Florence Gasking, known to everyone as Ma, ran the Ringlestone Inn with her daughter Dora from 1958. They are remembered, locally, for two things. The first was a shotgun, which they used to inspect arriving customers and dispatch any they did not like. The second was a series of secret knocks, speakeasy-style, that regulars needed to gain entry. Their behaviour, the histories politely note, may have originated in an incident when the inn was overwhelmed by around three hundred bikers. Some pub stories grow in the telling. This one, somehow, grew narrower.
The hamlet of Ringlestone - originally Rongostone, meaning "ring of stones" - predates the Norman Conquest. It appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 and in the Kent Hundred Rolls of 1274. The name evolved through Rongoston, Renglestone (1822), and finally to Ringlestone in 1867. The present building was constructed in 1533, in the reign of Henry VIII. The brick and flint walls still survive. The oak beams still hold up the roof. The interior is broadly unchanged since around 1732. Tables inside the inn are made from the timbers of an 18th-century Thames sailing barge - the flat-bottomed coastal traders that carried Kentish bricks and hops up the Thames into London. An oak sideboard once stood in the inn inscribed with the words "A Ryghte Joyouse and welcome greetynge too ye all." It belonged to John Tufton, Earl of Thanet, and his wife Margaret Sackville of Knole, and is now displayed at their family seat of Knole near Sevenoaks.
The original building was a hospice belonging to the church - a place of rest for monks travelling between religious houses, who farmed the surrounding land. Around 1539, in the aftermath of Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, the monks left. They were probably imprisoned or executed; the records do not say. A 1588 will from one Julius Papworth Quiller directed that "my house at Rongoston and land thereto belonging be sold to pay my debts and legacies." The property was bought at auction by Septimus Hepplewhite, a wheelwright and cooper from the parish of Hollingbourne, who set up a small cooperage on the site. After his death in 1609, his widow and eldest son took over. Around 1615, his second son Oliver Hepplewhite added ale-brewing and selling to the cooperage business. The transformation from religious hospice to working country pub was complete.
For the next century and a half, travellers on the road between London and Kent stopped at the inn for refreshment. Samuel Cooper, the 17th-century portrait miniaturist whose painted likenesses of Oliver Cromwell and Charles II survive in the Royal Collection, is said to have visited in 1656. Elias Shepherd, a highwayman known to have robbed stagecoaches between Faversham and Canterbury, frequented the inn before his capture at Charing and his hanging at Penenden Heath in 1765. On Friday 1 March 1788, two smugglers named John Roberts and Francis Whorlow - both wanted for the murder of two dragoons and the smuggling of five thousand gallons of Dutch gin at Whitstable - were arrested at Ringlestone and taken to Faversham gaol. At the Old Bailey, Roberts gave the alibi that he had been visiting his family at Ringlestone when the murders took place. Both men were acquitted. The owner of the Ringlestone Inn at the time was recorded as "Avery Roberts" - perhaps the same family.
At least from 1901 until his death in 1905, the innkeeper was Henry Brooks Bates. In 1913, Charles Alfred Rayfield took over - and his son, Charles "Gunner" Rayfield, became part of British military folklore. Gunner Rayfield is said to have fired what may have been the first British artillery shell against German forces in the First World War, in the chaotic opening days of August 1914. The inn passed through the standard rhythm of 20th-century rural pubs - changing hands, opening and closing, expanding the dining room. Then came Ma and Dora Gasking in 1958 with their shotgun and their concrete blocks thrown from the windows. Why exactly they ran the inn that way, the records cannot say. The 300-biker incident may explain the original tension. The reputation, once earned, sustained itself.
In 2005, the Kent brewers Shepherd Neame - whose Faversham brewery has been operating since 1698 - purchased the inn. By May 2018, it had been closed and was being prepared for auction, the latest casualty of unforgiving rural pub economics. The interior, an EastEnders film crew had used as a location during the Easter 2007 holiday season. The Grade II listed building was at risk. Then, in August 2019, after an 18-month closure and refurbishment, the doors reopened. New owners Dalton Hopper and Paolo Rigolli had taken it on as a free house - an independent pub not tied to a brewery - and a restaurant. The original brickwork remained. The oak beams from 1533 still hold up the roof. The Thames-barge tables still sit in the snug. Five hundred years of continuous building, two hundred years of continuous drinking on the same spot. A few alleged ghosts. No more shotguns.
Located at 51.270 north, 0.692 east, in the hamlet of Ringlestone near Wormshill, on the high ground of the Kent Downs about 6 miles east-northeast of central Maidstone. London Gatwick (EGKK) is about 30 nautical miles west; Manston (EGMH) is 22 nm east. From the air the inn is a small brick and flint building set among hedged fields and woodland, on a back lane far from any major road.