THE KENTISH COAST

WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-Day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.

The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.

The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.

The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”

Cycle Rides Round London.

A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.

Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.

The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”

The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.

The Dorset Coast.

The South Devon Coast.

The Old Inns of England. Two Vols.

Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy.

Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).

Haunted Houses; Tales of the Supernatural.

The Manchester and Glasgow Road. This way to Gretna Green. Two Vols.

The North Devon Coast.

Half-Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols.

The Autocar Road Book.

The Somerset Coast.

The Cornish Coast. North.

The Cornish Coast. South.

Thames Valley Villages

The Shakespeare Country.

The Sussex Coast.

[In the Press.

DOVER CASTLE: THE WHITE CLIFFS OF ALBION.

THE
KENTISH COAST

BY
CHARLES G. HARPER

“Kent, in the commentaries Cæsar writ,
Is termed the civil’st place of all this isle:
Sweet is the country, because full of riches;
The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy.”

King Henry the Sixth (Second Part).

London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1914

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Kentish Coast: Deptford to Faversham

THE KENTISH COAST

CHAPTER I
DEPTFORD AND PETER THE GREAT

The seaboard of Kent, and indeed the south coast of England in general, is no little-known margin of our shores. It is not in the least unspotted from the world, or solitary. It lies too near London for that, and began to be exploited more than a hundred and fifty years ago, when seaside holidays were first invented. The coast of Kent, socially speaking, touches both extremes. It is at once fashionable and exclusive, and is the holiday haunt of the Cockney: a statement that is not the paradox it at first sight appears to be, for the bracing qualities of its sea-air have always attracted all classes. We all ardently desire health, whether we are of those who romp on the sands of Margate or Ramsgate and eat shrimps in the tea-gardens of Pegwell Bay, or are numbered among those who are guests at the lordly Lord Warden, the Granville, or the Cliftonville.

Where does the coast of Kent begin? It begins at Deptford, that crowded London suburb which would doubtless be considerably astonished in contemplating itself as a seaside town, and in fact does not do so. Yet Deptford’s old naval history and ship-yard associations give it a salt-water flavour, and so we must needs say that the coast begins there. True, it is but the Thames whose murky waters lap the shore at Deptford; but the Thames here is the great commercial “London River,” as seamen call it, the port to which resorts a goodly proportion of the world’s shipping; and sea-going vessels crowd the fairway at all hours of day and night.

Past Greenwich, Woolwich, and Erith the Thames goes in its gradually broadening course, and at length comes to Gravesend. Gravesend Reach is, and has always been, by general consensus of opinion, the Sea-gate of London, and therefore, without any manner of doubt, on the coast.

The length of the coast of Kent, reaching from Deptford, and tracking round Sheppey and up the Medway estuary to Rochester, and in and out of the queer places wherever the foreshore wends, I make to be about one hundred and thirty-eight miles. It is—the whole of it—extremely interesting, and in places grandly beautiful and in others quietly pretty; and also along some other stretches, scenically (but never historically) dull and drab. Below Gravesend, round the Isle of Grain, and round Sheppey and the Swale to Whitstable and Herne Bay, for instance, no one could perceive much of nobility actually in that coast-line of London clay and of low, muddy, or shingly foreshores. But where the chalk begins at Westgate, and the sea, ceasing from washing the clay and receiving the contaminations of the Thames and Medway, becomes more cleanly, the coast, grows by degrees more striking.

As for the history that lies in the landings and embarkations, all along the coast of Kent, why, there was never such another coast as these storied shores. The fame of them begins at Gravesend, to which those foreigners who did not by any chance land at Dover generally came in the dangerous old days of the road between Dover and London. At Faversham a king who sought secretly to leave his kingdom was detained; at Ebbsfleet landed the Saxons under Hengist and Horsa, and a hundred and fifty-seven years later came to that same spot a Christian missioner who came missionising very much against his own inclinations. At Deal, 1970 years ago—a tolerably long stretch of time—a great personage set the fashion in these numerous landings. I name Julius Cæsar, the noblest Roman of them all, who, as far as history tells us, was the first of any importance who ever burst into these unknown seas. Great personages have been doing the like ever since. The reason for this exceptional honour shown the Kentish coast, which has thus from the earliest times been the Front Door of England, is quite easily glimpsed on any sunny day anywhere between Deal and Folkestone, in the gleaming coast of France, which reminds us that most of those world-famous characters, in common with modern voyagers across the Channel, disliked the sea, and crossed by the “shortest route.”

For the rest, Dover has been the scene of comings and goings uncountable, and to attempt recounting them would be wearisome indeed. Charles the Second, who had lively experiences in a hunted embarkation from our shores, experienced a welcome change in 1660, being received on his “glorious restoration” by his loyal subjects on Dover beach, and in 1683 came ashore at what was at that time “Bartholomew’s Gate,” in Thanet, which, in honour of that act of kingly condescension, has ever since been called “Kingsgate.”

