Walking round London pt14: Eltham Palace to Grove Park — Gary Parkinson Media
Gary Parkinson
Up and down the class scale at the 120km circumnavigation of the capital continues     (ICYMI: on Sat 5 May, the writer walked 36km as the first quarter of a    120km circumnavigation of the capital for charity   ; on Sat 26 May, he walked the next quarter. These blogs are to    publicise the fundra
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Gary Parkinson Media
Up and down the class scale at the 120km circumnavigation of the capital continues

(ICYMI: on Sat 5 May, the writer walked 36km as the first quarter of a 120km circumnavigation of the capital for charity; on Sat 26 May, he walked the next quarter. These blogs are to publicise the fundraising and consider the vernacular. There’s a full list of chapter/sections at the end of each blog.)

Eltham Palace isn’t one of those royal residences that sits on a hilltop visible for miles around. I can sense its presence as I walk along Tilt Yard Approach and Court Yard; not just the names — a tiltyard is an enclosed jousting area, like Horseguards Parade — but the brickwork, bravely bulging and unmistakably old in texture. The walls I’m passing are themselves listed buildings, dating back to the 16th century.

Then I round the corner and… yeah, I think that’s it. Blending into the hill with unusual subtlety, the palace is set back behind a moat and, more obstructively to the eye if not the invader, large gates. Entirely fittingly, the Google Streetview camera-car captured a bloke sticking his head through the railings, as so many must, for a better view.

With later Tudor monarchs preferring Greenwich, the place declined in the 16th century and was ransacked by Roundheads in the civil war: the palace became a farm, Edward’s great hall a barn. It stayed that way, gradually falling apart, until the 1930s when textile magnate Sir Stephen Courtald and his wife Virginia moved in, building a stunning Art Deco mansion while restoring the medieval bits as best they could, a process continued by English Heritage who finally opened it to the public in 1995.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbZVI2R4kgY[/embed]

Not that I have time to step inside and pad around. Instead, I skirt the outside, past the Grade II*-listed Lord Chancellor’s Lodging — probably 16th-century, but looking frighteningly like a modern fake — and down the hill to go up again.

Suddenly the air is thick with the stench of horse-shit, which for some reason — presumably class-based — is a wholly acceptable order of ordure. I can cope with the two teenage girls clip-clopping up the lane ahead of me, less so the idiot in the van who can’t wait to overtake me in order to wait annoyingly close to the horses — then to block off the entire lane so he can chat to someone in a passing car.

Passing van, horses and what seems to still be a working farm, I’m now alone to enjoy, across the paddock, a somewhat humid smoggy view of Canary Wharf. I’m cresting this latest hill — there are many, dear reader, dear God, there are many — via King John’s Walk. An ancient rural lane that once linked the palace with its hunting estates of Middle Park and the Great Park, Coldharbour, Mottingham and Chislehurst. The name could refer to Prince John, born at the palace in 1316 to Edward ll and Queen Isabella; given that young John never took the crown, it’s more likely to be the French monarch Jean Le Bon, who was kept as a courtly captive at the palace after the 1356 Battle of Poitier and was said to have wandered happily along the lane.

The path crosses two more capital-to-Kent arteries — the Dartford Loop trainline and the New-Cross-to-Dover hitch-hiker’s friend the A20 — before climbing again, literally and apparently figuratively. The former village of Mottingham Lane is the sort of place where, to quote Elvis Costello, “there are names, not numbers, on the gateposts”, even if they don’t make much sense: Alvescot, Penleigh, Karind, Norlesden, Brookfield, Mulberry, the Gothic coach-house Cedar Mount, the modish burnt-larch Grange View (£1.4m), Badgers Mount (unapostrophised as a noun-verb statement of fact). Two riding schools range opposite the junior school of Eltham College, an £18kpa independent whose extensive fields I will pass shortly.

But first it’s a brief detour off the Capital Ring, past the extravagantly-bearded cricket legend WG Grace’s former house Fairmount (now a nursing home), past the rubbish-strewn 1970s estate atop Carters Hill and down to the second Capital Trail Challenge checkpoint for a well-earned bakewell flapjack, a refill of water and a brief removal of the shoes to air the aching tootsies. Only brief, though, and not just because I can quickly feel the lactic acid building up: it’s 1.30pm and I’m 20km into a 35km walk, so there’s a way to go yet.

As I recrest Carters Hill to rejoin the Capital Ring on a hot Bank Holiday Saturday afternoon, two cars zip past broadcasting loud music: Gary Numan’s inexplicably enduring Cars and Bonnie Tyler’s considerably less po-faced Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Leaving behind the early 1980s I turn down one of those byways at which England excels, between two fences; beyond the left one is the extensive sports grounds of Eltham College, where Eric Chariots of Fire Liddell presumably ran his baggy-panted heart out for God and country.

As is so often the case, at the bottom of the hill is a river. The chalky surrounds of Eltham and Mottingham don’t go big on watercourses and the mighty Mississippi isn’t going to lose any sleep over the Quaggy River, a childlike name that appears to come from the same root as quagmire. It’s known for flooding but is quiet today: even culverted it’s all of two inches deep, just about enough to cover the golf balls if not quite the cricket balls. But it’s clean enough for mayfly nymphs to have been recorded.