Road to Home 2022 Day 24: Abbey Wood - Horton Kirby

24 km

There was only one Road; it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings 

After breakfast my hosts Alison and Ian walked with me to London Bridge railway station and I caught a train back to Abbey Wood, the station where we left off walking together yesterday. We said goodbye, and arrivederci, as they will be setting off in about a month's time to walk from London to Rome again, but by a different route than in 2017, and I hope to see them and host them in Italy!

I started walking at Abbey Wood Station and soon came to the ruins of Lesnes Abbey. Founded in 1178 by one Richard de Luci, Chief Justicar of England (a position similar to that of a modern-day Prime Minister), most likely as penance for his involvement the murder  of Archbishop Thomas Beckett in Canterbury in 1170, like the other English monasteries it was closed by King Henry VII and subsequently fell into ruin.

In front of the ruins stands an ancient mulberry tree, quite possibly a descendant of one of the 10,000 original trees brought to England by King James I as part of a misguided plan to set up a silk industry in the country: the king mistakenly purchased black mulberry trees, when silkworms will actually only feed on white mulberries! 

Leaving Lesnes Abbey, I joined the Green Chain Walk, which soon brought me back to the Thames, in a marshy landscape of mud flats that reminded me of the opening scene in Great Expectations. 

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.

I followed the river's south bank for a short way before leaving it to pass by a metals recycling facility and through an industrial estate. The Thames Path soon left the road to continue along the flood embankment of the Thames, with salt marshes, mud flats and the river to the left and a series of small industries to the right, most of which had to do with reclamation and recycling of various materials. 

I came to the spot where the River Darent flows into the Thames, where an information panel reported that between the 1880s and 1903 there were three floating smallpox hospitals moored at this site. In the distance I could see the QE2 Bridge, carrying the M25 across the Thames, one of the world's longest cable-stayed spans in the world at the time of its construction in 1991 (main span 450 metres, according to another of the information panels along the path). 

I left the Thames to continue meandering its way down to the sea on its own, and turned along the left bank of the Darent River, known as Dartford Creek in this final stretch before it flows into the Thames. The Dartford Creek barrier appeared before me, part of the system of flood defences which, along with the Thames Barrier, protect the low-lying London area against surging flood tides. 

I followed the Darent River to Dartford (originally Darent Ford, meaning place to cross the Darent River) via another industrial zone folliwed by a footpath into the town centre, where I stopped for a lunch of poached eggs and avocado on toast in the very pleasant tea room at Holy Trinity Church. 

I left Dartford through a beautiful park and followed the Darent Valley Path along the river, which was much prettier now that I was upstream of the mud flats. 

And the still Darent, in whose waters cleane

Ten thousand fishes play

- Edmund Spenser (1586)

I passed through the villages of Darenth and South Darenth, where I stopped to buy some food supplies to take to my airbnb in the next village, Horton Kirby. The village was simply Horton until the last descendant of the Norman family that once held the local castle married a Kirby. The castle had been built for Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who arrived in England with his half-brother William the Conqueror in 1066.

My castle chamber for the evening was a beautiful blue room on the top floor of a house on the outskirts of the village, directly on my route! I told Karen, the friendly lady who offers this and another double room in her impeccably decorated home for rent, that she ought to be included in the list of pilgrim accomodations for the London to Canterbury branch of the Pilgrims' Way, or North Downs Way, as it is also known. This is a route that may not be exactly bursting with walkers, but it is a known and used pilgrimage route, and in fact when I asked the ladies in the cafe at Dartford church for a stamp in my pilgrim passport, they knew precisely what I was talking about. They didn't actually have one, but one of them offered to sign it instead. That's a good start!