The Landscape of the English Part of the Via Francigena Oliver Rackham Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
The Straits of Dover are thought to have been formed three glaciations ago (about 400,000 years) by the sudden collapse of an ice dam which held back a glacial lake to the north-east. The contents of the lake suddenly rushed out, tearing a gap in the chalk ridge between the white cliffs of Dover and the white cliffs of Cap Blanc Nez.
The White Cliffs of Dover are still recent in geological time and rather abrupt.
Dover Castle was in military use for well over 2000 years, from the Iron Age to the Cold War.
On the highest point of Dover Castle is a Byzantine church, and uncomfortably close to it is one of the two surviving Roman lighthouses in Europe.
Dover town is in the valley between Dover Castle and a second fort, known as the Western Heights, also in use from the Iron Age to the 20th century.
East Kent with Roman roads and ports for France in red. Note the different landscapes either side of the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Dover. Squares are 1 km.
Landscapes between Canterbury (top left) and Dover (bottom right). The road connecting them forms a boundary between the light-coloured chalklands (to northeast) and the green clay-with-flints country (to south-west).
Detail of East Kent landscape: area 15 x 10 km. The Via Francigena (Roman road) folllows the divide between the mainly medieval landscape to the west and the mainly Iron Age landscape to the east. The Iron Age landscape is overlain by the remains of the Kent coal mines (1890 1989).
Most of the country-villa parks in East Kent may be 18th or 19th century, but the one at Fredville contains many much older trees.
The oak called Majesty at Fredville; it has been a famous ancient tree for 220 years.
The huge barn at Littlebourne, Kent, built by the monks of St Augustine s Abbey in the 14th cent. 1998 98/46
Canterbury was a holy city long before St Thomas the Archbishop was murdered there in 1170. The Canterbury Gospels is a Roman book brought to Canterbury by St Augustine of Canterbury in the year 597. In the middle ages it was regarded as a holy relic. It is now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Every new Archbishop of Canterbury swears his oath of office on the Canterbury Gospel book.
Canterbury was a Roman city of the first century AD. Its presumed predecessors were two Iron Age hillforts in the Blean, the ring of woods around Canterbury. Presumably the Blean woods were not so extensive then as they are now.
Medieval pilgrims setting out from London to Canterbury, as Blake (the eccentric artist and poet) imagined them in 1810.
The last danger for pilgrims from London to Canterbury was passing through the Blean, the great arc of woodland surrounding Canterbury on the north-west.
The Battle of Bossenden Wood, the last battle on British soil, was fought in the Blean in 1838 between followers of Sir William Courtenay, who thought he was the Messiah, and soldiers of the 45th Regiment of Foot.
The Blean is still a wild and little-known place. A major antiquity the Iron Age hillfort of Homestall Wood was discovered only in about 2006. Here it is in a LIDAR image: a form of radar that looks through the trees to see the ground surface.
The danger was highwaymen... QuickTime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture. QuickTime and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
... and gave rise to a characteristic landscape feature, the roadside clearings made in the middle ages to give pilgrims and secular travellers a sense of security against highwaymen lurking in the bushes.
The West Gate, by which pilgrims from London entered Canterbury city.
Journey s end: Canterbury, as a city both for pilgrims and for secular travellers to France, has massive medieval timber-framed buildings, many of which were inns and hostelries.