I tend to take it as a very good sign when you don't really see any barbed wire beside you as you leave a town. Cranbrook was pretty and as the small town fades out you soon join the High Weald Landscape Trail, which is a route I also tend to find well-maintained and generally passable. The way is easy-going if a little muddy in places but the gates, bridges, and signs are very good indeed until Benenden. Actually there are a fair few signs in place by land owners to encourage walkers and walking so you can't really ask for more.? Benenden is a small village but also very pretty. There's a cafe if you need it, and a pub as well a little beyond the large village green. I realised around this point that I was going to hit Tenterden at a point where I'd just miss a bus and have a two hour wait for the next so I decided I would run the rest of the route wherever I could to shave off the minutes. The rest of the route is about as muddy as the start, with a particular mention for wetness for Mount Hall Farm - which also has poor signage and a gate that tried to stab me when I looped the rope closure back over the post. Extremely wet as well at Rawlinson Farm because there's a large pond up the slope that drains down into the field you cross. I ran almost all of the rest to the Rolvenden train station - served by steam trains and heritage services, not the mainline network. Before you reach that station there is a broken stile roughly between Folly Farm and New Barn Farm if you look at the OS Map. After here the mud of Cold Harbour farm is also very bad, very deep, and it is also full of animal juice run-off from the cowshed/byer off to the left. Signage here is also a bit weak.? Would happily re-do this walk and with some improvements to signage it'd get 5 stars from me for a solid rural walk that isn't a national trail. The gpx file is pretty accurate and I only really definitely needed to check the OS mapping when I was at Cold Harbour and Mount Hall Farm, the rest is pretty obvious even when there are other paths branching off.?...

Ricechrisb

Only point I differed from the suggested route was to walk on the eastern side of Bethany School along Jarvis Lane....

wp