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Droveways through the Downs
Picture the scene if you will. You're tootling along the M20 between Ashford and Maidstone one day, when all of a sudden a snaggle toothed witch drops from nowhere on her broomstick, casts a hastily contrived spell involving the vanishing of the M20 and A20 into thin air, and then challenges you to complete the journey using only minor roads. Inconceivable perhaps, but if you've ever tried attempting such a journey you'll realise how exasperating it actually is. For no matter how hard you try to avoid them, most minor roads particularly in the mid Kent Downs and Low Weald show a marked tendency to run across the grain of the county from north east to south west. Study any OS map in detail and you'll notice lanes slicing their way through the Downs and then continuing undeterred in a south west direction seemingly oblivious to any obstacle just like trickles of water drops running down a window pane. In fact to travel east to west in the Downs it is sometimes easier to drop down onto the A2 or A20 and then return to the hills nearer your destination. This strange situation, which has for the most part preserved the remoteness of the Downs, owes itself more to the movement patterns of early Kentish Society rather than a haphazard attempt on the part of a Saxon road builder to link Hastings and Canterbury armed only with a dubious compass, a less than satisfactory training in elementary navigation and the eyesight of a bespectacled bat.
Following the departure of the Romans, early Kentish society (the Jutes) based itself essentially on the practice of moving livestock over long distances between pastures and outlying woodland. This practice sometimes referred to as 'droving' led to the development of droveways to provide routes for people who migrated each summer with their swineherds from settlements north of the Downs to their 'detached' pasture and woodlands in the Weald and Romney Marsh. These wealden 'dens' are still preserved in names of villages such as Biddenden and Marden. The names of the droveways in the Downs have long since disappeared (although some are still locally referred to as 'droves' or 'Drifts'). Today these droves can easily be traces on maps and appear in the Downs as characteristic 'hollow ways' cut down into the chalk over centuries of use to leave narrow twisting routes sometimes as metalled roads although more commonly as long forgotten byways and tracks.
So spare a thought the next time you're travelling in the Downs and count yourself lucky you're not held up by a Jutish swineherd oinking their way into the Weald........
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