Overhead there is the sudden swish from the wings of the speeding wood pigeons as they set out to feed in the corn stubble and the melodic song thrush can be heard pouring out his heart to the World from his vantage point on a nearby chimney. The air is crisp and the light breeze cool, a portent of the frosty mornings yet to come when the long grasses at the edge of the fields will be adorned with the clinging lace of hoar frost bending their tops to the ground.

The hop fields are fragrant with the heavy smell of the hop flowers and the bines are so thick with leaves to the point where the poles that support them, which are so obvious on the landscape in the Spring, can no longer been seen. Surrounding the hop fields are the rows of poplars with their twisting, fluttering leaves that whisper back to the wind. Inside the hop gardens themselves, under the canopy of the bines which compete with each other to reach the sun and the light, there is a sininster darkness only broken occasionally by a sudden stabbing shaft of light where a bine has broken or failed to grow. The rows seem endless, the narrow hills on which the plants were started, disappear into the distance and the dark and the sounds of the outside World fade away, muffled by the intense growth of the bines. There is a hush, a moment of peace, almost ethereal...

At one time Kent had over thirty thousand acres devoted to the growing of hops although what that figure is today, I have no idea. I suspect somewhat less although if someone would care to enlighten me, I would be obliged. Certainly, since the sixteenth century when the hop was introduced to England, Kent and beer, it has been an important commodity and vital to the local economy. As a writer by the name of Thomas Tusser once said in his abstract about hop growing:

Meet plot for a hop yard, once found as is told,
Make thereof account, as of Jewell of gold:
Now dig it, and leave it the sun for to burn,
And afterwards fence it, to serve for that turn.

These days, like so many other things, hop picking is fully mechanised which means that a whole legacy of words and phrases have disappeared from the local language. What child now knows what a bushel is? It is, for the aid of the uninformed, a measure of quantity being eight gallons and was the size of the baskets in which hops were hand picked. These bushel baskets were then placed into bins. Sections of the hop gardens were looked after by "bin-men", a kind of foreman, who would as a badge of his rank carry a long pole tipped with a sharp hook which he would use to cut the bines away from the hop-twine that supported them.

At regular intervals during the day while picking was in process, the contents of the bins would be collected and emptied into hop-sacks to be taken to the oast house for drying. This process would be supervised by the "tally-man" who was usually the farm bailiff and would keep a running total of the number of bushels picked by each person or family. As a child in the hop gardens, you would be in trouble if you got caught misbehaving by one of the bin-men, but Lord help you if you were caught by the tally-man!

Prior to mechanisation, most of the picking was done by local casual labour but it wasn't so long ago that hundreds of Londoners would make the trip into the Kent countryside for about three weeks every year to stay in small wooden shacks or huts on the hop farms to do the picking. It was an annual vacation for which they got paid.

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