Kent
The Shape of It
A county with two halves, two cathedrals, and one cliff that the whole world knows.
The name Kent is older than almost any other English county name — possibly older than England itself. A Greek sailor navigating the Channel around the fourth century BC recorded the people here as the Cantii, and so they have been ever since, more or less. Julius Caesar landed twice, in 55 BC and 54 BC. He was not impressed by the first attempt and came back better prepared. Not everyone appreciated this.
The River Medway cuts the county in two, and this division has mattered for more than a thousand years. Those born east of the Medway are Men of Kent; those born west are Kentish Men. Women are Maids of Kent and Kentish Maids accordingly. There is an Association with branches across the county devoted to maintaining this distinction, which tells you something about Kent.
The county has two Anglican cathedrals: Canterbury, founded in 597 AD, and Rochester, founded just six years later in 603. Nowhere else in England has two. The reason is historical: the Medway once divided two early kingdoms, East and West Kent, and each acquired its own bishop. The kingdoms merged but the bishops stayed.
Romney Marsh, in the south-east, is a world apart. Ten feet above sea level on a good day, reclaimed from the sea through centuries of patient work, it has its own microclimate, its own sheep (the Romney, naturally), and a reputation for mists, solitude, and smugglers that it has done nothing to discourage. The Aldington Gang operated here through the early nineteenth century with a thoroughness that embarrassed the Customs service considerably.
The North Downs run east to west across the county, chalk downland that breaks at the coast into the White Cliffs of Dover. These are not merely picturesque: the chalk continues under the Channel and reappears in France, making the cliffs a geological handshake between two countries that have spent a great deal of history disagreeing. Below Dover Castle, a labyrinth of tunnels runs through the chalk, some of them medieval, some Napoleonic, some dug in 1940 and used to coordinate the Dunkirk evacuation. The castle has been described, with only slight exaggeration, as the key of England.
Dungeness, in the county’s south-east corner, is one of the largest expanses of shingle in Europe and is sometimes described as England’s only desert, on account of its low rainfall and sparse vegetation. It has two lighthouses, a nuclear power station, and was home to the garden of the filmmaker Derek Jarman, who grew things there that by rights had no business growing.
Notable Folk
A county that has quietly produced several people the world cannot do without, and then largely forgotten them.
The Kentish Tongue
A vocabulary assembled over centuries, most of it now gone, some of it irreplaceable.
In 1888, the Reverend W.D. Parish and W.F. Shaw published A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms, which ran to several hundred entries and preserved a way of speaking that was already vanishing. True Kentish dialect survived longest in the Weald, in East Kent, and in small communities that saw no reason to talk like anyone else. The following are genuine entries.
The East Kent man, noted Parish and Shaw, was not fond of strangers, called any newcomer to the village a “furriner,” and pronounced their names as he pleased. The dictionary’s introduction adds that he was also apt to invent words of his own and resist any that came from elsewhere. This may explain why the dialect is no longer in general use.
Place Names
Names accumulated across two thousand years of successive occupation, and some that defy explanation.
Loose is a village near Maidstone, properly pronounced to rhyme with goose. It sits in a wooded valley beside a stream and has been continuously inhabited for well over a thousand years. Its name has nothing to do with its current meaning in standard English; it derives from an Old English word for a pigsty or enclosure, which is arguably worse.
Sandwich, the town, predates the sandwich, the food, by about eight hundred years. The name means something like “sandy harbour” in Old English. The harbour has long since silted up, and the town now sits two miles inland from the sea it once served. The fourth Earl of Sandwich, who gave his name to the snack, was born in the family seat at Hinchinbrooke in Huntingdonshire and had no particularly close connection to the town whose name he bore. Whether he knew this is not recorded.
Fordwich, near Canterbury, is said to be the smallest town in Britain with its own town council — a designation confirmed in the 1993 Guinness Book of Records. Its population at the last count was around three hundred. It was once Canterbury’s harbour, when the River Stour ran deeper, and had its own court for crimes committed on the river. The town’s council still meets in a timber-framed guildhall that dates from the early sixteenth century.
Wrotham and Trottiscliffe are two of Kent’s better-known traps for strangers. Wrotham is Rootam; Trottiscliffe is Trosley. This is not perversity on Kent’s part but a record of centuries of pronunciation drifting away from spelling, which stayed put. The county has several more. Meopham is Meppam. Smarden is often Smardn. Non-locals are quietly assessed by their willingness to ask.
The Isle of Sheppey means, in Old English, the island of sheep. It remains an island, connected to the mainland by a bridge. Sheep are still raised there. The name has been accurate for at least thirteen hundred years, which is more than can be said for most place names.
At the Table
The Garden of England grew a great deal of food, and a small number of dishes worth knowing.
The Huffkin
A large, flat, soft bread roll, about six inches across and an inch thick, with a deep thumbprint in the centre. What distinguishes a huffkin from a bap or a teacake is the indentation, the slow rise, and the wrapping in a cloth after baking to keep the crust soft. The dimple, tradition says, was put there to hold a pitted cherry.