Kent, the Cantium, or country of the Cantii, mentioned by Julius Cæsar B.C. 54, and by other ancient writers, is thought to take its name from the peculiarity of its geographical position, jutting boldly out (or, in other words, “canted out”) in an easterly direction, beyond the estuary of the Thames. There is another view taken of the origin of the word, a view which derives it from caint, the “open country,” as distinguished from the woodland character of Sussex, the ancient “Andredswald”; but, against this, it does not seem to be sufficiently established that Kent ever was such an open country, while the evidence of maps shows us that it does indeed project most markedly.

The Kentish Coast, then, begins little more than two and a half miles below London Bridge, the county boundary between Surrey and Kent being placed at Earl’s Sluice, on the Grand Surrey Canal, in Deptford, just beyond the Surrey Commercial Docks. There, where the Royal Victualling Yard fronts the busy Thames, midway between Limehouse Reach and Greenwich Reach, begin the 138 miles of this strangely varied and exceptionally historic coast-line.

Undoubtedly the noblest and most fitting introduction is to proceed down river by steamer to Greenwich, for that way you perceive the greatness of the Port of London, and the majesty of the commercial and maritime interests of the capital; while to come “overland”—thus to dignify the approach by mean streets through Bermondsey and Rotherhithe—is an effect of squalor.

Deptford of to-day is an integral part of London. Not an ornamental part; indeed, no. Rather an industrial and wage-earning place. One does not “reside” at Deptford, and there are not a few who find it difficult even to live. It is thus not easy to associate it with that “Depeford” of which Chaucer writes in his “Canterbury Pilgrims,” in 1383: “Lo, Depeford, it is half-way prime.” The deep ford whence it obtained its name is—or rather was—on the Ravensbourne, or the Brome, as that stream has sometimes been called, at the Broadway, on the Dover Road; but the many changes that have taken place have of necessity abolished any possible likeness to the passage that existed in Chaucer’s day. In any case, the Deptford around the Broadway, the present bridge over the Ravensbourne, and the road on to Blackheath is not the real intimate Deptford. That is only to be found on the river side of Evelyn Street, and in the neighbourhood of Creek Road, where the Ravensbourne broadens out into Deptford Creek. Here is the real Deptford; more especially along the winding old street oddly—and with a curiously shipboard suggestion—named “Stowage,” and so to the old original church of Deptford, dedicated, as it should be in a waterside church, to St. Nicholas, the sailor’s patron.

From the church, Deptford Green leads to the waterside, and adjoining is “Hughes’ Fields.” Pleasantly rural although these names sound, candour compels the admission that they are, in fact, streets, with no suggestion of grass or meadows about them. The church of St. Nicholas dates from about 1697, and is a red-brick building in the curious taste of that time; retaining, however, its old stone fifteenth-century tower. Flourishing plane-trees render the churchyard in summer not unpleasing, but the stranger is apt to see with a shudder the grisly stone gate-piers, surmounted by great sculptured skulls decoratively laurelled, as though Death were indeed the conqueror and the hereafter merely a vain thought. You might travel far, and yet find nothing so truly pagan.

DEPTFORD GREEN: ST. NICHOLAS’ CHURCH AND CHURCH-HOUSE.

Yet in this church is gathered much of Deptford’s olden story, and in it are the memorials of captains and constructors of the Navy in times when Deptford was much more of a dockyard and seaport than a stirring quarter of London: monuments dating from before the days of Charles the Second and Pepys. Here you shall find that of Peter Pett, master shipwright in the King’s yard, who died in 1652. The Latin epitaph upon this master craftsman quaintly describes him as “a thoroughly just man, and the Noah of his generation.” It further goes on to say that “he walked with God and brought to light an invention even greater than that recorded of his prototype (for it was an ark by which our mastery of the sea and our rights were saved from shipwreck). He was called away from the tempests of this world, God being his pilot, and his soul resting in the bosom of his Saviour as in an ark of glory.” This seventeenth-century Noah and inventive saviour of his country was the designer of the new frigate type of ship, the Dreadnought of its day.

Here also is the monument of Captain George Shelvocke, who thrice circumnavigated the globe, and died in 1742. The north side of the church facing Deptford Green, which as already remarked is not any longer a green, and cannot have been for some two hundred years or more, forms a striking picture, for a group of red-brick eighteenth-century buildings, built on to it, is obviously associated with the church itself, although of absolutely domestic character.

The great days of Deptford began in the reign of Henry the Eighth, with the rise of the Royal Navy. It had been described as “a mean fishing village” until the “King’s Yard,” as the dockyard was named, was established in 1513—the first of our naval dockyards. There the earliest ships of the Navy took the water; vessels with the strange, and long since impossible, names of Jesus, Holy Ghost, John Baptist, Great Nicholas, and the like: sacred names whose use in such a connection would in our own days offend the ear with a sense of blasphemy. The naming of ships in that manner went out of fashion with the Reformation, and thereafter no English Holy Trinity set forth to deal out death and destruction upon the high seas. It was left to the Spaniards to couple holiness with conflict and slaughter, and for such awful names as Madre de Dios, Sanctissima Trinidad, and Espiritu Sancto to be associated with warfare.

The breach with Rome brought an entirely new order of names into the Royal Navy of England, of which that of the Mary Rose was for a time typical. But the domestic prettiness of love in a bower pictured by such as this presently gave place to others, of the robustious, defiant kind, such as the Revenge. It is true that there was even another order, of which Sir Richard Hawkins’s Repentance was representative. It marked the full swing of the religious feelings of Englishmen from the idolatries of Rome to that sinners’ sense of abasement under conviction of sin which was a feature of Protestantism and the Puritan wave of thought.

It was in the year of the Armada that the Repentance took the water at Deptford. One would dearly like to know exactly why Hawkins gave his ship that name. Was he wrestling with the spirit, or had he in his mind some conceit of bringing repentance home to the Spaniards? The Elizabethan age was an age of ingenious conceits, and this may well have been one of them. But the name did not commend itself to Elizabeth when she was rowed from her palace of Greenwich to see the new ship, lying off Deptford beautiful in paint and gilding, and she renamed it the Dainty. Perhaps the great Queen considered Repentance to be a singularly ill-chosen name for a ship about to sail on a filibustering, piratical expedition. It is curious to consider that the expedition was a disastrous failure, and that a cynic dispensation of affairs thus mocked the original choice of a name; just as it did that of Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge, three years later, when the fight went against the English, and Grenville was killed and the Spaniards had their own revenge for much.

Seven years before her visit to Sir Richard Hawkins’s ship, Elizabeth had made a notable journey to Deptford, when she went aboard Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, in which he had returned from circumnavigating the world, dined there, and knighted him after dinner.

Of all those ancient days and brave doings nothing remains. The dockyard, although from time to time enlarged, and actually in existence until 1869, is now but a memory, and the site of it is occupied by the Foreign Cattle Market. It was the smallest of all the dockyards, only thirty acres in extent; but it was the introduction of ironclad ships, and the greater depth of water required that led to its end, after a temporary closing between 1810 and 1844. The last vessel launched was H.M.S. Druid, in 1869.

When the average person thinks of Deptford, historically, it is not to Queen Elizabeth’s visits his mind reverts, nor even to Mr. Secretary to the Admiralty Pepys, but rather to John Evelyn, to Sayes Court, and Peter the Great. John Evelyn, later of Wotton, settled at Deptford in 1651, at the mansion of Sayes Court, which had been originally the manor-house of West Greenwich. Here he made gardens and planted trees, the chief delight of his life. “I planted all the out-limites of the gardens and long walks with holly,” he says, in March 1683.

He was extremely proud of his holly-hedges:

“Is there under heaven a more glorious and refreshing object of the kind than an impregnable hedge of about four hundred feet in length, nine feet high and five in diameter, at any time of the year glittering with its armed and varnished leaves? The taller standards at orderly distances, blushing with their natural coral: it mocks the rudest assaults of the weather, beasts, or hedge-breakers—Et ilium nemo impune lacessit.”

No one, he thought, could insult a holly-hedge with impunity.

In 1665 he found Deptford a very desirable place of retreat from the Great Plague of London. Later he let Sayes Court to Admiral Benbow, who in January 1698 sublet it for three months to the “Czar of Muscovy,” Peter the Great, who was as earnest then in planning a navy for Russia as the German Emperor of our own times in building a fleet for Germany. But the Czar himself worked as a shipwright in the dockyard and filled Sayes Court with a semi-savage household. His reputed chief amusement, that of continually wheeling a wheelbarrow through Evelyn’s cherished hedges, is perhaps the most vivid item of information about Peter the Great in the average Englishman’s mind: something of an injustice to the memory of that constructive autocrat, whose greatness was not built upon such eccentricities.

The generally received account of the Czar’s way with the hedges is that he trundled wheelbarrows through them; but it would appear that he was seated in the barrow, and that some one else did the wheeling.

