Kent Countryfile

Romney Marsh, a distinctive patchwork of low-lying land.

Cut through with streams and canals, rich in wildlife and history.

Romney Marsh covers 100 square miles along the coast,

stretching from Hastings in East Sussex to Hythe in Kent.

Looking at this marsh,

you would think you could cross it no problem, but you'd be wrong.

It's an obstacle course.

There's a maze of ditches, watercourses and bridges.

They do say, if there's a footpath, then stick to it.

And I've found one.

This landscape hasn't always been this idyllic.

Right up until the mid 19th century, the unwary traveller would

have been risking life and limb crossing these marshes.

Because this was smuggling country, plain and simple.

The featureless expanses and hidden creeks

and waterways made it a smuggler's paradise.

On top of that, France is just under 30 miles away.

These smugglers weren't just trading in alcohol, tobacco and guns.

What they were also after were sheep.

And the Romney Marsh was a gold mine.

Smugglers would kill for the wool on their backs.

I'm catching up with local Steve Humphries to find out more.

So, Steve, what was it then about wool that was so attractive?

Well, there was a big woollen industry in the country.

Wool was the first commodity to have an export tax put on it

-back in the 13th century.

-Right.

So once you've got an export tax on something, then smuggling begins.

And over the next few centuries, then smuggling went on and on.

The smuggling gangs that arose during the 17th

and 18th centuries were often from villages quite some way away.

But of course, they would employ local labourers,

local agricultural workers to carry the contraband from the coast

-and they would pay them good money.

-And were they living like kings?

-What kind of money were they earning?

-They made a lot of money.

Big fortunes were made out of smuggling certainly by the

leaders of these gangs and everybody involved made some money out of it.

-So it was popular.

-How risky was this, Steve?

What kind of a world were they working in?

In 1662, the death penalty was imposed for smuggling wool.

So the smugglers probably thought, "Well, if I'm going to be hanged

"for smuggling, if I murder someone on the way, I'll still be hanged."

And of course, there's the phrase -

rather be hung for a sheep than a lamb.

These were clearly not guys to mess with.

But there was one hardy breed who protected the flocks.

He was called a looker

and was employed to look out for the sheep and trouble.

A rough and tumble job, but it came with its own accommodation.

These self-employed lookers

would spend about six weeks of the year in here.

They came into their own at lambing time.

There's a fireplace, enough room for a hay-bale bed and plenty of room to

store all of your tools, so to be honest, what more could you want?

But during the 19th century,

with 350 of these huts scattered right across the marsh, the chances

are that contraband would have found its way into here as well.

It seems everybody was in on the act, even the local churches.

Smuggling expert Richard Platt is going to tell me

more of this sorry tale.

So this church was one of the many churches then that were

involved in storing this contraband.

Why were churches such an attractive prospect for the smugglers?

Churches were great for smugglers because they were cavernous.

They had cavernous interiors and lots of nooks

and crannies where you could hide stuff.

But also because they were one of the few places

in a village where the door could be locked without arousing suspicion.

I think the vicars really played a passive role in the whole thing.

They weren't actively involved in smuggling,

but they were aware it was going on and they didn't see any moral

contradiction in allowing this to happen.

But there must have been a lot of coming and going.

If they were storing stuff here,

the smugglers would come in and take it to their market.

Yeah, there would have been a constant

parade of people into the church to drop stuff off and pick it up.

And how would the priests be thanked for their services?

The priests would be paid off, not in money, but they would find a little

keg of brandy or something outside their back door

in the dead of night, or a small bale of tobacco.

But there's one sign that suggests just how welcome the smugglers

were here.

This is a picture of a ship

and it was supposedly a sign of a place of safety,

probably from the time when smugglers were exporting wool as contraband,

rather than importing brandy and luxuries like that.

So this was a kind of secret sign.

This huge image, the biggest in the whole church, is a secret sign!

It's a secret sign, yeah. That was the whole thing about smuggling.

It was an open secret.

Everybody really knew about it and everybody connived in it.

Unless you bought your tobacco, tea and brandy from a smuggler,

you were a fool.

Yeah, fair enough.

The smugglers didn't have it all their own way.

Getting caught meant the death penalty.

