Day Thirteen

Bear with me on this one. I am trying to get all sorts of jobs underway, but repeatedly find that, in order to make progress, I am having to journey through time.

Elham is first mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon Charter of 855 AD, and later in the Domesday Book of 1086. Evidence of neolithic occupation includes hand-axes and flint scrapers. There are Bronze Age remains, including tumuli; Roman coins and pottery; and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in neighbouring Lyminge. St Mary's church dates from 1200; the market square dates from 1251; a large Tudor building greets people who alight buses from Folkestone. All that said, the village emanates a strong sense of the nineteenth century. The population of Elham in 1881 was 1,192, and today, 140 years later, it is 1,465. A railway, the Elham Valley Line, ran from Canterbury to Folkestone between 1887 and 1947, with a station at Elham, but the first world war closed the line after which significant passenger traffic never returned. Elham had its own brick works, a chalk pit, a ropery and two windmills: the district was largely economically self-sufficient. Cherry Gardens and Cherry Tree Lane point to former orchards

As well as the Anglican church, Elham also has a Methodist church, a village hall, a primary school, a GP surgery, two pubs, a restaurant, a tea room, an estate agents, and a very small shop. A pub, a bookshop and an antique shop all closed down in recent years. The smallest post office imaginable is hosted a few days each week in the King's Arms, and a mobile library visits Elham for twenty minutes every Thursday morning.

Looked at from a different standpoint, the nearest (expensive) petrol is 4.5 miles away, the nearest (cheaper) petrol is 6.5 miles away; the nearest supermarket is also 6.5 miles away; the nearest shopping centre (Folkestone), including banks, is 8 miles away; the nearest cinema for us (Canterbury) is 12 miles away. The nearest railway stations are in Folkestone and Canterbury. We have to buy heating oil because Elham is not on the natural gas network. There is no cable broadband, and the BT broadband signal fluctuates wildly. BBC radio signals are poor. There is no Vodafone signal at all, and the O2 signal is patchy. Elham is due east from Gatwick airport, and every evening a huge number of jet planes overfly on their way to continental Europe and the Middle East.

It seems that we have chosen to live in a place that, despite witnessing the aerial dog-fights of the Battle of Britain, has avoided many of the ravages of  the twentieth century, but as a consequence has been substantially by-passed, and is now something of a little world of its own. I am reminded variously of Brigadoon, The Shire and the Island of Sodor. Whilst both attractive and desirable, perhaps there is something a little unrealistic about living in a place that has a kennels for the local fox hunt, but very few of the features of twenty-first century life in an economically- and technologically-developed country.