Three months of “his Zarrish Majestie” and suite sufficed to very nearly wreck Sayes Court and its gardens. Benbow and Evelyn claimed compensation from the Treasury for the damage, and the Treasury, considering that the Czar was the guest of William the Third in this country, admitted the liability and deputed Sir Christopher Wren to make a return. The document is still in existence. Among other items of dilapidations by that riotous tartaric company are:

The total amount awarded by Treasury warrant of June 21st, 1698, was £350 9s. 6d., of which £162 7s. went to Evelyn.

Sayes Court was almost wholly demolished in 1728, and the remainder converted into a workhouse. A plot of ground of fourteen acres, a portion of the old gardens, was secured in 1877 by Mr. W. J. Evelyn of Wotton, and converted into a public recreation ground. The Evelyns still own considerable property here, and although Court and gardens be gone, the historic sense is strong, and Evelyn Street, Czar Street, and Sayes Court Street, neighbour thoroughfares named after the Armada, Blake, and Wellington, and curiously contrast with the unimaginative “Mary Anne Buildings.” It is, however, only right to say that the streets that remind one of those historic people and that old mansion are as squalid as the buildings that honour Mary Anne.

Across the bridge that spans Deptford Creek, amid the surroundings of canals and wharves, you come into Greenwich. The Frenchman of the story illustrating the vagaries of English pronunciation, uncertain whether he wanted “Greenwich or Woolwich, he didn’t know which,” and pronouncing the place and names as spelled, was to be excused: how could he know it was “Grinnidge” and “Woolidge”? And how many Englishmen can speak the name of Rennes properly after the French use?

CHAPTER II
GREENWICH—THE ROYAL NAVAL HOSPITAL—THE “FUBBS YACHT”—THE GREENWICH WHITEBAIT DINNERS—WOOLWICH—THE “PRINCESS ALICE” DISASTER—LESNES ABBEY—ERITH—DARTFORD

To fully appreciate the majestic appearance of Greenwich, you must view it from the river. Indeed, none of these waterside places from Deptford all the way to Gravesend, show to advantage on shore. Their historic associations and original scenic beauties are too overwhelmed with recent squalid developments. But from the busy Thames, Greenwich has a grandeur that is not easily to be expressed. This is due, of course, chiefly to the architectural interest of Greenwich Hospital, whose stately water-front is in part the work of Sir Christopher Wren. It began as a Royal Palace, arising on the site of the ancient palace of Placentia built here by Henry the Sixth, who also enclosed the park. In that vanished palace Henry the Eighth was born, and there died Edward the Sixth. Queen Mary in 1516, and Elizabeth in 1533 were born at Placentia, and from its terrace Elizabeth watched the sails of her adventurous seamen setting forth to realms that Cæsar never knew. When Charles the Second found himself firmly established, he began to build himself a new and gorgeous palace on the site of Placentia, which had suffered much in the time of Cromwell. The beginnings of it alarmed Pepys, who was afraid it would cost a very great deal of money; but it was never finished as a royal residence, and was incomplete in 1692 when Queen Mary selected it as a home for wounded sailors returned from the battle of La Hogue. She died in 1694, and William the Third continued his wife’s scheme. The buildings were completed and opened as a hospital in 1705.

I do not think there was ever a Greenwich Pensioner who liked living in Greenwich Hospital. That they ever reasoned out all the causes of their dissatisfaction is not to be supposed, but it must be quite obvious that residence amid these stately colonnades of Wren’s design, and in these monumental buildings of such prodigious scale, was not a little like living in a mausoleum. Then there was the feeling of being a mere part of a system and subject to a certain degree of control which, together with an embarrassing public curiosity, must have made burdensome the life of any Greenwich Pensioner of independent mind. They are nowadays much happier in living with friends and relations; and probably suffer less from rheumatism than they did amid these draughty waterside colonnades, pleasant enough in summer, but where the bitter blasts of winter can be really murderous. The views of an old Greenwich Pensioner on Wren’s stately architecture would be interesting, but probably not at all flattering to the memory of that great master. They would not be worth listening to on the score of ideas about architectural style, but as criticisms of the Hospital as a dwelling-house they would be very much to the point.

GREENWICH HOSPITAL.

In course of time, somewhere about 1870, the Greenwich Pensioners plucked up courage sufficient to express their dislike of the place; and at last prevailed upon those Pharaohs, the Governors of the institution, to let them go from the House of Bondage and Draughts, so to speak, and to betake themselves and their pensions wheresoever it pleased them to live.

The Royal Naval College now partly occupies these great ranges of buildings; and other portions, are, of course, well known as a museum, in which the Nelson relics and a curious collection of ship-models are to be seen.

