The Two Miles

The Two Miles is the carriers' name for a stretch of the pilgrim road below Boughton, and by any definition the county uses it is a haunt, a word Kent applies both to such a place and to whatever is in it. Whatever is there has been there as long as anything has been written down. For that reason the county holds it up as the type of a trouble that belongs to a place, to be bounded, attended and lived beside, as against things like the Crooked Hearth or the visitor at Harbledown that move on.

Two inns stand either side of the stretch. In nine years of Alice Ospringe's yard book, and somewhat longer of her neighbour's, no walking party has left either yard for the other later than three o'clock between October and the end of February. Neither house has a rule or has refused anybody, and the two women have never discussed it.

The midwife Nan Wicker, writing in 4611, laid out four bodies brought in between Boughton and the hill and judged that three were not deaths from cold; nobody asked her a second question. It was below Boughton Hill that Gentleman Jack Calloway robbed a coach, having first shot its near leader; he went to the gallows at Maidstone in 4617.

Walk the Two Miles in daylight and be in a yard before dark. Nobody in Kent calls the road dangerous, and no one in Kent walks it once dark has fallen. If offered dinner at three on a winter afternoon, take it.