Working on the imagination

The Isle of Oxney, looking north towards Tenterden

I do not know that any one has ever explained satisfactorily the true source of our attachment to natural objects, or of that soothing emotion which the sight of the country hardly ever fails to infuse into the mind.

Hazlitt “On the Love of the Country”

It is very strange, this pleasure that we get from the countryside – if indeed we do. Many never really see it. A comparative few join rambling groups, but I find that conversation distracts me: to an extent that I cannot myself see the countryside. One of my favourite walks is in the Weald of Kent, from Paddock Wood to Marden, Via Brenchley and Horsmonden. I have walked it some seventeen times or so, over a period of thirty years, in different seasons. If asked why this walk is a perennial favourite, I would say that it is for the variety of its topography, footpaths / bridlepaths, fields, hedgerows, villages – and for an indefinable love of the Weald of Kent and Sussex. If I ask myself, “Do I find it indefinable because I lack the ability to define it?” I would have to say that that is true to a certain extent. I think that I would need to be a poet to do it full justice. However, poets do not write to order, and I would not dream of commissioning a poem: “From Paddock Wood to Marden”. Besides, poet and I would see different things; which would be interesting, but of little help to me. I could try taking a notebook with me, and writing down my impressions. Would that help? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. At the end of this piece I have attempted a description of something unique (to me, at least) experienced on this walk. And that, I suppose, is the point: that experience is the subject of this essay, and the walk the circumstance that made it possible. It needs a short preamble.

If there is anything that particularly ‘grounds’ and defines a walk, I think that it is its topography; and I find a peculiar – in the less common usage of that word – pleasure and satisfaction in traversing a walk with this aspect at the front of my mind. And if I simplify my Wealden walk – ignoring incidental dips and other geological happenstances – then it broadly follows this pattern: From Paddock Wood to Brenchley there is a climb due south: 50 to 300 feet; From Brenchley to Horsmonden there is a fairly even ridge due east, with an overall gentle downward slope: 300 to 197 feet; From Horsmonden there is a further gentle downward slope, due east to Mount Easy on the edge of the valley of the Lesser Teise: 197 to 24 feet. The path then turns north and follows the Teise valley, until taking a right (east) turn towards Cornwells Farm. A small wood marks a slight change in the path’s direction before it begins a gentle climb through an orchard and then across a field that leads towards the farm. (This small wood is densely carpeted with bluebells in the spring, and so strong is the blueing of the wood’s ground that it gives the impression of being illuminated.) And something quite remarkable has happened on two separate occasions as I have climbed the gentle slope through the orchard, and reached the gap in the hedge which leads into the field – on the 35 foot contour. The weather conditions on the two days were notably similar – if not to all intents and purposes the same: the sun was shining, and an unusually steady cool wind was blowing from the east. And what could I smell on this wind? The unmistakable tang of seawater! Thinking about this, I realised that between where I was standing and the coast of the eastern side of Romney Marsh, there were no significant barriers. And yet, was it the sea that I smelt? On the second occasion, I was lucky to find a farmer from Cornwells Farm in the very field where the smell was – to me at least – very strong. And yet the farmer seemed not to have noticed it, and could come up with no explanation. This was disappointing, and I can only assume that there was something else in the vicinity that the farmer had become used to, but was not sea salt on the wind. Nevertheless, nothing could take away from my first experience: the exciting notion that the Channel air had reached some 25 miles inland, carried on one of the steadiest winds I ever remember experiencing.