Blue Bell Hill

Blue Bell Hill is a chalk hill between Maidstone and Rochester in the English county of Kent. It overlooks the River Medway and is part of the North Downs. Settlements on the hill include Walderslade; and Blue Bell Hill and Kit's Coty villages. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries much of the hill was quarried for chalk.

The south west side of Blue Bell Hill is a Site of Special Scientific Interest as it harbours several rare plant species. A picnic area serves as a rest point for walkers on the North Downs Way which runs along the top of the hill whilst the prehistoric trackway of the Pilgrims' Way skirts its foot. A modern crematorium also surmounts the hill.

The A229 dual carriageway follows the route of a former Roman road and climbs the hill, today linking the M2 and M20 motorways. High Speed 1 also runs beneath the hill, via the North Downs Tunnel, and archaeological work in advance of it uncovered a Neolithic long house on its slopes.

The Bluebell Hill transmitting station is located on the hill.

Read more about Blue Bell Hill:  Archaeology

Famous quotes containing the words blue, bell and/or hill:

    But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
    The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
    That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
    ‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)

    I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

    What rein can hold licentious wickedness
    When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)