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Much History has passed this way.

There has been an inn on Gad's Hill since time immemorial for tired and thirsty travellers, and a trough, which still remains, for their equally thirsty horses.

Geoffry Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims would have passed by on their way to the shrine of Thomas 'a Becket at Canterbury.

Sir John Falstaff

The boastful, hard-swearing, cowardly, wenching, sackswilling but ultimately lovable rogue Sir John Falstaff stalks, or rather blusters through several of Shakespeare's plays, but it was at Gad's Hill that one of the best known stories.

In the play Henry IV , Prince Hal and Poins conspire with Falstaff to rob one of the rich pilgrims or merchants on the Dover Road at Gad's Hill for a lark.

Prince Hal and Poins vanish at the critical moment only to fall upon Sir John and his companions and chase them away from the booty. Later in the Boar's Head tavern in Eastcheap, when Sir John has been boasting of his courage, they reveal that it was they who had attacked him, but he pretends he knew it was them all along, and naturally he would not fight the heir apparent.

Charles Dickens

"... I am on my little Kentish freehold looking on as pretty a view out of my study window as you will find in a long day's English ride. My little place is a grave red-brick house, which I have added to and stuck bits on in all manner of ways, so that it is as pleasantly irregular, and as violently opposed to all architectual ideas, as the most hopeful man could possibly desire. The robbery was committed before the door, on the ground now covered by the room in which I write. A little rustic alehouse, called the Sir John Falstaff, is over the way, has been over the way ever since, in honour of the event."

Sir John Oldcastle

Shakespeare's model for Falstaff was Sir John Oldcastle; he became Lord Cobham by marrying the heiress, Joan with whom he lived at Cooling castle. He was in fact very different from Falstaff; though he was indeed a friend of young Prince Hal, and proved himself a brave and capable commander compaigning in Wales and France, he became a Lollard. These 14th century Evangelical Christians, were opposed to the corrupt practices of the Church, the supremacy of the Pope and making war. This brought him into conflict with statutory power, and he was imprisoned in the Tower. He escaped, spent four years at large, was recaptured in Wales in 1417 and finally hanged and burnt for heresy and conspiracy against his old friend, now King Henry V.

Dick Turpin

John Williams (Swift Nick) Nevinson was given the name of Dick Turpin by Harrison Ainsworth, who describes the incident for which he is famous in his novel, Rookwood.

Because of the steepness of Gad's Hill, the rich traffic passing between London and Dover via Canterbury and the dense surrounding woodland, there were rich pickings for highwaymen.

One summer morning in 1676 Nevinson took a chance. He robbed a man on Gad's Hill and, fearing recognition, raced to the ferry to Essex on his amazing horse Black Bess and then carried on all the way to York, covering the whole journey in 16 hours, to establish his alibi. He got away with it that time but was subsequently caught and hanged.

William Hogarth

The seventeenth century satirical artist William Hogarth and four friends passed by this way in the hiliarious five day tramp from London to Sheerness; they wrote and illustrated a book about the walk, call Hogarth's Peregrinations. It is encouraging to find mature, and even eminent men embarking on quite such a dotty adventure.

Charles Dickens again

Dickens, exhausted by his own incredible energy, had a stroke and died at Gad's Hill Place in 1870 where he had lived for 14 years and written some of his finest novels. His last, Edwin Drood , was unfinished.

Though abstemious himself, he loved to hold house parties, and especially to walk far and wide in the locality at such rate that few of his guests could keep up with him. Amongst others Hans Anderson came to stay; they had a job to get rid of him.

Edwin Drood describes the Rochester of his time and the beginning and end of Great Expectations are redolent of the brooding spirit of the marshes.

Colin Smith

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