There are really two Highams, Upper and Lower, and this is because the village has been gradually moving away from it's original centre towards Rochester. Lower Higham is the oldest part, down by the marshes at the end of Church Street, where St Mary's church flaunts it's antiquity with Roma tiles built into it's walls. In the churchyard lie buried many of the navvies who lost their lives during the building of the canal tunnel through Higham towards Strood. The canal was abandoned and the tunnel used for the railway instead.

It is a very out-of-the-way little church, unfrequented and a bit 'spooky', almost begging to be discovered by some film crew and used as a suitably mist-shrouded location for a late-night horror story. A hundred yards from the church is Abbey Farm, which is on the site of old Higham Priory, a nunnery founded by King Stephen in 1148 and which was still there in 1512 because it was then that the vicar of the church, Edward Sterofer, was reprimanded by his bishop for keeping company with a nun from the nunnery, a certain Lady Anchoretta Ungelthorpe.

Perhaps he was not the only one who 'kept company' with the nuns, either. It surely was not necessary for the Prioress, a year later, to petition the Bishop for a wall to be built round the nunnery 'for the increase in virtue and observance of the rule' in order to fend off the attention of just one vicar?

On the other hand, though, in 1520 - by which time the Lady Anchoretta had become Prioress and admitted she had taken money from the Common Chest of the nunnery in order to pay debts owed to her sister - two other nuns were said to have borne children fathered by the vicar, so perhaps the wall was needed after all. Anyway, the nunnery was closed soon after that and scarcely a breath of scandal has emerged from what what remains of the old village since.

The parish used to be a collection of hamlets that included Lillechurch, Church Street, Gore Green and Chequers Street. It was to Chequers Street that the Gravesend-Rochester railway came in 1845 and there that Higham Station was built, just about halfway between Lower Higham and the former hamlet of Higham Upshire, which is now the larger centre of population.

The railway tunnel between Higham and Frindsbury, two and a quarter miles long, was designed for the Thames and Medway canal by William Tierney Clark, who also built an iron bridge over the Danube at Budapest. But the canal was not a financial success and the line was adopted by the Gravesend and Rochester Railway, which later became part of the South Eastern Railway network.

Upper Higham began to emerge as a village during the 18th century, and it was this that Charles Dickens knew so well during the time he coveted and later when he owned Gad's Hill Place. Gad's Hill itself was, before Dickens' time, a notorious place for highwaymen, who waited until the travellers had slowed their pace on the hill and then relieved them of such encumbrances as their purses and other valuables.

The Sir John Falstaff Inn recalls that it was here where Shakespeare's great comic character had his own taste of highway robbery in company with Prince Hal. Here, too, began the Dick Turpin legend after a gentleman was robbed on the hill early one summer morning. He afterwards identified his robber who was able to prove he was with the Lord Mayor of York at 8.30 pm that same day, and was acquitted of the robbery by a jury that could not bring itself to believe that a man could be in Higham and York on the same day.

Later the robber was convicted of other offences and admitted the crime, telling how he had ridden to Gravesend, forced the ferryman to take him and his horse over the river, and had then ridden across Essex to Cambridge and so to York, where he went to a fete in the York teagardens and deliberately engaged the Mayor in conversation for some minutes to establish his alibi.

The hero of this exploit was not called Dick Turpin, who was a different character altogether, but was a well-known Kent highwayman called Swift Nicks.

Almost opposite the Sir John Falstaff is Gad's Hill Place, built by a man called Stevens, a barely literate ostler at an inn who was canny enough to marry the landlord's widow, became a brewer and reached the pinnacle of social achievement by becoming Mayor of Rochester. Now the house is a girls school, but once it was a private house where Charles Dickens lived from 1856. It was in the garden of this house that the author had his famous Swiss chalet workroom in which he was working on the story of Edwin Drood the day before he died there in June 1870.