North Downs Way - Cuxton to Boxley

Saturday 11th July, and as ever on a Ken-organised walk - and despite some cloudy days earlier in the week - Saturday was fine and dry!  It took a little navigation around Woolwich Station to find the right platform for the journey south east but once we reached Cuxton and the Medway Estuary things got going nicely.  

The first part of the walk up the hill in a spiral from Cuxton Station was quite different from what was just ahead.  The Medway bridges - which cross the M2 motorway, the river itself and the HS1 railway line - gave us a good idea of just what an important route the river forms out to the Thames estuary. Apart from being very noisy, the road bridge across the river is quite safe and provides terrific views along the river valley. The HS1, or Channel Tunnel line as it is better known, inspired a game of 'spot the train' coming out of tunnels. However promising the idea of a photo of this was, the trains themselves are so quick you would be lucky to get more than just a blur as they thunder past on their way to Dover.

Once past all of this modern life though, the scenery really goes backwards in time. Behind us as we ascended the hill from the railway line sits the town of Borstal, made infamous as the location of a young offenders institute since 1908. The prison has undergone a name change in recent times but the association hasn't really gone away. The path took on the familiar chalk look of the Downs and we had a much more peaceful walk on our way up to the lunch stop at Bluebell Hill, sitting on the edge of a ridge with views right across the estuary: miles of open space!

Down the hill a short distance and nipping through a gap in the hedge, we came across Kit's Coty House - a rectangular stone chamber that once formed the opening to an ancient burial mound, constructed around 5,000 years ago.  A this point the North Downs Way joins with the Pilgrims Way, the ancient route to Canterbury. The path was mostly under an arch of greenery and deeply engraved into the chalk of the Downs by hundreds of pairs of feet. It didn't take much of a leap of the imagination to see ourselves as fellow foot-travellers making our way along this ancient route, just as the pilgrims had before us.

The advice of fellow travellers should always be heeded, and when we turned off the track by a very interesting carving of a sleeping man, a man going in the opposite direction said - with more than a hint of warning - "Oh you are going up the steps....".  Yes we were, and how right he was; a long steep climb up many steps did indeed follow! Luckily once we were up we were up and stayed there for the next couple of miles. What we didn't expect at the end though was the path to disappear and to have to take the road down the hill. Exercising great caution and with Trevor on traffic monitoring duties up front (also having tried and had to abort a path labelled as a bridle path but which an athletic mouse might have had trouble negotiating) we eventually made it down the hill and into Boxley and the pub for a reviver. From here it was a bus ride into Maidstone where again we had some help from a very nice lady in the village who - no doubt charmed by Ken and Fred's good manners - brought us a bus timetable from her house. We didn't have to wait too long for our transport back towards the station and the end of this leg of the journey.

Sue C. 3rd August 2015