There are, in one way and another, a good many recollections of Charles the Second at Greenwich. One of them is found in the name of the “Old Fubbs Yacht” inn, which stands in Brewhouse Lane, hard by the “Ship.” “The Fubbs Yacht” is nowadays more in the nature of an obscure public-house than an inn, but the back of it looks upon the river, and passengers by steamer to and from Greenwich Pier may easily see the odd and not beautiful name. No one, however, is in the least likely to associate it with Charles the Second; but the sign derives directly from his royal yacht, Fubbs, which succeeded his first yacht, the Cleveland, just as his favourite, the Duchess of Cleveland, was succeeded by Louise de Kérouaille, whom he created Duchess of Portsmouth, and whom he nicknamed “Fubbs” because of her “plump and pleasing person.” Singularly enough, these are exactly the words in which the vicar describes Mrs. Partlet, the pew-opener, in the comic opera, The Sorcerer.

THE “OLD FUBBS YACHT” GREENWICH.

But you will hear nothing of this history at the inn itself, where the vague idea prevails that “Old Fubb” was a sportsman, who, at some time unspecified, sailed racing yachts. The situation of the house is now of the grimiest, with a busy coal-wharf on either side, but it is sung by a modern poet—not Tennyson, nor Alfred Austin, nor Kipling, but by one J. G. Hamer, who writes thus, in the advertising way:

“There’s an ancient house near the subway,
‘Fubb’s Yacht,’ kept by William Pring,
In the old royal borough of Greenwich,
Where the bells of St. Alphage ring.

“Do you want a good sixpenny dinner,
From twelve o’clock till two,
You’ll get what you want at the ‘Old Fubb’s Yacht,’
From steak-pie to Irish stew.

“A jolly good tea for fourpence,
You can have at this well-known spot,
And enjoy yourself by the silvery Thames,
At the cosy and smart ‘Fubb’s Yacht.’”

Together with much more to the same effect. I fear no contradiction when I say that Tennyson never wrote anything like this.

Beyond the stately Hospital, along a humble waterside street where the riverside “Yacht” and “Three Crowns” inns hang out their signs, the inquisitive stranger will find the Hospital of the Holy Trinity, sometimes called Norfolk College, an alms-house for a number of old men, founded together with another at Clun in Shropshire, and one for women at Castle Rising in Norfolk, by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, in 1814. It is a quaint, white-painted group of buildings, enclosing a little cobble-stoned courtyard with a central garden and a fine large lawn at the back. In the chapel, otherwise uninteresting, is the monument of the founder; removed in 1696, together with his body, from the then ruined and roofless church of St. Mary at Dover Castle, where he had been Constable. His life-sized, white marble kneeling figure, with the Garter on his left leg, looks stately and dignified in the chancel. It is indeed among the best works of that notable sculptor, Nicholas Stone. Other portions of the monument, in fragments at the west end of the building, show signs of having at some time been long exposed to the weather. The figures are rather speculative, and may be either a galaxy of Virtues and Graces, or wife and children.

Trinity Hospital is overhung and pitifully dwarfed by the great electric power-house of the London County Council’s electric tramways, whose chimneys rise to a height of nearly 300 feet. They are typical of the great change that has come over Greenwich in modern times, tending towards degrading it to a mere indistinguishable part of London. Fortunately, it possesses too many beautiful natural features to become ever quite that.

But no longer is Greenwich dignified by the ministerial whitebait dinners that were once held at the “Ship.” These once famous entertainments that generally marked the close of the parliamentary summer session originated in a casual way, about 1798, when the commissioners of Dagenham Breach invited Pitt to be a guest at their annual fish dinner at Dagenham. The occasion was successful enough to be repeated, and the scene was eventually changed to a tavern, sometimes at Blackwall and sometimes at Greenwich. By this time the annual feast had developed into a Tory ministerial event, and proved so useful in the strengthening of party ties that the Whigs, when in office, adopted the custom.

The Greenwich ministerial whitebait dinners, held either at the “Ship,” the “Crown and Sceptre,” or the “Trafalgar,” were formerly accompanied by something of what, in less exalted circles, we should style the showy “beanfeast” element; for the Royal and Admiralty barges, gay with bunting, conveyed the guests to the scene of jollity, and back. Only the concertinas were lacking. The function was first broken during the Gladstonian administration of 1868–74. In that last year, with the triumph of the Conservatives, Disraeli revived it, but the excursion was made by steamer instead of by barge. And so it continued, through the next Liberal term of office, until 1883, when it was again discontinued; to be revived on only one occasion since, in 1894, during the short-lived administration of Lord Rosebery.

Not only Ministers of the Crown resorted to Greenwich for whitebait dinners: they were long popular with Londoners in general; but now that the swiftest of communication with London is obtainable, this most easily perishable of fish is just as readily to be had there, and Greenwich has suffered in consequence. Whitebait, supposed by some to be a distinct species of fish, and declared by others to be merely the small fry of herring, are caught between Blackwall and Greenwich, said to be the only waters in which they are found.

