Day Two

Sunday 11 October – Rye to Tenterden

Leaving Rye by the back door, crossing the railway line and diving off down a footpath which started as a back alley for local houses, I soon reached the countryside, followed my nose and almost immediately go lost. A wrong heading of a few degrees soon left me about half a mile from my intended course.

I should have known that it would happen. I passed a sign asking me to "follow the waymarked path", usually an indication that the waymarks will peter out and leave you in the middle of nowhere. Luckily I realised that the big house on the hill, which I should have left behind my right shoulder, was still doggedly square on to me. I whipped out the Magic Phone, got a GPS grid reference and a compass bearing, and soon recovered the situation.

A well-surfaced green lane, a back road through Peasmarsh and some field paths led me towards a road bridge across the Rother and the border with Kent. While still in East Sussex I avoided a wooden bridge, designed to keep you out of a muddy ditch in wet weather. It was in such a bad condition - missing planks, whole thing at a crazy angle - that a foot of mud would be a better bet.

I passed through Signsville - everywhere I looked, there was a sign telling me to go there, don't go there, keep out, f*** off. Some farmers spend their time and cash putting up these footling signs rather than simply marking the footpaths properly and keeping the stiles in good condition. How many people will be bothered to trespass if walking the legal footpath is the easiest option? - not many, I guess. I strongly suspected that it was Sign Man who had ploughed up the next field, leaving no trace of the footpath across it.

The clouds, which had been fighting the Sun all morning, appeared to be winning the battle as paths across farmland took me to my late lunch stop at Smallhythe Place, a lovely half-timbered cottage best known as the country retreat of actress Dame Ellen Terry. Many a thesp was entertained here in the thirty years she owned the cottage at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and the whole glittering ensemble is celebrated in a display of pictures, mementoes and costumes. These were collected and arranged by Ellen's daughter Edy who, as recently detailed in the National Trust's magazine, lived in a "largely lesbian" community which she had gathered around her at Smallhythe. There is a connection with Sissinghurst (which I had visited the previous day): Vita Sackville-West, chatelaine of Sissinghurst, apparently enjoyed a brief fling with one of Edy's lovers. The barn theatre is still used for performances, and the entrance doubles as a draughty café, where I enjoyed an unbalanced meal of pork pie followed by fruit cake - delicious.

After a rather perfunctory look around the cottage (musing on the fact that any relationship, sexual or otherwise, could hardly remain secret on these creaky floorboards), I walked up the (horrendously busy) main street of Smallhythe, past another half-timbered building with a polite notice in the front garden saying that “this is not Ellen Terry’s cottage”! I soon took to the fields again. Clear and helpful footpath signs reminded me that I that I was now in Kent (he mithers).

Annoyingly, just as I reached the outskirts of Tenterden, tempted to stop and watch a couple of overs of cricket, it started to rain. Misty rain became hard rain, and it lasted as I walked through Tenterden to the now-attached village of St Michael’s. Postponing plans to look for ancestors in the churchyard, I headed straight for the welcoming b&b. I was greeted (with disdain) by a flock of white pigeons or doves. The lady running the b&b told me that some of them had moved in after a neighbouring dovecote had been closed, and she did not know how to get rid of them humanely.