Countryfile

Kent (26x9)

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The Countryfile team explores the coast and countryside of Kent. Matt Baker island hops to Elmley Marshes on the Isle of Sheppey. It is a peaceful place that has become a haven for wildlife. Out on the marshes, he meets the farmers managing the land with conservation in mind and joins wildlife enthusiasts out on a bird safari. Further inland, Ellie Harrison explores an ancestral pile being transformed on a grand scale. Knole has been a show home for many distinguished owners through the centuries but it was the Sackville family that made it their home for 300 years. Still partly a private home, a large part of the house is now managed by the National Trust. Ellie gets special access to rooms previously unseen where work is underway to repair and catalogue everything from photos to expensive objet d'art. John Craven finds out about a lesser known Kent produce, Kentish blue cheese. He visits a dairy farm using its own milk for its cheese and learns the secrets to making a fine blue. Helen Skelton is in the Wiltshire countryside. A place that has provided inspiration for artists, poets and writers for centuries. One of our most famous war poets, Siegfried Sassoon, chose to live in Wiltshire for the last 36 years of his life. Here he continued to write poetry and prose, motivated not by the horrors of war but by the beauty he found in the countryside. Tom Heap discovers that there are hundreds of thousands of disused mines and mine shafts beneath the British countryside. They may be out of sight, but they are still causing problems on the surface - subsidence, water pollution and in extreme cases collapses that open up huge holes in the ground. Tom asks whether we should be doing more to find these old workings and make them safe.