AND HOME TO KEMSING
by Brian Doe
When you first come as a visitor to our village, whatever the direction you travel, eastward from Wrotham, westward from Otford or in from Seal and Sevenoaks to the south, and whether it is Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter, your first vision, your overriding impression will be hills, trees and open grassland; but it is not an architects mind that planned the landscape that you see or the layout of some master gardener, it is the product of a million years of weather and gradual evolution, the chalk rock, the flint stone, the great gashes and craters in the rugged downs that have been torn out and fashioned by the winds and storms of centuries past. The trees, shrubs, and open Downland you see today have all taken their place in the footsteps of time, and on the same ladder have come birds, mammals, insects, flowers, fungus and even man himself. That is the mainspring of the beauty and fascination you see before you today. Who is there who would separate them out from the web of life? Who would want to? They are the backbone of our village!
The trees, plants, animals and birds you see today will be not unlike any other seen by travellers over the centuries or even Chaucer’s pilgrims journeying anywhere on the chalk route between Winchester and Canterbury – only the sombre green yews, gaunt and disfigured by the storms of centuries past bear witness to this ancient place – they also provide food and shelter for numerous birds, flocks of finches, thrushes and warblers, even the tiny goldcrest who slings her little hammock of mosses and lichen under the branches. Because of their great age and ability to survive in deprived conditions of pure chalk rock, great caverns form in their roots creating homes for badgers, foxes and rabbits in the warm dry chalk shelves – woodpeckers hammer into the bark for insects and tree creepers tuck their nests into the old shattered limbs.
A familiar sight from my high point on the Down at dawn or dusk is the large flights of black headed gulls in the southern sky who travel daily from the tip at Otford to the Medway estuary. Often in the same sky skeins of Canada Geese honk and call to one another on their way home to the Wild Fowl Reserve at Bradbourne. Another early riser and great fisherman is the heron –long before Kemsing folk rise from their beds, he has plundered their fish ponds of goldfish and even frogs.
Now from my high seat rooks and jackdaws cross the evening sky calling and arguing amongst themselves as they journey westwards into the evening sunset – a molten ball, heaving and billowing in the blue margin between earth and sky as all goes quiet, until the creatures of the night take over, when your ears will serve you better than your eyes. A hunting vixen, her wailing scream echoing across the downland – rabbits drumming their warning of some unseen enemy, bats bouncing their almost inaudible signal as they navigate through the trees, and badgers, who have a tremendous range of sounds, from barking like dogs, squealing like piglets, sobbing like a child in distress to a high pitched scream – so much is known of badgers – so little I know of their language.
Tawny owls are night hunters. They too have a wide vocabulary – their familiar ‘to-whit-to-whoo’ to all sorts of little snores and grumbling. Herons cross the night sky ‘Fraank Fraank’ they call. In winter moonlight, not only will you see the Great Bear, the Milky Way or Orion striding his way east to west, but large formations of ducks and many other wading birds, whose call and shapes I have never been able to identify, as they pass across the face of the moon.
by Brian Doe
When you first come as a visitor to our village, whatever the direction you travel, eastward from Wrotham, westward from Otford or in from Seal and Sevenoaks to the south, and whether it is Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter, your first vision, your overriding impression will be hills, trees and open grassland; but it is not an architects mind that planned the landscape that you see or the layout of some master gardener, it is the product of a million years of weather and gradual evolution, the chalk rock, the flint stone, the great gashes and craters in the rugged downs that have been torn out and fashioned by the winds and storms of centuries past. The trees, shrubs, and open Downland you see today have all taken their place in the footsteps of time, and on the same ladder have come birds, mammals, insects, flowers, fungus and even man himself. That is the mainspring of the beauty and fascination you see before you today. Who is there who would separate them out from the web of life? Who would want to? They are the backbone of our village!
The trees, plants, animals and birds you see today will be not unlike any other seen by travellers over the centuries or even Chaucer’s pilgrims journeying anywhere on the chalk route between Winchester and Canterbury – only the sombre green yews, gaunt and disfigured by the storms of centuries past bear witness to this ancient place – they also provide food and shelter for numerous birds, flocks of finches, thrushes and warblers, even the tiny goldcrest who slings her little hammock of mosses and lichen under the branches. Because of their great age and ability to survive in deprived conditions of pure chalk rock, great caverns form in their roots creating homes for badgers, foxes and rabbits in the warm dry chalk shelves – woodpeckers hammer into the bark for insects and tree creepers tuck their nests into the old shattered limbs.
A familiar sight from my high point on the Down at dawn or dusk is the large flights of black headed gulls in the southern sky who travel daily from the tip at Otford to the Medway estuary. Often in the same sky skeins of Canada Geese honk and call to one another on their way home to the Wild Fowl Reserve at Bradbourne. Another early riser and great fisherman is the heron –long before Kemsing folk rise from their beds, he has plundered their fish ponds of goldfish and even frogs.
Now from my high seat rooks and jackdaws cross the evening sky calling and arguing amongst themselves as they journey westwards into the evening sunset – a molten ball, heaving and billowing in the blue margin between earth and sky as all goes quiet, until the creatures of the night take over, when your ears will serve you better than your eyes. A hunting vixen, her wailing scream echoing across the downland – rabbits drumming their warning of some unseen enemy, bats bouncing their almost inaudible signal as they navigate through the trees, and badgers, who have a tremendous range of sounds, from barking like dogs, squealing like piglets, sobbing like a child in distress to a high pitched scream – so much is known of badgers – so little I know of their language.
Tawny owls are night hunters. They too have a wide vocabulary – their familiar ‘to-whit-to-whoo’ to all sorts of little snores and grumbling. Herons cross the night sky ‘Fraank Fraank’ they call. In winter moonlight, not only will you see the Great Bear, the Milky Way or Orion striding his way east to west, but large formations of ducks and many other wading birds, whose call and shapes I have never been able to identify, as they pass across the face of the moon.