Smeeth is a mostly agricultural land use village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...

, centred east of Ashford in the Ashford Borough of

Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...

, England.

Geography

Smeeth is a small village in population near Mersham Hatch Park on the A20 road from Ashford to

Folkestone Folkestone ( ) is a coastal town on the English Channel, in Kent, south-east England. The town lies on the southern edge of the North Downs at a valley between two cliffs. It was an important harbour, shipping port, and fashionable coastal res ...

. The church of St Mary the Virgin contains some Norman work such as the

south South is one of the cardinal directions or compass points. The direction is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to both west and east. Etymology The word ''south'' comes from Old English ''sūþ'', from earlier Proto-Germanic ''*sunþa ...

door A door is a hinged or otherwise movable barrier that allows ingress (entry) into and egress (exit) from an enclosure. The created opening in the wall is a ''doorway'' or ''portal''. A door's essential and primary purpose is to provide securit ...

way,

tower A tower is a tall Nonbuilding structure, structure, taller than it is wide, often by a significant factor. Towers are distinguished from guyed mast, masts by their lack of guy-wires and are therefore, along with tall buildings, self-supporting ...

arch An arch is a curved vertical structure spanning an open space underneath it. Arches may support the load above them, or they may perform a purely decorative role. As a decorative element, the arch dates back to the 4th millennium BC, but stru ...

ways and

chancel In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar, including the Choir (architecture), choir and the sanctuary (sometimes called the presbytery), at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building. It may termi ...

Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen, 1st Baron Brabourne Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen, 1st Baron Brabourne (29 April 1829 – 6 February 1893), known as E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, was a British Liberal and later Conservative politician. He served as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Depar ...

is buried in the churchyard. Three east-west routes pass quite near to the middle of the parish and are aligned east-west: the

M20 motorway The M20 is a Controlled-access highway, motorway in Kent, England. It follows on from the A20 road (England), A20 at Swanley, meeting the M25 motorway, M25, and continuing on to Folkestone, providing a link to the Channel Tunnel and the ports a ...

, the A20 single carriageway road and the

High Speed 1 High Speed 1 (HS1), officially the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL), is a high-speed railway linking London with the Channel Tunnel. It is part of the line carrying international passenger traffic between the United Kingdom and mainland Euro ...

railway line connecting to the

Channel Tunnel The Channel Tunnel (), sometimes referred to by the Portmanteau, portmanteau Chunnel, is a undersea railway tunnel, opened in 1994, that connects Folkestone (Kent, England) with Coquelles (Pas-de-Calais, France) beneath the English Channel at ...

. Most of the development is residential and all of the neighbourhoods are north of the motorway. The parish has many headwaters to the East Stour which bounds Smeeth to its south. The far northern borders are contiguous with

Brabourne Lees Brabourne Lees is a village in the civil parish of Brabourne, within the Ashford borough of Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the ...

and link into its main 'village street' directly; this is also where most of the buffer land is woodland it also had a railway owend by SER

References

External links

Statistical civil parish overview - map
{{authority control Villages in Kent Villages in the Borough of Ashford Civil parishes in Ashford, Kent