All the way from Greenwich to Woolwich, a matter of three miles, run the electric trams; the river going in a bold loop almost due north, along Blackwall Reach. A fine, broad, new road runs across the dreary flats to the Blackwall Tunnel; and all along these once solitary levels great modern factories are springing up. The explorer will not get much joy of going that way; nor indeed will he find much by going ahead into Woolwich, for the mean things that fringe about the skirts of a great city are abundantly evident.

Woolwich looks imposing from the river, with its crowded houses backed by the wooded heights of Charlton and Shooter’s Hill, but it is disappointing on close acquaintance. Its streets, of the narrowest, described to the present writer by a contemptuous attendant at the Free Ferry as “not wide enough to wheel a bassinette,” are old without being either ancient or picturesque, and although they own such attractive names as “Nile” and “Nelson” Streets, “Bellwater Gate,” and “Market Hill,” are grim and repellent. The parish church, in midst of these unlovely surroundings, is exactly in keeping: a grim, eighteenth-century affair of dull stock brick, like a factory. Many of the crowded tombstones around it were removed in 1894. Among them was one to a certain Emmanuel Skipper, who died in 1842, whose epitaph concluded:

“As I am now, so will you be,
Therefore, prepare to follow me.”

To which some one, apparently a stone-worker engaged in the churchyard, added in very neat lettering:

“To follow you I’m not intent,
Till first I know which way you went.”

North Woolwich, whose name will be found by the diligent student of maps, on the opposite shore, is not, as might reasonably be supposed from its situation, in Essex, but is a portion of the county of Kent. There are, of course, many instances throughout England of detached portions of shires and counties islanded in others, but perhaps none so oddly arbitrary as this, where a broad river separates the two portions. Rarely ever do we find an altogether satisfactory explanation of these peculiarities. In the present instance it is held to be owing to the ancient local manorial possessions of Count Haimo, Sheriff of Kent in the reign of William the Conqueror, lying on either side of the Thames, and that, therefore, the smaller portion of his holding was included in that county in which his greater interests lay. It is an ingenious, if not altogether convincing theory.

Woolwich is associated with one of the most terrible shipwrecks of modern times. A good many years have passed since the wreck of the pleasure-steamer Princess Alice thrilled London, but there are many yet living who remember the occasion. The Princess Alice plied frequently in the summer between London and Gravesend, and was generally crowded. She was exceptionally well filled on that fatal day, September 3rd, 1878. More than eight hundred people were aboard. London trippers are proverbially jolly, and those who in those days made holiday at Gravesend and Rosherville were folk of exuberant spirits. Music and dancing occupied the attention of the holiday folk on the return voyage, and all went well until after passing Gallions Reach and rounding Tripcock’s Tree Point. Night had fallen upon the broad and busy river, and coming swiftly down-stream appeared the lights of a large screw-steamer, the Bywell Castle collier. The captains of both vessels were taken by surprise, and both lost their presence of mind, with the result that the Bywell Castle struck the Princess Alice immediately forward of her engine-room, and cut her in two. In less than four minutes the Princess Alice had sunk, and 670 persons were drowned. Some few, with the exercise of much agility, jumped aboard the collier at the moment of the collision, but many were women and children, and many more were in the saloon, and were caught there, as in a trap.

It was finally decided in litigation that the Princess Alice was alone to blame for the disaster. Some of the drowned were buried in Woolwich Cemetery, where a monument stands, erected by a “national sixpenny subscription” contributed by over 23,000 subscribers. Around it are long lines of small stones, marking where the dead lie. The inscription on the monument gives figures considerably at variance from those given in books of reference. It states: “It was computed that seven hundred men, women, and children were on board. Of these about 550 were drowned. One hundred and twenty were buried near this place.”

This melancholy spot is situated on the one-time pleasant hill-side above Plumstead, between Woolwich and Abbey Wood; close to where Bostal Woods still look down from their craggy heights upon the wide-spreading marshes of Plumstead and Erith. This was once an exceedingly delightful escarpment, densely clothed with noble woods and vigorous undergrowth, stretching away to Erith, but the suburban expansion of London is spoiling it. Cemeteries—the abodes of the dead—and little mean streets of houses, scar the once rustic hill-sides, and along the road that goes to Erith, down in the levels, the electric trams run swiftly. But the place-names are still fragrant: Abbey Wood, Picardy, Belmont, and Belvedere; and indeed the great Abbey Wood is still very much more than a name.

