Penshurst Place is one the finest manor houses in England; it sits in the heart of the Weald at the confluence of the Rivers Medway and Eden, surrounded by wooded hills and ridges. On a fine autumn day, the house and the grounds look like something out of an 18th or 19th century painting.
Tag: River Medway
Upnor and the River Medway
The narrow high street at Upnor drops down the hill to the edge of the Medway; the street today is a smart rendition of Dickensian England with weatherboard houses and fine pubs. Chatham, just upstream across the river, was the Royal Navy’s principal dockyard and the little town, that was built around the old, riverside…
West Kent
A male barn owl is hunting through to mid-morning over a rough pasture field near Bough Beech reservoir. The bird keeps up an effortless round low over the ground on elegant long wings with an occasional sudden but fruitless stoop into the sward. Then a brief stop on a branch of one of the huge…
East is East…Shellness and Sheerness
From the sea wall on the Isle of Grain, the Port of Sheerness is an unbroken strip of trade and industry between the gun metal Medway and the brilliant blue sky. The Grain Tower, once the principal defence for the Medway ports, squats in the shallow estuary like an old, broken barrel. The high tide takes it…