Bedgebury camping is a campsite surrounded by historic places

The Weald of Kent is a landscape shaped as much by time as by human hand — a broad, gently undulating clay vale framed by wooded ridges and stitched together with hedgerows, lanes, and scattered farmsteads. Around Biddenden, Horsmonden, and Marden, the land opens into wide pastures and orchards, where heavy soils support grazing cattle, apple trees, and hop gardens that once defined the rural economy. The horizons are soft rather than dramatic — lines of oak, ash, and chestnut rising gently from the fields — giving the area a quiet, grounded beauty that feels deeply English and resolutely unhurried.

This is a working landscape, but one rich in texture and atmosphere. Narrow lanes dip and rise between high banks and ancient hedges, opening suddenly onto broad views of pasture and sky. In spring and summer the Weald feels lush and enclosing, while autumn strips the land back to reveal its structure — dark ploughed fields, mist hanging low over the clay, and woods glowing bronze and copper. Despite its proximity to London, the countryside here retains a sense of remoteness and continuity, where villages sit comfortably within their surroundings rather than imposing upon them, and the land itself remains the defining presence.