizon above the fields, the lane narrowing to a pale strip between the crops. The rapeseed on the left was already in full flower, an intensity of yellow that absorbed the pink light and threw it back differently. It was the kind of light that lasts for perhaps twenty minutes and is gone before it has fully registered.
Guston itself is small — a scatter of houses, a handful of farms, and the church of St Martin of Tours, which has stood near this road since around 1090. The Domesday Book records the settlement as Gocistone, meaning Guthsige's village, and the name has been wearing away ever since into the softer single syllable it carries today. The church was built within a generation of the Conquest and has changed less than most of its contemporaries, partly through the involvement of the monastic orders and the Archbishops of Canterbury, who held the living for centuries. Three Norman windows survive in the east wall. The Victorian restoration, as elsewhere in Kent, left its mark — the stained glass in the south nave window is twentieth century — but what you see in the low morning light, framed by the churchyard trees with the sun still low and oblique, is a building that belongs to its landscape in a way that the more heavily restored village churches sometimes do not.
The route turned north beyond Guston, through East Langdon and the hamlet of Martin. East Langdon was once written as East Lange Dune — the eastern end of the long down — and the description still fits the topography. Langdon Abbey, a Premonstratensian house founded in 1198 by Sir William de Auberville and dissolved in 1535, lies in the fields between East and West Langdon, its remains absorbed into a later farmhouse. The parish church at East Langdon is dedicated to St Augustine, built in the Norman period and modified in the Early English style, and is described in the county literature as a small unpretending structure of rough flints — a description that manages to be accurate and slightly unfair at the same time. The Four Bells public house takes its name from the four bells in that church tower, and has probably been doing so for the best part of three centuries.
From East Langdon the route continued north-west through Ripple and Little Mongeham. Ripple takes its name from the Old English ripel, meaning a strip of land, and is one of those villages that is more interesting than it appears from the road. The church of St Mary the Virgin was rebuilt in 1861 by the architect Arthur Ashpitel on its original Norman foundations, in a Romanesque style modelled on the church at Barfreston — itself one of the finest examples of Norman carving in England. The rebuilding retained many of the earlier memorials, including one to Field Marshal John French, 1st Earl of Ypres, who is buried in the churchyard. The 1663 pulpit, a post-Puritan replacement in the same neo-Romanesque manner, also survived the rebuilding and remains in the church today.
Little Mongeham is smaller still — a hamlet rather than a village in any working sense, its main buildings being Little Mongeham House and Manor Farm. It was, until 1935, a parish in its own right, with its own rector. The church that served that parish is now a ruin; the foundations can be found just to the south-west of the double bend in Willow Road, which gives some sense of the scale of the settlement's contraction over the centuries. Little Mongeham was historically part of the possessions of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, and the scholar Richard James held the living here from 1629. The name Mongeham itself — from the Old English Mundelingeham, the settlement of Mundel's people — is shared with Great Mongeham to the east, the two having once formed a single manor before the Conquest divided them.
From Shepherdswell the route headed south to Coldred. Shepherdswell is the largest village on the loop, and the one that appears in official documents under a different name entirely. The village is recorded in the Domesday Book as Sibertswalt — Sibert's Wold, named after a Saxon landholder — and the older form Sibertswold has persisted in formal usage long enough that the primary school still carries it. Shepherdswell is a corruption, which arrived gradually and is now permanent. The village sits on a route with considerably older traffic than its current function as a dormitory settlement suggests: the North Downs Way passes through, and in this section it follows the line of the Via Francigena, the medieval pilgrim road that ran from Canterbury south through France and Switzerland to Rome. Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, recorded his journey along the route in 990 AD. The walkers passing through Shepherdswell on a Saturday morning in April are, in this sense, following well-established precedent. The East Kent Railway, whose terminus is at Shepherdswell, was one of the lines built by the light railway engineer Holman Fred Stephens in the early twentieth century, originally running to Wingham; the section as far as Eythorne is now run by a preservation society and carries rather fewer passengers than Stephens had anticipated.
By the time I reached Coldred, the cloud had begun to break and the morning light was becoming more ordinary. Coldred is the kind of village that rewards some investigation. St Pancras Church sits within the outer bailey of a Norman motte and bailey castle — one of only a handful of churches in England in that position — and has been described as a good example of an original early Norman rectangular nave and chancel with no later additions. The village itself had a population of 134 in 1861 and has not grown dramatically since. At the cutting of a road through the old Roman earthwork that still encircles the church, a well was found that descended approximately 300 feet.
Back at the northern end of Singledge Lane, approaching Whitfield from the south through rapeseed fields bright against a now properly blue sky, the 33km objective was more or less accomplished. Moving time was 6 hours 26 minutes across 33.51km, with 403 metres of elevation — undulating rather than severe, the landscape of the east Kent plateau rolling steadily rather than climbing in any dramatic way. Total elapsed time of just over eight hours reflects some time spent with the camera.
The day did not end with the walk. Having arrived home around lunchtime, showered, and briefly contemplated sitting down, I found myself in the passenger seat of a car heading to the Ashford Designer Outlet with Vanessa and Milo. There are worse places to recover from a 33km training walk, particularly when lunch is factored in. The London to Brighton, at that point, felt slightly more achievable than it had at four that morning.
