Walking and Writing the Kent Landscape

In the cultural imaginary, the county of Kent, has long been associated with rural journeying, especially long-distance walks around the county’s coastline or through its downland interior. In 2024, Lavinia Brydon and Caroline Millar walked two of its popular pathways; the North Downs Way and the Saxon Shore Way, with the aim to revisit, re-route and re-write the twin imaginaries/tropes; of the county as Garden of England and as borderland to Europe. This session reflects on these shared experiences and offers a performance of some of the critical-creative outputs that resulted from our practice as research. These include cut-up poems, counter-maps, and hybrid forms using montage and palimpsest to overwrite official documents and canonical (male-authored) texts.