There are two stories about the thumbprint. The first is practical: Kent grew cherries, Londoners came to pick them each summer, and the baker’s wife made rolls in which a cherry could sit without rolling. The second story involves a baker’s wife in a fury, who pressed her thumb into every roll her husband had made to ruin them, then dared him to sell the spoiled goods. He did. People wanted more. Both stories may be true simultaneously, which is how the best culinary legends work.
The huffkin is still made by a handful of Kentish bakers. It is served with bacon, or cherry jam and cream, or in pubs with a ploughman’s lunch. The name is a Dickensian delight that the county has done very little to trade on.
Gypsy tart is a Kentish institution: a pastry shell filled with a mixture of evaporated milk and dark muscovado sugar, whipped together until pale and mousse-like, then baked. The result is intensely sweet and has a consistency unlike any other English tart. It is, according to several generations of Kentish schoolchildren, the finest thing ever to appear on a school dinner menu. The origin story involves an elderly woman near Leysdown who saw Romani children playing hungrily in a field, checked her larder for what little she had, and improvised. Whether this is true or not, the tart is entirely Kentish and almost unknown anywhere else.
Whitstable has been famous for its oysters since before the Romans arrived — who arrived partly because of the oysters, having tasted them in Gaul and decided they needed to know the source. Native oysters were farmed in the estuary for centuries; the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company, established formally in 1793, is one of the oldest surviving fishing companies in the country. Oysters were once cheap food for working people; it was refrigeration and over-fishing that made them expensive, not any change in the oyster.
The cobnut is a cultivated form of hazelnut developed in Kent, where over seven thousand acres of cobnut orchards existed in 1913. The crop is harvested in late summer in its own green husk, before the nut dries and darkens, which gives it a milky, delicate flavour quite different from a standard hazelnut. Numbers have fallen sharply, but Kentish cobnuts are still grown, still sold at farm shops in August and September, and still used in the county’s cooking. They are one of the things that genuinely cannot be replicated outside Kent.
The Biddenden Cake deserves a mention, though it is more ceremony than food. Made of flour and water in a mould bearing the image of two women joined at the hip and shoulder, these hard biscuits have been distributed at Easter in the village of Biddenden for centuries. The women depicted are Eliza and Mary Chulkhurst, said to have been conjoined twins born in the twelfth century who died within hours of each other aged thirty-four and left land to the village to provide for the poor. The cakes are not entirely edible. They are kept, framed, and understood as objects.
Customs & Laws
A county that negotiated its own terms with every invader, and largely got them.
In most of England, the eldest son inherited everything. In Kent, land was divided equally among all sons — a system called gavelkind, derived from an Old English word for tribute or rent. It survived the Norman Conquest, when primogeniture became the law everywhere else, reportedly because William the Conqueror granted the custom to Kent in return for peaceful submission. Scholars now treat this origin story with polite scepticism, but the custom itself is real: until 1925, all land in Kent was presumed by law to be held under gavelkind unless proven otherwise. Under gavelkind, a widow kept half her husband’s land, a man convicted of felony did not forfeit his estate, and a boy could sell his land at fifteen. Elsewhere in England these would have been remarkable privileges. In Kent they were simply normal.
On the village green at Offham, near West Malling, stands a wooden post with a pivoting crossbar — one arm bearing a target, the other a weighted sandbag. This is a quintain, a jousting training device used by knights to practise striking a target at full gallop. Offham’s quintain is believed to be the only surviving medieval quintain still standing in its original location in England. It looks like a strange lamp post to the uninitiated, which may be why it has survived.
From the mid-nineteenth century until mechanisation ended the practice in the 1960s, tens of thousands of East Londoners — families, children, whole streets — came to Kent each September to harvest hops. They called it their annual holiday. They slept in farm huts, cooked over open fires, and worked for a few weeks picking into large baskets called bins. The money was secondary for many families; the escape from the city was the point. Communities that had never left London spent several weeks in Kentish countryside each year, and brought East End customs into contact with Kentish ones. The villages around Maidstone, Tonbridge, and Faversham were transformed each autumn. It ended not because anyone wanted it to but because machines arrived that did the work in a day.
The River Medway is the boundary. Born east of it, you are a Man of Kent (or Maid of Kent). Born west, you are a Kentish Man (or Kentish Maid). The distinction traces to the early Anglo-Saxon period, when Jutes settled east of the Medway and Saxons west, and has been maintained with varying degrees of seriousness ever since. There is an Association of Men of Kent and Kentish Men with branches across the county. Their motto, shared with Kent generally, is Invicta — Unconquered. The legend behind this is that when William the Conqueror marched on Kent after Hastings, the men of the county met him bearing branches of trees in an advancing forest. William, perhaps remembering what happened at Birnam Wood in the Scottish play, negotiated rather than fought.
Did You Know?
A selection of facts in the “wait, really?” format, for use at any available occasion.
