Walking the Great Lines

Our Explore Medway guest blogger is a proud resident of the Medway town of Gillingham, Kent. Looking for new ideas and blogs on the positives of being outdoors in Medway, we found ‘Medway, She Wrote’. She likes to write mainly about Medway – places, people, history, everyday life and more – and today we’re sharing our favourite post from her blog. It’s about the Great Lines and starts during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, when she and her husband were both working from home.

Extract:

…”we worked from home, at alternate ends of the dining room table. That’s a lot of time in one small house, on top of plenty of sedentary telly-watching after work. Getting out for some exercise and fresh air was no longer baked into the day as part of my commute, or an optional weekend leisure activity. It was now imperative. A sanity-saving daily mission.

So I, and often the Man of Kent too, started going out for late afternoon walks in a big, open space not far from here – the Great Lines Heritage Park.

The Great Lines Heritage Park (also known as the Field of Fire) connects Chatham, Gillingham, Brompton and Fort Amherst via a series of criss-crossing paths. It’s one of the highest points in the area. From the top of the Great Lines, you can see miles of Medway, from the steep terraces of Luton to the hulk of the Pentagon Centre in Chatham below. It’s a beautiful walk, and one that I’ve never tired of.

As you stand atop those quiet, grassy hills, looking at the view and listening to the wind mingled with muffled traffic noise, you might not realise that in the past, you could have watched over naval battles, horse races and football matches from the exact same spot”…

You can read more from this guest blogger, by clicking the link below: