Eynsford is bung full of ye olde tea shoppes and there should be B&Bs but whether they have any vacancies then is another matter. It's got the oldest stone-built Norman castle in England (curtain wall and a stone hall-house in the middle; one of my exercises in archaeological draughtmanship was to do a drawing of it burning down) and just down the road (and across the ford) from Lullingstone Roman Villa, so is a bit of a tourist magnet in a small way. Here's the website for it: http://www.eynsfordvillage.org.uk/
I have a particular liking for the Darent Valley: the average village has a nearby Iron Age site, a Roman villa and an entry in the Domesday Book, and Darenth has a Saxon church. At Farningham, an Iron Age settlement was found when they were building the motorway: apparently in about AD 50 they moved out, lock stock and barrel, for a trendy rectangular Roman style cottage down by the river. They left all their pots and pans; it appears that nasty old-fashioned stuff was not what they had in mind for their fancy new Roman lifestyle. The cottage later developed into a fancy villa so big that at first it looked as though there were two of them.
If you're going to even try to travel over the Bank Holiday weekend I second the suggestion of hiring a car. It's not just that the trains will be jam-packed, in crucial areas they are likely to be not there at all because of mainenance work on the lines, which means that a lot of journeys involve getting off the train, getting on a bus and then getting on a train again.
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Date: 2008-07-18 05:27 pm (UTC)I have a particular liking for the Darent Valley: the average village has a nearby Iron Age site, a Roman villa and an entry in the Domesday Book, and Darenth has a Saxon church. At Farningham, an Iron Age settlement was found when they were building the motorway: apparently in about AD 50 they moved out, lock stock and barrel, for a trendy rectangular Roman style cottage down by the river. They left all their pots and pans; it appears that nasty old-fashioned stuff was not what they had in mind for their fancy new Roman lifestyle. The cottage later developed into a fancy villa so big that at first it looked as though there were two of them.
If you're going to even try to travel over the Bank Holiday weekend I second the suggestion of hiring a car. It's not just that the trains will be jam-packed, in crucial areas they are likely to be not there at all because of mainenance work on the lines, which means that a lot of journeys involve getting off the train, getting on a bus and then getting on a train again.