Just a hop, skip and a jump to Kent for this weekend break
Words & pictures ❚ Helen Stockton
There are times when campervanning involves carefully planned, epic voyages, and times when it offers a spontaneous, sneaky few days away without traveling too far. For us, living in East Sussex, a quick hop over the border into Kent gives a welcome change of scenery without having to clock up the miles behind the wheel.
Kent is in the top 10 of the largest English counties and has a varied landscape, bordering Greater London in the northwest through to the coastal regions in the south, where France can be seen on a clear day, and a visit to the Continent is only a short ferry or shuttle journey away.
Kent can barely be mentioned without the epithet ‘Garden of England’, and while it is indeed stunningly beautiful in many areas, with it being the fifth-most-populous county in England, that garden has a fair amount of hard landscaping in places, too! However, Bearsted, in mid-Kent, offers all the charms of the leafy Kentish countryside, sporting its distinctive oast houses, together with having the historic cities of Maidstone and Canterbury within easy striking distance.
For us, with our two border terriers, Teddy, and appropriately given our location, Bear, accompanying us, our excursions tend towards those venues that welcome our canine companions as well as us, so our first outing was to Bearsted Woodland Trust. This is about 15 minutes’ walk from the Bearsted Caravan and Motorhome Club site, where we were staying for three nights.
Bearsted Woodland Trust offers approximately 26 acres of mixed woodland and meadow with, unsurprisingly, some spectacular old trees, providing a reminder of the times when this part of the world was swathed in native woodland. There are some senior oak trees that have stood sentinel across the centuries as well as areas of new planting, with helpful plaques to help with identification.
The paths are broad and level, offering inclusive access, and, while the maintenance is largely volunteer led, the woodland is well-managed and thriving. This is reflected by the fact that, since 2011, the woodland has been the holder of a Green Flag Award, which celebrates excellence in community-led green spaces across the UK.
Even trees that have succumbed to the forces of the natural elements are turned into features; one 300-year-old specimen, felled by stormy weather in 2014, had owls carved into the top of its split trunk, with another tree trunk morphing into a rearing horse. These provide an imaginative addition t
