Sunday, 18 March 2007

Streams (2)

In response to my earlier post on streams (click here to see), Mr Godfrey King has provided some excellent detail on the route the stream takes through East Malling. His email is reproduced in full below.

Regarding the stream by the church, it begins in the spring at Gillets Hole, as we used to call it when I lived up The Rocks (before the war), trickles down by the side of the road near the station, goes underground and runs behind the old bakery, had a small diversion into some ponds in the rear garden of the grocery shop owned by Mr Dimon (for whom I was an errand boy during the war), then through the grounds of the old rectory, in which I gather a lake has now been constructed, and comes out by the church (next to the house occupied by Nurse Skinner, who was the village midwife in the 1930s/1940s), crosses underground to a spot just past the King and Queen, then runs all the way down New Road, until it joins with the stream which comes from Blacklands Lake, and flows into the large pond at Bradbourne, then onto the road ford at Ditton, where it then goes down to the London Road, which it crosses under, through Cobdown and eventually joins the river Medway between Aylesford and New Hythe.

Coincidentally, I have noticed that there appears to be quite a bit of water running down New Road at the moment. Could this be the stream, or does it run underground at this point? It's probably just a burst main!

There is more information on the streams to come, which I intend to add this week. So keep posted!...

2 comments:

Stephen said...

There seem to be two threads about this stream! I've just posted this on the other thread, unaware of this one!
I think I can give you the full course of this stream from when I lived in East Malling in the 50s. it started at a spring in Gillet's Hole (as the road was called then) and ran down the side of Rocks Road.

Outside what was then Warner's Sweet shop, at the junction of rocks Road and Chapel St, it went underground and reappeared somewhere in the gardens of the houses on the right side of High St (going downhill). It was certainly above ground in the garden of The Vicarage.

It came through the wall on the right side of Chuch Walk and immediately went underground again. If i remember rightly it surfaced roughly opposite the Research Station entrance on New Road. It then flowed down the park side of New Road for at least a couple of hundred yards. It was certainly in the open in the early to mid fifties, though it is now culverted.

At some point it goes under New Road and then flows the other side of the wall separating Bradbourne grounds from New Road. Almost opposite Chapman Drive, right by where the "Blue Door" used to give access to Bradbourne, it joins the East Malling Mill Stream at the point where that stream flows under New Road.

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