Well it sure was a Bank Holiday weekend to remember.  The cricket was fantastic, as was the Rugby and the Saints won a game away from home, prompting yet another open top bus ride around Southampton.

The weather was more than a bit on the scorchio side and I felt for those thousands who had decided to spend a glorious weekend at a city centre carnival or some ear splitting music festival or, even worse, fighting through motorway madness just to get where thousands of people were there already.

So how to avoid all that and find some peace and quiet away from it all?  Well, we decided to take Dudley our retriever for a nice walkies through some of Kent`s finest countryside.   So we parked the car in a nearby village and started our walk through open fields which had been harvested a week or so before.   We looked back to the village and this was the tranquil scene with the village church resplendent in the early morning haze.......

We then climbed up the hill towards the foot of the North Downs and saw this old but prosperous farmhouse proudly standing on its hill and surveying its domain........ 

After climbing a little further we joined the Pilgrims Way - the long distance footpath that leads from Winchester to Canterbury, a large section of which passes through this part of Kent.  I took this photo to demonstrate the peace and quiet, not to say solitude, that rush hour on the Pilgrims Way can bring - so different from the M20 Motorway just a couple of miles away........

And as we left the Pilgrims Way and headed back across the fields we came across what I have called Sunflower Cottage, buried deep in the quiet lane back to the village.........

I won`t bore you with any more photos but please click on them for better images.  But I hope you agree that even if there are countless things to do on a Bank Holiday the glories of the English countryside in all its high summer splendour really do take some beating.