Film

Dunkirk

I feel as if I'm the only person who didn't think this was the Greatest Film of All Time. I get it: war is horrible, yet it inspires unparalleled acts of bravery and patriotism. I just don't feel this film took me forward in my thinking; if anything, the events of Dunkirk evacuation seemed smaller on screen than they always were in my imagination.

North Downs Way

Holingbourne → Charing

Distance: 8.36 miles
Ascent: 208 metres
Duration: 2 hours 50 minutes

A byway, open to all traffic
« Not walked | Not walked »

For most of today's walk the route is technically a "byway": a route open to all traffic. Others were certainly making the most of this, with half a dozen trail motorbikes passing us at one point, and a handful of Landrovers squeezing past a little later.

This green lane is the old Pilgrim's Way, and although its surface doesn't seem to have been updated in hundreds of years, its "open to everyone" nature similarly remains. I wonder whether pilgrims of old were similarly squeezed into the margins of the path.

North Downs Way

Cuxton → Hollingbourne

Distance: 16.92 miles
Ascent: 699 metres
Duration: 6 hours 33 minutes

Out of place
« Not walked | Not walked »

Seven years later, it's high time we finished walking the North Downs Way.

The first few miles were on tarmac, crossing the river on the huge Medway Viaduct alongside the roar of the M20 motorway and the whoosh of high-speed rail. We never quite escaped the noise of people moving faster than us, but the path soon returned to downland and before long we found ourselves dropping to the foot of the escarpment alongside the remains of a 6,000 year-old burial chamber.

Kit's Coty House looked completely out-of-place, the kind of thing you'd expect in west Wales, not here in the deep south-east of England.

Back on the downs we found ourselves caught in a thunderstorm before the walk was over, lightning striking the ground quite close by. The one positive result was that the thunder drowned out the otherwise incessent sound of traffic.