Photos of the Otford Solar System Model
unop.uk
unop.uk
It's beautiful countryside there - I highly recommend it. There's also a circular walk in that area which can be more convenient if you're driving: http://www.walkingclub.org.uk/book_1/walk_43/
Both walks take you past parts of the Otford solar system.
Incidentally, your walk of about 3 miles sends you within a couple of hundred meters of the partial ruins/remains of a medieval palace (16th century), a Norman church (11th-14th century), the site of the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Otford (776), and the archaeological sites of two Roman villas (1st-3rd century). If you widen out by another 500m, there's another Roman villa, and an iron age fort up on the hills.
It's very unusual in Roman Britain to have three villas so close together, and there is speculation that one of the sites may be a temple complex. Lead weights were found which could be unrolled to reveal curses - 'I HATE CLAUDIUS, MAY HE BREAK HIS LEG' sort of thing. They were apparently thrown in for the attention of the local river goddess.
The third villa site has just been discovered, and excavations by the local society are actually underway this weekend.
There are a number of other villas dotted northwards along the valley, and one open to the public with a series of famous mosaics, and the earliest evidence of Christianity in Roman Britain, at Lullingstone.
Otford during the Roman period would have been a significant centre of power, it is at the southern point of the river Darenth, which flows north into the Thames, through very productive agricultural land. To the south is the Weald, which would then have been a massive forest stretching almost down to the south coast and the English Channel. More than one Roman army entered that forest and never emerged. So for the Romans Otford and the Darenth Valley would have been both a breadbasket and the edge of civilization.
It would also have then important as a crossing point for the river, and the point where the river cuts through the North Downs, a set of chalk hills which run Eastwards and then South East, to Dover. Those are the same hills that are cut by the Channel to make up the White Cliffs.
Now, it's a rural or intermittently suburban area, strong banker/commuter territory for the City of London (it's mostly countryside and small villages, but Canary Wharf is only 20 miles away, so house prices are off the scale).
Anyway, my vague point is (beyond being mildly interesting), if you're in London on holiday, or in fact if you live in London, I recommend hiring a car and wandering off into the Green Belt and going to somewhere like this (although it could be pretty much any direction, go 15-20 miles outside the M25 orbital motorway from London and you'll hit the countryside). You'll get a much better idea of England (which is surely above all about cricket on the green, pubs, cream tea and village churches!) than by getting entirely sucked into the tourist maw in London.
They weren't on OSM the first time I came across it on an OS map. So I guess it's a fairly recent addition. It was exciting to discover what the "monument" was.
The North Downs Way (Pilgrims Way) and Darent Valley Path both run through Otford. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/shop/maps/explorer-map-seve...
I was blown away after seeing a scale model solar system on the U Colorado Boulder campus.
The tiny size of the planets relative to the distance of the orbits is mind-blowing, especially the outer planets. It's almost amazing we're able to see the planets so well with the naked eye from Earth through just their own passive reflection of sunlight.