The Walk

 So I walked. I walked, in fact, from Dover to Canterbury, in three stages, following various pilgrim routes and long-distance paths, and it was a great walk. 
  We began on Thursday, in cold sea fret, doing little more than strolling around the mighty castle and its precinct, with its ancient church – hideously redecorated and far from numinous – and the Roman pharos that served as its bell tower. The walking began, in lightly hungover conditions, the following morning, and the first challenge was to get out of Dover, which, for all its peppering of architectural and historical gems, is an all too typical depressed and depressing English seaside town. Once through the outskirts, though, and out along the Dour valley, things picked up rapidly, and the afternoon walking was good, despite cold and persistent rain accompanying us, and despite the necessity of a stiff climb up to the downs. Returning to Dover, we found many of the previously closed churches opened for an evening event, and were able to see inside even the little St Edmund's Chapel, a tiny 13th-century building that somehow survived the Reformation, wartime bombing and even the city planners.
 The countryside showed to better effect on Saturday, with intermittent sunshine on the blackthorn and cherry blossom, celandine, daffodils, primroses, violets and glorious drifts of wood anemones. Mud and flood posed problems from time to time, as they often do at this time of year, especially after much rain, but the churches were almost all open, and full of interest: one, the extraordinary Romanesque survival of St Nicholas, Barfreston, is an absolute gem, 'the Kilpeck of the South', richly carved with religious and mythological figures, zodiac symbols, labours of the year, cavorting beasts, crude faces, abstract and natural forms, all united in an elegant overall design, the work of very superior masons and craftsmen. That's the South door, with its intricately carved tympanum, below...

  Also open whenever we happened on them were the pubs, and each of those we visited was a lively, friendly and genuinely local 'local' – proper English pubs, though one of them, surprisingly, was run by a Turkish family, with the glamorous young daughter at the bar and the matriarch cooking up excellent Turkish food in the kitchen. This was all very heartening, in all sorts of ways. Despite what is going on in some of our cities, a deeper, nicer England endures. 
  I shan't attempt even to outline the wonders of Canterbury Cathedral – Pevsner takes 60 pages – but I was struck anew by its sheer magnificence, by how much there is of it, and how many are its beauties. One that caught my eye, almost incidental amid such splendour, was a fine, decorous memorial to the great Orlando Gibbons [below] on the North wall of the nave. Gibbons was at the cathedral in 1625, organising the music for a service blessing Charles I's marriage to Henrietta Maria of France, when he died suddenly, 'of an apoplexy', and was 'transcribed to the celestial choir'. 

  To return to Dover, Auden wrote a fine poem about the port as it was shortly before the war – very different, but recognisably the same place...  

Dover

Steep roads, a tunnel through chalk downs, are the approaches; A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay; The sea-front is almost elegant; all the show Has, inland somewhere, a vague and dirty root:     Nothing is made in this town. A Norman castle, dominant, flood-lit at night, Trains which fume in a station built on the sea, Testify to the interests of its regular life: Here dwell the experts on what the soldiers want,     And who the travellers are Whom ships carry in or out between the lighthouses, Which guard for ever the made privacy of this bay Like twin stone dogs opposed on a gentleman's gate. Within these breakwaters English is properly spoken,     Outside an atlas of tongues. The eyes of departing migrants are fixed on the sea, Conjuring destinies out of impersonal water: 'I see an important decision made on a lake, An illness, a beard, Arabia found in a bed,      Nanny defeated, Money." Red after years of failure or bright with fame, The eyes of homecomers thank these historical cliffs: 'The mirror can no longer lie nor the clock reproach; In the shadow under the yew, at the children's party,      Everything must be explained.' The Old Town with its Keep and Georgian houses  Has built its routine upon such unusual moments; Vows, tears, emotional farewell gestures, Are common here, unremarkable actions      Like ploughing or a tipsy song. Soldiers crowd into the pubs in their pretty clothes, As pink and silly as girls from a high-class academy; The Lion, The Rose, The Crown, will not ask them to die, Not here, not now: all they are killing is time,      A pauper civilian future. Above them, expensive, shiny as a rich boy's bike, Aeroplanes drone through the new European air On the edge of a sky that makes England of minor importance; And tides warn bronzing bathers of a cooling star     With half its history done. High over France, a full moon, cold and exciting Like one of those dangerous flatterers we meet and love When we are utterly wretched, returns our stare: The night has found many recruits; to thousands of pilgrims      The Mecca is coldness of heart. The cries of the gulls at dawn are sad like work: The soldier guards the traveller who pays for the soldier, Each prays in a similar way for himself, but neither Controls the years or the weather. Some may be heroes:      Not all of us are unhappy.