Georgian
In the autumn of 1823, one of England's most outspoken writers came riding through west Kent, and by the time he reached Leigh he was ready for breakfast. William Cobbett, who lived from 1763 to 1835, was the son of a Hampshire farmer, and his rural upbringing shaped everything he later wrote. He spent years working as a journalist and ran his own publication, the Weekly Political Register, which carried his views to readers across the country.
Cobbett's life was eventful. He fled to America twice, and at one point he was imprisoned over debts he could not pay. Yet it is his travel writing that brings him to our parish. His diaries record his 'Rural Rides', journeys made on horseback across England, in which he observed farming, countryside and country towns with a sharp and often critical eye.
The ride that concerns us began at Dover, where Cobbett set out in 1823. He was in a critical mood even before he left the coast. The government of William Pitt the Younger had paid for tunnels to be dug at Dover Castle, and Cobbett disapproved of the money spent there. He was also scornful of worries about Napoleon landing on the English shore, and he mocked the fears raised at Dover. As for the Minister Canning, who was then negotiating arrangements with America, Cobbett offered a characteristically barbed comparison: he likened Americans who had left Britain to a daughter running off to elope.
Riding inland, Cobbett passed through the Sittingbourne area. Along the way he grumbled about the tithes that English farmers were obliged to pay, a grievance he returned to often in his writings. On Friday 5 September 1823 he arrived at Mereworth, and in Hadlow he noted a house that struck him as singular, unlike the ordinary buildings around it. At Tonbridge he paused for only a few minutes, judging it a common county town of no great distinction. Even so, his eye for plants did not fail him: he saw Althea Frutex in flower there during that visit.
From Tonbridge he pressed on into the Weald of Kent, and it was here that Leigh enters the story. Cobbett stopped in the village to take his breakfast. It is thought that the meal may have been served at The Porcupine, a coaching inn that was already well established by that date. Whether or not that was the house, we can imagine the horses resting while the great man ate and looked about him.
Fed and rested, he rode on from Leigh towards the Chittingstone causeway, passing through Bough-beach and then Four Elms before reaching Westerham. He described Westerham as a little market town, and he was pleased with what he saw of the farming nearby, judging the corn very good and the barley excellent.
Bough-beach gave him something else to remark upon: two remarkable oak trees. One of them measured more than thirty feet around the trunk, and the other exceeded twenty-seven feet. Both, he noted, had stood hollow for half a century. Their modern counterparts can still be appreciated locally. The oak on Leigh Green measures 28 feet around at its base and 19 feet at chest height, the latter being the level that Ian Vincent recommends for taking tree measurements, since trunks flare out where they meet the ground.
By the end of the day Cobbett had covered 44 miles in the saddle, a considerable distance for a man of sixty, before returning to his home in Kensington. His impressions of the Weald were affectionate. He wrote of riding through its lanes, and he made clear that he preferred such quiet lanes to the turnpike roads with their tolls and traffic.
For Leigh, the visit is a small but treasured entry in the parish's story: a morning in September 1823 when a controversial, well-travelled and much-read Englishman chose our village for his breakfast. This article, drawn up in August 2020, pulls together the threads of that single day's ride through the Weald, from the Dover tunnels to the hollow oaks, and from Tonbridge's brief stop to the breakfast table at Leigh.