fpb | DiaCon diary, day one, part two

II

In recent years I have been more often in central England - especially but not only Oxford - and I have noticed a difference. The road from London to Birmingham, to Southampton, or to Cambridge, is surrounded by open fields, dotted at best by the occasional coppice, rolling over enormous, long, soft inclines of land barely steep enough to be called hills. It is a very domesticable and a very domesticated landscape, largely dedicated to agriculture, with rather less suggestion of anything wild or secret than one would expect of a country famous for the supernatural and for faerie mythology. But Kent is all that. It is not high, but it is hilly and curiously steep, even rugged. Roads, even main roads, sink and vanish in secret little dells, surrounded by hedges so high, wild and ancient as to be very like woods, and by bits of wood so dense and dark as to suggest that they have indeed been there since before the intruder Man. Kent can indeed seem haunted, even in the daytime; here, if not in Oxfordshire, you would have every reason to believe that fairies nest at the bottom of anyone's garden. I began to notice the difference as we were moving away from London: not only the increasingly rugged terrain, but the larger percentage of woodland and even wild, uncultivated grassland - much of which, I noticed, was dense with lavender flowers. Perhaps that was one reason why it was left untouched. Lavender was a valuable plant back in Victorian times, and I am told it's making a comeback now.

Canterbury itself, where I had not been in ten years or more, lies almost hidden in a shallow valley through which the river Stour pushes its silty way to the sea. A thousand years ago, and even more in Roman times, the Stour opened in a great, navigable mouth just downriver from the city, where Sturry and Fordwich now stand, and they were the city's harbour; ahead of them, covering the approaches, lay what is still today called the Isle of Thanet. And indeed it is still in some way an island, since the Stour breaks into two mouths and reaches the sea at either end; but the great mouth, called the Wantsum, that once let ships in - including the ships of Caesar and of St.Augustine - has long since been silted up and turned to fields, and the sea is now approached from the Medway cities, from Dover and Folkestone, or from Brighton.

Coming to Canterbury I became aware of other historical facts. The map will show you that the city has long since overflowed its Roman walls; but the buildings show that this must have happened between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century - the seventeenth at most. The city seems to have completely missed the immense growth spurt that struck most of England, Scotland and Wales in the nineteenth century, and to have only started growing again, and that rather sluggishly, in the twentieth. This means that there is an unusual abundance of old buildings and districts, which must make the town very expensive. (In fact, measuring on the unscientific but convincing test of a portion of doner kebab, prices in Canterbury seem to be considerably higher than those in London - and London is not cheap.) Unfortunately I was soon to find out that this did not preserve this ancient and historic place from the barbarous ravage of the most pestilential of all English forms of lowlife - the property developer. But, again, more on that later.