We returned to Shoreham by the back route, avoiding Seven-oaks. It was important, we felt, to make the sideways link with the M25. On the day of that first expedition, with Kevin and Marc, we had walked the Darent Valley like a ditch — seeing trains, but having to imagine the motorway.
Driving out of London towards the coast, you might notice a traffic-monitoring camera on a pole sticking out of woodland, just after Junction 4. That was our marker. To the west of Shoreham you climb steeply; the village tidies itself away, leaving the church spire. You come up alongside the chalk cross, mentioned on the war memorial by the river. After the first ascent, through Meenfield Wood, you hear the chant of the M25. Intimations of civilisation.
Down across fields to Timberden Bottom, then another brief ascent to the tunnel under the motorway. Shivering against a five-barred gate is a dying animal, a sheep covered in flies. There are no shepherds, few farms. Renchi sets off to find a human who might be interested in the loss of his investment. Empty houses, barking dogs: no resolution. A mascara of black insects outlines the sheep’s blank stare, the white rubber eyes. They feed on dead sight.
Renchi is being slightly mysterious about our destination: Badger’s Mount (which is depicted on the OS map as an enclosure of spiked huts). When we emerge on the west side, the motorway is still with us, visible through the woods. We are back inside the hoop. We circumnavigate Badger’s Mount, which is indeed an enigma, coy about its attractions. The perimeter is a wilderness of impenetrable scrub, low fences woven in, piss-off signs (courtesy of MOD).
A fortnight after the World Trade Center attack, paranoia is justified; it sings. Now I remember a postcard Renchi sent, after the first Shoreham walk, that said:
In Cambridge I dug again for anecdotal reference to unblock the blank disguise of the North Downs and discovered there was an Earth Tremor in Westerham in the 18th century that shook buildings and caused more than a ripple on the pond. Sadly the earth did not open quite wide enough to swallow two of their local heroes…
Another angle came from a friend’s brother’s partner’s nephew who worked for a defence contract at Fort Halstead (not on the map but near the M25 near Otford) with computer company LOGICA.
The village we were approaching was Halstead, ribbon-development filling a fork in the road. Why should such a place, where you might meet a traffic cop having a tea break, boast of a substantial ‘Police Office’? And nothing else: beyond ‘Church, remains of’, Old Rectory and pub.
Politically sensitive forensic investigations, Renchi had heard. Fragments bagged when the bombers hit the City or Docklands. Badger’s Mount to Fort Halstead: the story of the motorway circuit, of England. His instinct about this site was confirmed by the presence of sanctioned woodland (the sort that reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock, sylvan backdrops hovering at the margin of disbelief). Here, once again, was that Epping Forest mix: trails for the disadvantaged, bird cards — and bunkers where the police gun down cut-out terrorists. Check in at the hut, pick up a leaflet: Orchid Walk, Owl Walk, Lizard Walk. (‘The Lizard walk is also available in a large printed booklet for the visually impaired.’) Obey the rules: ‘Continue through the kissing gate, here the woods open up to shrub land. Turn a quarter right towards the bottom of the valley and continue up the other side to a concrete stile.’
Ecology and secrecy. Fort Halstead is a green fort. Tony Sangwine, the motorway horticulturalist, began with the MOD. First, a protective curtain of greenery. Then creative planting to improve the quality of life for the mole people, the Official Secrets mob. Whoever laid out Fort Halstead did a good job. Scrub, thorn and thicket at the rim, then tall trees and low buildings (after the fashion of the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey). You don’t see the barbed wire and the swivelling CCTV cameras — until you make the initial penetration, until it’s too late.
An off-road vehicle with official markings tracks us, all the way from the roundabout, keeping its distance. There is only one entrance to the Fort. A long driveway, screened on both sides, leading to a set of gates. The police vehicle parks itself by the gates. No challenge, nothing said. I’m not taking out my Sony DV. I’m not risking an out-of-focus snap. A quick Palmer doodle from Renchi would summon a snatch squad. It’s all for our own good, of course. To preserve democracy and the free world. If we’ve learnt anything on our tramp, it’s this: Blake was right. Energy can only be understood as a system of contraries, polarities, oppositions: Fort Halstead mirrored, across the M25, by Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham. Palmer at Underriver working in pen and ink to counter Churchill’s splashy Chartwell oils. The world is kept in balance, the wheel spins. Blake was wise enough to journey in his imagination: ‘over trembling Thames to Shooters’ Hill and thence to Blackheath, the dark Woof. Fort Halstead, surrounded by orchids and lizards and owls, was the kennel of that Woof.
7
After Shoreham, going north, the fields are damp, footpaths puddled. Patterns of mud combed by tyre tracks. Crisscrossing lines: a desert seen from space. Flinty ground between diminishing avenues of herbs. A low, featureless sky. Everything drips and drags. We have to pull our boots from the suck of clay.
Marc and Kevin, allied by height, by philosophies of the camera, drift back: in conversation. Equestrian tackle is hung, drying, from metal gates. Horse-heads nudge over fences. Not a day for riding.
The approved walk is an illustrated book, better read than experienced. The post-Shoreham landscape is Italian, predicated on an assumption of sunlight. Lulhngstone, tight to the A225, has its castle, lake and Roman villa. Therefore: kids. Teachers, buses.
The villa is kept, for its own protection, inside a shed. ‘Is this a post office?’ one of the children asks. Ghost voices inside the hangar come from audio commentaries. Curators enjoy their Gladiator moment. The river path colludes; farm, fertile valley — with no visible obstruction to contradict the mood, no unsightly industry.
Wildlife display panels are trailers for shy birds who dip and flutter and disappear. Willow and alder and dark oak guide us through Lullingstone Park (golf and deer). We are experiencing hop country from which the hoppers have been banished (the last London hop trains stopped in 1960). Now hopping is mechanical.
Red brick memory-mansions. The gatehouse of Lullingstone Castle has its Union flag (just like a Barratt estate). A taller standard is topped with a model Spitfire. House and grounds are open to the public (FINAL SEASON!). The parish church of St Botolph’s, within the castle grounds, boasts of its noble dead, the landowners: the Peche and Hart Dyke families (with their Tudor pedigrees).
By the village of Eynsford — approaching the mysteries of Junction 3, the Swanley Interchange — walkers are in deniaclass="underline" there is no M25. We are outside the circuit, playing at a Kentish country ramble. Looking for kingfishers, appreciating fields where grain and vegetables were produced for export to Derenti Vadum (aka Dartford), Durobrivae (Rochester), Londinium. Nothing happened between the Romans and the Tudors, between Samuel Palmer and Pop Larkin. No TV explainer has appeared with a convincing narrative.
South London villains, economic immigrants (of the better sort), like the pedigree: the bleach and polish of these hamlets. The history. The elbow-room. The motorway at the bottom of the lane. Houses can be any colour you fancy — so long as they’re white (black beams permitted on pubs). My golfing umbrella, the only gaudy splash in the landscape, comes into its own. The road at the ford is flooded to the depth of about a foot (according to the measure by the bridge).