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City & Village Tours: 0208 692 1133
I spend many of my weekends on the Romney Marsh
and over the years I’ve spent a lot of time exploring but
I am a creature of habit and there is one place to which
I always return. Donkey Lane near Burwash snakes
across the marsh from Dymchurch towards West Hythe
beneath the beautiful grassy cliff of the old Saxon Shore
– the point to which the sea once ran. There are two little
trees on the lane that I have photographed in all seasons
and last week I had a go at summoning the Gods of the
Lottery to bring me a modest win so that I might buy a
Donkey Lane property, near the trees, that has come onto
the market. But on Sunday evening, remembering that,
once again, I’d forgotten to complete the ticket-buying
part of the becoming-a-millionaire process I drove along
Donkey Lane at sunset both to console and torture
myself. I dawdled until dark fell, at least as dark as a
massive moon over the marsh was going to allow.
Man plans, God laughs as they say for as I sat in my car
wistfully gazing out over my lost estate I realised with a
heavy heart that I could never live here. I’ll walk through
the toughest London neighbourhoods alone at midnight
but put me in a remote property out on the marsh after
dark and I'd be twitching the curtains, poker in hand, at
every little noise. And one should factor in that on
Donkey Lane that night time sound scape would include
Mister Aspinall’s lions, for up on the slopes of the Saxon
Shore is Port Lympne Wildlife Park.
Port Lympne was the name given to the house built up
the cliff just after the Great War by Sir Philip Sassoon
the MP for Hythe. Lloyd George, Edward, Prince of
Wales and Mrs Simpson, Chaplin and Churchill were
among Sassoon’s illustrious guests at Port Lympne.
Next door the
Norman church of St Stephen is squeezed on
to the edge of the grassy cliff top, the churchyard suddenly
plunging down to the Military Canal built in the 18
th
century to enable the speedy movement of troops and
canon should Napoleon reach our shores. When the
navvies were building the canal below Lympne they dug
into the sand of the old Roman harbor, Portus Lemanis.
once guarded by a Roman fort. The ruins of the fort can
be seen, as if in free fall, tumbling down the grassy slopes
beneath Sassoon’s castle. From the churchyard the view
is joyfully thrilling stretching over the Romney March to
Dungeness in one direction and to the start of the White
Cliffs in the other. And if you needed any further proof
that this stretch of coast has always been on the frontline
you might just be able to pick out one of the Listening
Mirrors – a clunky concrete experiment in pre-Radar
detection of enemy aircraft coming across the Channel.
When Sassoon died in 1939 his country house on the
hillside became both the officers mess and an observation
post for the Royal Air Force Lympne fighter station.
Kent,
was once again on the frontline and when France fell in
1940 Hitler was just 22 miles away.
The Battle of France is
over
said Churchill,
the Battle of Britain is about to begin
.
Fewer than 3,000 men of Royal Air Force Fighter
Command were at the forefront of British resistance in the
Battle of Britain waged between 10th July and 31st October
1940 with much of the action taking place in the skies
above Dover and Folkestone – a strip of England that
became known as
Hellfire Corner
.
Lympne airfield was
The Battle of Britain in Kent
The new Scramble Experience at The Wing has opened at The National Memorial to The Few
Russell Savory with Prince Edward and the new be2e bi-plane April 20115
