When I was growing up in rural Kent, one persistent rumour that dominated the school gossip network was that one kid’s mum would organise an orgy in an ancient woodland just off the M25 after every parents’ evening. Heavy stuff, but par for the course for playground banter.
I never knew who the boy in question was. Nevertheless, its location did always stick out to me. The orgy was said to take place in Farningham Wood Nature Reserve, around a 20 minute walk from my childhood home. The reserve is one of the very few places of open green space in Swanley – an otherwise drab and grey town, centred around a derelict high street held together by two betting shops and a Turkish barbers. The reserve, while small, has a unique soil composition that makes it home to a rare assemblage of flora and fauna, notably the Deptford pink wildflower and the small-leaved lime tree. As a result, it is classified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest – one that draws in hundreds of nature enthusiasts and amateur botanists every year. But I hadn’t thought about those schoolyard rumours until recently.
For like so many, I was pulled back home to Kent by the ructions of the pandemic, and found myself trapped in one of those inexorable Zoom quizzes, when the old rumour about Farningham Wood re-emerged.
‘It still goes on there!’ insisted my friend Alex, who recalled coming across three dildos and an empty bottle of lube while walking his dog one Sunday afternoon. Though having had a tendency to over-exaggerate in his youth – particularly when it came to how many girls he’d gotten off with at under-18 clubs – most in our group were prone to believing him. After all, Kent has long had a reputation for being a prime location for ‘dogging’, the not-so-graceful term associated with having or watching people have sex in public. The county markets itself as the Garden of England, whispering that Blighty of old: sleepy, quiet villages marked by Victorian country pubs, winding country roads and acres of pristine farmland. For the UK’s dogging community, it is precisely these features that make Kent so lucrative. Its seclusion, lack of public transport and coterie of unused farms – alongside its numerous connections to the country’s major motorways – make it an ideal place to have an outdoor sex party.
I was curious about Alex’s assertions, and the boldness with which he made them. So the following week, I used my allotted daily mental health walk to visit Farningham Wood in search of more clues. To get there required traipsing through an array of narrow country roads, nearly getting clipped by speeding cars. Next, I passed by a row of quaint, thatched cottages, and finally slipped through an industrial park purposed for tractor and combine harvester maintenance.
It was there I came across the first set of open condom wrappers, nestled in a pile of McDonald’s burger wrappers, cigarette butts and empty canisters of nitrous oxide. A fairly unremarkable scene considering this was suburban England, so I decided to venture deeper. I stared deeply into every thorny bush, checked behind every tree in sight. My hands were stung by nettles as I carefully separated weeds, in the hope I’d find any remnant of Kubrickian theatre masks or cheaply produced leather lingerie – admittedly, the only things I could associate with dogging. Two hours later – and conscious that my neighbour could be about to call the police for breaking COVID guidelines – I began walking back, accepting that I had once again been taken in by Alex’s bullshit.
That was, until this summer, as I spooled out an August evening on the internet, where I came across a bizarre post on my Nextdoor page. A user was complaining: they had taken their family to Farningham Wood to go star-gazing, only to accidentally stumble across an orgy. The comments under the post were a mix of moralistic disdain (‘disgraceful!’ and ‘no wonder nobody respects the English’) and less-than-subtle requests to find out more information about where these orgies take place – and how regularly they took place. It seemed Alex was right. I scrolled further, hardly believing what I was reading.
It was a hyperlink posted near the bottom of the thread that led me to a locked Facebook group. After months of lurking and sending unanswered interview requests, I finally had a stroke of luck: a pair of doggers agreed to speak with me.
