The Ightham Mote Cobnuts Project

I was brought up in Kent in south-east England. Although close to London, Kent was and still is largely rural, famed for its orchards, its hop fields and its cobnuts.

    Hops are a wild plant, used as an ingredient for beer. Up until the 1960s when mechanical picking was introduced, the poor inhabitants of London’s East End used to come down to Kent in September and camp in the countryside for several weeks in order to pick the fruit-clusters. That was their holiday. I don’t remember the pickers, but I do remember the tall trellises on which the hops were grown and which I still see when I go back to Kent for a visit.

    We were five children, all born within seven years, so my mother had to buy food in bulk – sacks of potatoes, sides of ham, and crates of fruit. I remember in particular her driving to a local orchard and coming back with a crate of cherries, a Kentish speciality. Such riches. We gorged ourselves, having spitting competitions with the stones. I read however that 85 per cent of Kent’s orchards have been lost in the last fifty years – since my childhood in other words.

    Although my father worked in London, we lived on a farm. We let most of the fields but kept a few cows and George, who lived in a flat over what had once been stables, looked after them, and told us children off when we played in the haystacks, destroying the bales with our jumps and slides.

    We also played in and on top of derelict pigsties, running along the precarious corrugated-iron roofs, hoping they wouldn’t collapse underneath us and pitch us on to the concrete below. I shouldn’t think that was permitted either but nobody knew except us.

    Next to the pigsties was a vast walled kitchen garden, again largely derelict, and an orchard. In the orchard were quinces, from which my mother occasionally made jam, and cobnuts. Cobnuts are a type of hazelnut. You eat them green (ie not dried) and what I remember most is the work involved in cracking the thick shell – out of proportion it seemed to me with what you actually got to eat. Still, hazelnuts have been cultivated since at least the middle ages and ‘Kentish cobs’ since the nineteenth century.

    All of which is a preamble to introducing you to a blog recently set up by a friend, the Ightham Mote Cobnuts Project (http://www.motecobnutsproject.blogspot.com/ ). (In spite of its outlandish spelling, the name 'Ightham' is pronounced  exactly like the simple four-letter word 'item', ie ite-m.) Ightham Mote is a medieval moated manor house owned by the National Trust. It looks glorious in the pictures but I am ashamed to say that I have never visited it, even though it is only a few miles away from where we lived. Gill, who still lives in Kent, and whose family owned a cobnut ‘plat’ or plantation, has taken on the task of restoring a derelict plat at Ightham Mote.

    I felt quite choked seeing Gill’s pictures, as they took me straight back to Kent and my childhood. Goodness knows why, as although the Kent climate and countryside are very different from that of Devon, I can't pin down why that's apparent in the pictures.
    Anyway, whether or not you're a Kentish lass, do check out Gill's blog as this is a fascinating and worthwhile project. And I look forward, Gill, to lots more posts about what you’re getting up to - and perhaps more about your childhood in Kent as well.