Here is Lesnes Abbey Farm, whose 260 acres comprises 200 acres of woodland. The lands, now and for long past the property of Christ’s College, are of much romantic and antiquarian interest, for here was situated the Abbey of Westwood, or Lesnes, founded in 1178 for Augustinian Canons by Richard de Lucy, Lord Chief Justiciar of England, and at one time protector of the realm. The founder died within a year, and was buried in his abbey church. For 347 years the Abbey of Lesnes continued in existence, and was then suppressed by Cardinal Wolsey, in 1525, and its revenues seized for the purposes of his educational endowments. The Abbey ruins and lands passed in succession to a number of owners.

So long ago as 1752 the buildings had become a mere heap of rubbish, with little remaining above ground, and that greatly overgrown with trees. Excavations were then made and numerous monuments were discovered, but they appear to have been all covered up again; and not until 1910 was the site again explored. Work was then undertaken by the Woolwich Antiquarian Society, and some highly interesting remains have been unearthed. There, close by the modern farmhouse, deep down in pits dug in the accumulated soil, you see the bases of pillars of the Lady Chapel and the Chapter House, with floors of encaustic tiles; and there, too, are five Purbeck or Bethersden marble coffin-lids of the abbots and brethren of this vanished Abbey. One, bearing a shepherd’s crook, is that of Abbot Elyas, while another, on which the word “medicina” may be clearly traced, is obviously that of a brother who acted as doctor. A museum of relics has been established in a room of the farmhouse. Chief among these was the life-size, cross-legged effigy of a knight in chain-mail, supposed to represent one of the De Lucy family, about 1301; the shield on his arm bearing the “flower-de-luce.” The colours and gilding are still perfect. This interesting relic has now been removed to the South Kensington Museum.

The name of Belvedere is curiously un-English, but the village is sufficiently British, with a very ordinary “Belvedere” railway station. The origin of the place takes us back to early in the eighteenth century, when a mansion of that name was built on the wooded hill-top, in a pleasant park whence the estuary of the Thames and its crowded shipping could be seen. Hence “Belvedere,” a word deriving from the Italian, bello vedere, a pleasant view. Look-out towers commanding fine prospects, and known as “belvederes,” or sometimes as “follies,” are familiar objects all over the country, in ancestral parks. This mansion of Belvedere was rebuilt in a “classic” style, in red brick, about 1764, by Lord Eardley. A still wider view is obtained from a prospect-tower in the grounds. The park was greatly cut up for building purposes in 1859, and the village of Belvedere then sprang up. The mansion itself was purchased for £12,000 and opened in 1867 as a home for old sailors: the Royal Alfred Institution for Aged Merchant Seamen.

Any expectation of beauty in the village, or wretched forlorn settlement, of Belvedere that fringes the road to Erith would be doomed to disappointment, and Erith, which succeeds it, is simply beastly: there is no other fitting word for the place nowadays. “Aer-hythe,” whence the place-name is said to derive, is considered to mean the “old port,” and a picturesquely dilapidated old place it remained until recent years, with a quaintly ramshackle old wooden jetty projecting into the Thames, and a curious wood-and-glass house at the head of it. Coal was leisurely landed here, in a way that was, by comparison with the present methods, altogether amateurish. Nowadays the street of Erith is mean and squalid, and filthy coal-yards and busy power-houses, together with a network of railway-lines, occupy the shore. Modern industrial conditions have rendered Erith a place eminently desirable to leave unvisited. Nor do the marshes and low-lying fields beyond it, towards the mouth of the river Darent, reward the explorer, whose only course is now to turn inland and so come, past the hamlet of Perry Street, through Crayford and along the Dover Road, into Dartford town.

Dartford does not greatly concern us here, because, for one thing, it is not upon the coast, and, for another, it belongs to quite a different subject, the Dover Road; and in a book on that highway I have described the town at some length.

It is a matter of some two miles from the town, more or less beside the river Darent, across the low-lying and sometimes marshy meadows, to the Thames-side. You pass the scattered hamlet of Joyce’s Green and evidences of gunpowder works; and, nearing the Thames, there opens before you a view of Long Reach, with the smallpox hospital-ships, and on the Essex shore the very striking picture of Purfleet, a busy little place, nestling at the foot of its bold, chalky hill. A place very little, yet very busy and grimy when you come closely into touch with it, is “Portflete”—thus to style it by its older name.

CHAPTER III
STONE—GREENHITHE—NORTHFLEET—HUGGENS’S COLLEGE—ROSHERVILLE—GRAVESEND—SHORNEMEAD—CLIFFE—COOLING—THE HUNDRED OF HOO—THE ISLE OF GRAIN—HOO ST. WERBURGH—UPNOR CASTLE—STROOD

Rising steeply out of Dartford, we come by the Dover Road, the ancient Watling Street, up to the lofty plateau of Dartford Brent; here taking the left-hand fork where the road branches. To the right goes the Watling Street, the Roman road, our left-hand route conducting gradually past Stone to the waterside at Greenhithe. Industrial England is prominent on the way, greatly to the disadvantage of the older England of romance. The thoughtful man asks himself, on passing the huge City of London Lunatic Asylum at Stone, and coming into a region of chalk-pits and cement-works, whither we are tending.

