London and Leeds Castle

The more logistically complex journey I planned for my friend’s stay took us to Kent. We took the Oxford Tube to London on Friday morning, evading the exorbitant railway prices but getting delayed by bad traffic. We got off at Marble Arch and walked through Hyde Park towards Wellington Arch, where I told my friend about the bizarre history of the Wellington statue that once adorned (or, according to some, defaced) it. It was so big that instead of facing the street that ran through the arch, the statue had to be placed perpendicularly to it.

We continued along Constitution Hill towards Buckingham Palace, where we found a massive crowd of tourists apparently waiting for something. One Google search later, we found ourselves joining them, as the changing of the guard was about to begin. Blasting marching music, the first group followed several mounted policemen down The Mall. Before they stopped playing, we could hear the second group approaching via Birdcage walk to their own tune. We stayed around for a little bit, but because we had joined rather late, we could not see much of what was going on.

Thus detained, we had to speed-walk to Victoria Station, from which our train to Maidstone was departing at 11:25. We arrived with about five minutes to spare, which I spent frantically trying to figure out how the ticket machine worked. The tickets, it turned out, had to be printed at the station (and not, as per usual, simply opened on the Railway phone app). The train was practically empty, the weather sunny, and the atmosphere relaxed. The only annoying thing about the ride was the lack of wifi, which did not endear Southeastern Railways to me.

After eating a hasty lunch in Maidstone, we located our regional 10X bus to Leeds Castle. As one might expect on a Friday noon, our only fellow passengers were seniors, all of whom seemed to know each other as well as the driver – a smiley, unjaded gentleman. Because of an earlier mishap at the restaurant, my debit card refused to work when we boarded the bus. The driver waited patiently until I succeeded on my third try, while an elderly man standing behind me joked that the machine was “making sandwiches again” (my friend insists he said “it isn’t very helpful is it” but I believe my account is much more colourful).

Unsurprisingly, none of the stops was signalled on this provincial ride, which meant that we had to track our progress on Google maps to know where we should dismount. The walk from our stop was certainly not intended for pedestrians, so we followed an elderly lady as she bravely waded through the motorway towards our goal.

We enjoyed Leeds Castle a great deal. The sun was shining, the magnolias were blooming, and the ducks seemed completely unperturbed by our presence. The castle, standing picturesquely on an island in the middle of the lake, was undergoing some renovations, but this did not ruin our enjoyment of the half-prepared exhibition on life there in the 1930s. The permanent exhibition also taught me about some of its Czech links: it was granted in 1382 to Queen Anne of Bohemia, daughter of Emperor Charles IV and the first wife of King Richard II. “Good Queen Anne” famously procured pardons for participants in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In 1416, Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund – Anne’s brother – was entertained at Leeds Castle by Henry V.

We left Leeds Castle a little later than I had expected, as my friend insisted on completing the maze challenge. I will not say it took him a slightly embarrassing amount of time, as it was probably the largest maze I had ever seen. Nevertheless, we compensated for this loss by not returning to Maidstone as I had originally planned, instead taking the train from Hollingbourne to Ashford and from Ashford to Dover.

A side note: I had no idea that the train to Maidstone continued to Hollingbourne. Had I known, we would not have stopped in Maidstone at all, but Google maps has a way of being a little uninformative sometimes. In any case, our short stop in Maidstone allowed us to discover a plaque commemorating Jane Austen’s visit to the town. Having seen such plaques in Bath and Southampton, we agreed that it was obligatory for every English town to at least pretend to have a tenuous Jane Austen connection.