And many a lost soul spent their last nights here,

New Hall Prison in Dymchurch.

This was one of four cells exactly the same size underneath the court.

There would have been up to four men in here and when you look around,

you can see evidence of how they've tried to just keep their minds busy.

All these etchings that are scratched into the wood.

There's some beautiful writing here.

And also these images here, the birds and the horses.

But it just feels... It's grim in here.

It's cold, it's dark, it's lonely. You can sense a lot of unhappiness.

Now, whilst we're exploring Kent, Tom is up in the north east

of England,

finding out about plans to bring rural Britain into the 21st century.

The British countryside might be the perfect place to get

away from it all, but these days,

wherever we are, we still want decent access to the internet.

Yet, in rural areas, the service varies massively.

Some locations are crawling on with the most basic connections,

a mere 0.5 megabits per second, not even enough for BBC iPlayer.

Others, even, are still on dial-up. Remember that sound?

DIALLING

But some are flying along at 30 megabits per second.

Plenty for your online business

and all the possible family fun on the internet beside.

But does that matter?

In parts of the country that seem to offer a slower pace of life,

is there really a need for high-speed broadband?

Ian Close, his mum Pat

and their family run a large dairy farm in rural Lancashire.

They're struggling to run

their business with a basic dial-up connection.

So, Ian, as a farmer, what's the big issue for you in working with

a rubbish internet connection?

The expectation is everything has to be done online now.

The other day, the vet was talking to us about something,

"You can go and look it up on YouTube. There's a presentation.

"It'll show you everything I'm talking about.

"No, but you haven't got a decent internet connection,

-"so you won't be able to do it."

-There's that

expectation now that you'll have that big data pipe to your house.

Everything is geared up for having a fast internet connection.

And when you haven't got it, it makes life very difficult.

Ian's problems aren't just shared by a few isolated farmers.

Businesses in rural areas generate

around a fifth of the British economy.

That's hundreds of billions of pounds every year.

Yet, many are struggling with connections that would be

unacceptable to most urban companies

and it's not just businesses that are suffering.

When communities lack decent internet, what's the effect?

Well, they're cut off. That's the first thing, I suppose.

They're cut off from the outside world, in a lot of cases.

Especially rural farms, rural houses, the ones that are isolated, but

you tend to have a lack of inclusion when you don't have the internet.

People simply don't know what's going on in the outside world.

Does it actually make it difficult for them

-to be part of 21st-century society?

-I think so. I really do.

They haven't got the instant research,

they can't access the shops, the internet banking.

In farming, you've got all the forms that are online.

It's all that sort of thing that really affects us

and it makes us feel remote.

Commercial companies have managed to supply two-thirds of the UK

with superfast internet access and that's an achievement in itself.

But they stop short of rolling out their fibre optic cables

into the remotest parts of our countryside,

saying the low population density made it not commercially viable.

Yet, all is not lost.

Fibre optic cables may soon be coming to a village near you.

One fibre in your hand will do a lot better job than this 300 pair cable.

-Quite significantly?

-Yes.

The Government has now stepped in with a half a billion pound

investment designed to bring the rest of the country up to

speed by 2015.

The broadband delivery UK project aims to connect

the parts that the commercial market won't reach.

And BT has been chosen to do the work.

What kind of scale is this on?

Well, take north Yorkshire, for instance.

10,000km of fibre's got to go in the ground in order to

deliver...connect up 90% of the premises across north Yorkshire.

It's one of the biggest challenges in the UK.

-10,000km, that's in a single county.

-Yes, exactly.

We're talking about hundreds of thousands across Britain.

Absolutely, hundreds of thousands of kilometres, tens of thousands

of green cabinets and technology we have to deploy out to the field.

-So it's a big undertaking.

-And how many millions of pounds?

It's a very expensive game,

very capital intensive communications business.

Some people think it's just for Christmas, it's not. It's for ever.

Whatever we put in, it's got to work today, tomorrow and be upgradeable.

We'll put about £1 billion in, the Government will put £1 billion.

500 coming from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

500 million from local authorities like North Yorkshire County Council.

Other parts of Yorkshire have already reaped the rewards

of improved internet connectivity, thanks to a similar scheme.

