We had planned to go to Canterbury but- having stopped for lunch at Chilham- which was lovely and quiet- we thought,"Lets not go where the tourists are"- so we turned left into the hills and drove by narrow, unimportant roads though orchards and vineyards and tiny villages to Faversham.
I've never loved Canterbury, but I've always loved Faversham. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because no-one ever told me Faversham was beautiful- and I got to find out for myself.
Court Street which turns into Abbey Street is one of the prettiest streets in England. Here's Arden's House- where the murder was committed which inspired the first social realist play in English literature.
St Mary of Charity is an ugly church with wonderful things inside- like this pillar with its medieval paintings still largely intact and their colours unfaded.
I walked around the churchyard taking pictures of gravestones. I particularly like this one- which I remember from my first visit 40 years ago. I photographed it then as well. Photographing it again felt a little weird- as though I were crossing my own time line.
Heh, I was in Chilham yesterday, doing a recce for an upcoming scooter forum ride. (It would be lovely to meet up at some point; that part of Kent is dead easy for me to reach.)
The colours and details on those medieval pictures are astonishing! I wish some of our local wall paintings had survived that well, rather than as faded enigmatic fragments - St Christopher's detached foot in a river full of fish, and that sort of thing...
And I do love the matching skulls on that gravestone.
I don't know any other English medieval wall paintings that have kept their colours so well.
the gravestone is a great piece of folk art. Picasso would have been happy to have come up with the shape of those skulls- so bold, so stylised, so tactile.
