Jane’s Walk 2025 – Day 13
Today, we can reach the start of our walk straight from our Airbnb in Sandwich. The town had a very important history dating back to the seventh century.
Known as ‘the town on a spit of land’, it was the gateway to Europe and was owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who gave ship service to the king. It flourished in its trade of timber export, and King Henry III granted it a licence to hold St Clement’s Fair in 1227, which brought considerable prosperity to the town.
The harbour gradually silted up, but the arrival of the French Huguenots and the Flemish Protestants in the sixteenth century gave it a new lease of life. Many of the gable-ended houses are visible as we walk through the town.
Sandwich is a charming place of narrow streets, medieval houses, flint and stone walls, many with blocked up doorways and large stone churches. It’s probably the most attractive town we have been through on this walk.
We follow the old town wall of the medieval town beside a delightful meadow, which was originally the moat of the town. It has begun to rain steadily, but we decide we don’t mind as we are walking along a charming wooded path with a canopy of trees above us, and the Virgo Spring to our right, and lots of dog walkers hurrying past.
We cross over a bridge where the Virgo Spring meets the Stour. The rain is now coming down torrentially, and within minutes, we are soaked and can hardly see in front of us.
This is hopeless so we make a plan to meet Richard at the nearest road access point about half a mile away. There is no sign of this deluge abating for some time so we return to our accommodation.
With the help of a tumble dryer, including drying the backpacks, we are ready to set off again 2 hours later.
We return to where we left off but the clouds are amassing again and decide it would be crazy to get soaked again where Richard cannot get to us. We decide instead to go to Deal, our end point, and walk backwards as far as we can, weather permitting.
We arrive in Deal and walk along the long well maintained seafront walkway with rows of fine town houses from various dates, standing back from the sea with park in front. All along the parade are hundreds of wooden benches all dedicated to the memory of loved ones. Many with charming messages and poems and with containers holding flowers.
We pass the wooden pier rebuilt after the war and opened by Prince Philip in the early 1950s. The previous one having been removed because of the fear of invasion during WW2.
The fine building of the Royal Marine School of Music is on our left and the memorial bandstand on the parade. This was built as a memorial to the 11 musicians killed and 11 more seriously injured on 22nd September 1989, when the IRA exploded a bomb at the music school.
We continue to walk out of Deal for a further hour before stopping as heavy rain was threatening again.
Before returning to Sandwich for the night we drive to Pegwell Bay where St Augustine of Hippo in AD 597 first landed in England.
A couple of miles further on is the life-size replica of a Viking ship given by the Dutch in 1949 as a memorial of the arrival of the Saxons to the same bay 1500 years previously. It was rowed over by 52 oarsmen to its present site.
The day has been different but an interesting one.