In the small village of South Otterington, a high-speed connection

has brought significant benefits to the school and local business.

It's been a really big bonus for the parents, the children,

who can now do their homework at home.

We have the school blog they can contribute to,

we have a learning platform, they can access resources at home

and help complete their homework.

It's been a bonus for the business community

and benefited our parents that way.

But will the rewards of the latest roll-out be worth the cost?

Yes, there's commercial investment from BT

and a lump sum from central government, but the rest

of the money will in many cases have to come from hard-up local councils.

Kent, the Garden of England.

This is Scotney Castle, apparently the most romantic garden in England.

I feel as if I have stepped into a fairytale.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!

She's not in.

Even if romance and fairytales are not your bag, a floral display

like this does make your heart beat that little bit faster.

The gardens were created by the Hussey family,

who lived here for more than 200 years.

A well-to-do bunch, they wanted the views from their stately pile

to resemble a wild paradise.

They planted rainbows of rhododendrons,

explosions of sweet-smelling azaleas.

Vines creep over walls

and tree roots emerge from paths and walkways.

No wonder 130,000 people visit here every year.

But little would they suspect what wild treasures are lurking nearby

beneath these murky waters.

The great crested newt, dragons of the amphibian world.

They are the largest and most threatened

of our three native newt species.

Lee Brady is an ecologist, county recorder for newts

and also president of the Kent Reptile and Amphibian Group.

-Hello, Lee.

-Hello.

With those credentials he has got the licence and more importantly,

the experience, to handle these protected species.

Is it unusual to find great crested newts in, essentially,

-a swimming pool?

-It's not particularly unusual.

We do find great crested newts in a wide range of different water bodies

including swimming pools like this.

Now, what's interesting about this pool is that potentially,

the newts are doing quite well here.

So we're trying to investigate why that might be.

And how many do you reckon are in there?

We have got what we would call a medium relative population.

That is a maximum count of about 15 individuals.

The great crested newt.

Why the crest?

Well, the males have a crest only during the breeding season

and it's part of their secondary sexual characteristics

in order to attract a female.

-It's always about the showing off, isn't it?

-It is.

-And some males have bigger crests than others.

-Of course.

We believe the crest helps the animal to breathe underwater.

Newts can absorb oxygen across their skin

so great crested newts with larger crests potentially can absorb

more oxygen and therefore stay underwater for longer.

Males with smaller crests that have to come to the surface

for a gulp of air will lose the interest of the females.

So larger crests are better. Potentially.

-But interestingly, they don't keep the crest all year round?

-No.

Outside of the breeding season, the animals typically are found on land

and the crest would be an impediment to their movement on land

so they reabsorb the crest back into their bodies.

It's so clever, isn't it?

-Shall we have a look at some now?

-Let's have a look.

-Thank you.

How many different species of newt in here?

We've got female great crested newts

and we've got smooth and palmate newts.

So this particular swimming pool actually supports

-all three of the native newt species.

-Brilliant.

So what I'd like to do is to show you a great crested newt belly.

Yes, please.

-What have you got here?

-This is a squash box.

-Squash box!

But it doesn't literally squash them?

It holds them gently against a clear surface.

Oh, look at that! She is having a little wriggle in there.

She is having a little wriggle.

-I've been careful I don't squash her too much.

-Yeah, she's fine.

-For anybody watching at home, she's absolutely fine.

-So, very bright.

-Yeah.

-Black blotches with a unique pattern.

These markings are completely individual.

-This is its bar code, in essence.

-It is.

We can identify each animal in this pool from its belly pattern.

It's a very, very bright colour.

Is that a warning signal as well?

It does, it tells predators that they are distasteful.

In terms of this pool, is it quite a dreamy situation for newts?

The swimming pool is very good for newts because it is full of food.

The newts are very well fed.

I suspect that they are also still egg-laying and in fact today,

we have found a number of eggs in the pond, which perhaps...

-So they're breeding?

-Yeah, yeah. They're laying eggs.

One of the things we want to discover is

whether those eggs are hatching successfully and

whether the tadpoles are successfully metamorphosing

into juveniles.

There we are, little ones.

Back in your nice, watery home.