- That Pocahontas is buried in Gravesend? She had come to England in 1616 with her husband John Rolfe and was something of a celebrity in London society. In March 1617, having embarked at Gravesend to return home, she became too ill to continue and was brought ashore. She died there, aged around twenty-one, and was buried at St George’s Church. Her exact grave is unknown because the church was destroyed by fire in 1727.
- That Fordwich, near Canterbury, may be the smallest town in Britain with a functioning town council? Its population is around three hundred. Its guildhall dates to the early sixteenth century and still stands beside the river. The town once had the right to execute criminals by drowning — a method reserved for those convicted of crimes on the Stour.
- That the oldest known horse fossil in the world was found at Herne Bay in 1838? The fragments of skull have been dated to around 54 million years ago. Herne Bay’s current promotional material does not foreground this as much as it might.
- That the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, known as the Crab and Winkle Line and opened in May 1830, is believed to be the first railway in Britain to carry fare-paying passengers on a regular timetable? It used a stationary steam engine to haul trains up the gradient out of Canterbury, and gravity to bring them back. It closed in 1952 and is now a cycle path.
- That the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office was made in Chatham Dockyard? HMS Resolute had been abandoned in the Arctic during a search for John Franklin’s lost expedition, recovered by American whalers, and returned to Britain. When the ship was decommissioned, Queen Victoria had a desk made from its timbers and presented it to President Hayes in 1880 as a gesture of goodwill. Most American presidents since have used it.
- That John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps in Kent in 1914 while bedridden with a duodenal ulcer? He later explained that he had invented the novel partly to take his mind off the pain. He took the title from the seventy-eight steps from the villa to the beach at North Foreland, then halved it for reasons he never explained. The steps do not survive.
- That Ian Fleming wrote much of the James Bond series at his house at St Margaret’s Bay, near Dover? He called the house “White Cliffs” and spent time there between writing sessions playing golf on the local links. The Kentish setting did not often appear in the books, but several biographers have noted that the chalk cliffs visible from his window appeared in his dreams.
- That Shepherd Neame, in Faversham, is the oldest working brewery in Britain, having brewed on the same site continuously since at least 1698? The brewery draws water from its own artesian well and uses locally-grown Kentish hops. It has been through plague, fire, war, and several changes of ownership, and is still making beer.
- That Britain’s first motor show took place not in London but at the agricultural showground in Tunbridge Wells in October 1895? The Horseless Carriage Exhibition predated the London show by less than a year. Tunbridge Wells has not allowed this fact to define its identity.
- That Stephen Gray, a Canterbury dyer’s son, demonstrated in 1729 that electricity could be transmitted along a thread? He strung a boy horizontally from the ceiling of a room on silk cords, brought a charged glass tube near one end, and showed that the boy’s face could attract feathers at the other end — proving that the electrical “virtue” had travelled the length of his body. This was the first demonstration of electrical conduction. Gray won the Copley Medal and died in a charity house.
- That John Wallis, born in Ashford in 1616, invented the symbol ∞ for infinity? He introduced it in a 1655 treatise on conic sections. Before Wallis, there was no standard way to write the concept. He also contributed substantially to what became calculus, worked as a military codebreaker for Parliament, and wrote on music theory, theology, and English grammar. He was ordained as a minister.
- That Laurel and Hardy officially opened the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway in 1947? The line runs fifteen miles across Romney Marsh on one-third scale track and is still in operation. Stan Laurel drove the locomotive. Whether he managed it without incident is not recorded.
- That Henry VIII, having eaten cherries in Flanders, ordered the first cherry orchard planted in England on land near Teynham in Kent? He is said to have called Kent the Garden of England on account of the fruit it produced. The county has been living up to this name, with varying enthusiasm, for nearly five hundred years.
- That the word “sandwich” may owe its existence to the fourth Earl of Sandwich’s unwillingness to leave a card game? The Earl, reputedly, asked his servants to bring him meat between slices of bread so he could eat without putting down his hand. His fellow gamblers began ordering “the same as Sandwich.” The town of Sandwich, from which the family took its title, had been providing harbour services for several centuries before anyone thought to name a food after it.
- That Kent is the only county in England with two Anglican cathedrals — Canterbury, founded in 597 AD, and Rochester, founded in 603? The reason is that the county was once divided between two kingdoms, each with its own bishop. The kingdoms merged; the bishops did not.
- That the Biddenden Maids — Eliza and Mary Chulkhurst, conjoined twins said to have been born in 1100 — bequeathed land to the parish of Biddenden on their deaths, the income from which was to provide bread, cheese, and beer for the poor each Easter? The custom continues, though the beer has long been replaced by tea and the biscuits made in the image of the twins are now mainly kept as souvenirs. The bequest has been running for approximately nine hundred years.
This page draws on original research, 2025, with material from: W.D. Parish and W.F. Shaw, A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms (1888); Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (1778–1799); William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1576); and local and county histories too various to enumerate. The selection, arrangement, and editorial commentary are a later hand’s. All errors of emphasis are ours; all genuine curiosities belong to Kent.