Following the unexpected boost provided by the popular final tour of the preceding year, and the business award from Folkestone Town Council, 2020 always promised to be an exciting year. And within days of the commencement of the New Year, the season’s prospects looked even brighter. An approach from the leader of the Sandgate Parish Council resulted in an agreement to deliver ten walking tours of the village, linked to the dates of the Farmer’s Markets in Chichester Hall on the first and third Saturday of each month from May to September.
And, for the first time, I was given funding to research and design the programme, and to compensate for any slow take up in interest.
In addition, the Folkestone Channel Rotary Club asked me to deliver a day long tour and introductory presentation to their members, including colleagues from Belgium and the Netherlands, as part of their fortieth anniversary celebrations. A date had also been agreed with the Friends of Folkestone Museum to conduct a talk, followed by a walk around the Creative Quarter.
Finally, there was the added enticement of the fifth Folkestone Triennial, scheduled from 5 September to 8 November, during which I had undertaken to provide a series of artworks tours to complement the official programme.
But within three weeks of the launch event, all had “changed, changed utterly” in the prophetic words of W.B. Yeats a hundred years before.
And yet 2020 still became the most successful season in the four year life of Folkestone Walking Tours.
How could that have been?
As March begat April, which turned into May and then June, all the major events in town, including the Triennial, were postponed or cancelled. The only walking I was permitted to do fell into the category of daily “exercise”. I began to joke to anyone who would listen that, if and when lockdown restrictions were lifted, I might find myself the “only gig in town”.
And so it proved.
On a cool, wet morning on Saturday 4 July I was joined on the steps of Rocksalt by fourteen human guests and a dog for a three hour stroll around the harbour and seafront. Despite persistent drizzle and intermittent dives for cover to avoid the seagulls seduced into joining the group by one of our number with large handfuls of food, it had been a enjoyable and liberating event. My prior concerns about the legality of the size of the group, and the potential inability to maintain the appropriate distance between each other, proved unfounded too as the police in evidence allowed us to move around unchallenged.
The Sandgate tours got underway two weeks later, and I was eventually able to deliver the entire programme, with a further tour thrown in for good measure.
But a remarkable thing happened to confirm my earlier prediction.
As society reopened, and many felt comfortable in leaving their homes again, I began to receive requests for tours from leaders of groups such as the U3A (University of the Third Age) and other “Meetup” parties. Starved of their customary range of activities, they were determined to enjoy the great outdoors again. With so little else on offer, walking tours became an even more attractive proposition than they might otherwise have been.
I even found time to offer “new” literary and artworks walks – and a special birthday tour for the family of the former Prima Pottery shop owners on the Old High Street.
With holidays cancelled, there needed to be no end date to the season, other than if further restrictions were imposed, which duly returned in November. But in the intervening period, I was able to deliver twenty six tours for a total of two hundred guests. That figure would have been even greater had the “rule of six” not been in force during part of the period, which left a number of prospective guests disappointed.
In the space of eight months, 2020 had promised much, threatened to disappoint but ultimately delivered in unexpected but satisfying ways.
And then 2021 proved equally interesting.
But that is for another day.
Tony Quarrington 