Blue Bell Hill

Blue Bell Hill is a village of detached houses and bungalows on top of the Kent Downs, with a view across the Medway valley good enough that nobody minds the dual carriageway roaring past the end of the garden, or at least nobody admits to it. The neighbours include a Neolithic burial chamber at Kit's Coty and, by local legend, a phantom hitchhiker who has been thumbing lifts on the hill road since the sixties, which makes her the only resident without a driveway. Everyone else drives, because the alternative is walking down a chalk escarpment and back up it with the shopping. It is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty with a lorry soundtrack, and the people up here picked the view over the quiet knowing exactly what they were doing.