Is there anyone out there in the Gravesend, Cobham, Cuxton, Sole Street, Harvel, Great Buckland or Meopham area who knows anything of the history of a small isolated cottage on Cutter Ridge Lane quite near The Golden Lion Inn at Luddesdown that is today called Cutteridge Cottage?

My knowledge of the place dates from the late forties, when I lived in Sole Street where I was born. It was then inhabited by an elderly gamekeeper who I think worked for the Darnley Estate, by the mid fifties it had fallen into a ruin and remained partly fallen down and used as a free range chicken house by a local farm, until it was bought I was told, by a man who lived in Gravesend, in the mid nineteen sixties who began to rebuild it.

When it was finished he was not to live in it for long before there was a fire there, the cottage was seriously damaged and the man became ill, apparently dying in Gravesend Hospital in the late sixties. For a couple of decades the cottage remained a ruin until someone began to rebuild it on quite a grand scale in the mid eighties, extending it and making it I think double storied.

I moved from the Medway Towns area to Shropshire in the early nineties and when I revisited the cottage, now named Cutteridge Cottage in the late nineties it was finished, but appeared to be once again abandoned and though part furnished, was becoming severely overgrown once again. Reference to Google Earth Maps appears to confirm that Cutteridge Cottage is still abandoned and it looks as if it is now an almost completely overgrown ruin.

I  would be most interested to hear from anyone who has any genuine information about this property.

Honker 785.