Here, where the hill-sides are being cut away for sake of the chalk, and where lofty chimneys send forth clouds of smoke, stands the lovely Early English church of Stone, built, it is thought, by the designers and craftsmen who created Westminster Abbey. The clustered shafts of the nave-arcade, and the general decoration of the interior, bear a marked resemblance. The exceptional elaboration of this parish church is due to the offerings of pilgrims on their way to and from the shrine of St. William of Perth at Rochester. The church stood beside the road, and thus came in for the pilgrims’ alms. The modern pilgrim will only note that this church, begun on this beautiful and costly scale, was completed on a minor note. This is due to a falling-off of those wayfarers’ gifts.

Greenhithe sits beside the river, in a queer little byway. From it sailed away into the northern ice and an obscure death, Sir John Franklin and his crews of the Arctic expedition, on board the Erebus and Terror, 1845. Many an one must, since then, have reflected upon the peculiarly ominous names of those ships.

Greenhithe is just a quaint, waterside street of houses running parallel with the Thames, with shops of a kind which give you the impression that they are kept by people who never expect to sell anything, and that they, in fact, never do sell anything; that they would resent the very suggestion of a sale, and are a kind of shop-keeping anchorites, who keep shop in fulfilment of vows to deny purchasers the satisfaction of making purchases. Though, I honestly declare, I have never seen any article in Greenhithe shop-windows in the least desirable by any reasonable person. Almost the oldest house in this queerest of queer streets is one which bears the initials and date:

E.
I. M
1693

I believe it must have been only a little later than this period when some of the goods exposed to view in these windows were added to stock.

INGRESS ABBEY.

In the broad reach off Greenhithe and Northfleet are anchored the training-ships Arethusa, Warspite, and Worcester; and at the eastward end of this street, which leads to nowhere in particular, you come suddenly upon the handsome mansion of Ingress Abbey, built about 1834 by Alderman Harmer, then proprietor of the Weekly Dispatch. It was built from the stones of old London Bridge, which had been pulled down two years earlier. Sweetly pretty, almost noble, must the Alderman’s lordly mansion have looked, in its lovely waterside park, rich in noble trees. So, indeed, it does even yet, although the house has been long empty, and although it and the park are about to be abolished for the building of a huge wall-paper manufactory. The entire neighbourhood, in fact, is being thoroughly commercialised, and rendered a fuming, striving horror of machinery and belching factory-chimneys. Enterprising people have even plans for factory-building on that projecting spit of desolation between Greenhithe and Northfleet, known as Swanscombe marshes; while as for Northfleet, that old-time village has become a sprawling place of much squalor.

The chief feature of the long street is the rather striking group formed by the dwellings and the chapel of Huggens’s College, in grounds secluded behind a lofty wall. In the years 1844–7 the amiable John Huggens, a city merchant, founded and endowed this college, as almshouses for the benefit of gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances; and here forty of these collegians, with their wives and one woman relative, reside and enjoy an annuity of £52 apiece, and live, like all pensioners, to the most preposterous and incredible ages, much to the disgust of those in the waiting list. Over the archway leading into the grounds is a statue of the admirable Huggens, seated and habited in a tightly buttoned-up frock-coat. He seems to be seeking inspiration in the skies, and holds a roll of papers in his right hand, while the left appears to be groping in something that resembles a coal-scuttle. The street at this corner is quaintly named—in allusion to Huggens, no doubt—“Samaritan Grove.”

Here we are again on the Dover Road, with modern developments of electric tramways leading on through Rosherville to Gravesend. Let us, as soon as may be, turn off to the left from the dust and the traffic, and seek the waterside at Rosherville Pier. The famous gardens created in the great chalk-pit by the enterprising Jeremiah Rosher, 1830–35, were for many years the scene of Cockney jollity and the wildest of high-jinks; all thought very daring by the early Victorians who indulged in them. “Rosherville, Where to Spend a Happy Day”: that was the legend. You made excursion by steamer from London and indulged in tea and shrimps—“s’rimps” in the Cockney tongue, you comprehend—taken in earwiggy arbours in gardens decorated with plaster statues; and possibly took part in some dancing, later on, under the illuminated trees. These things, considered awfully wild then, we look back upon with disgust for their mingled slowness and vulgarity.

Of late years Rosherville Gardens have had but a precarious existence. Now you find them closed, and then they are reopened for a space, and again they are closed once more. The place that Rosher created outside his moribund gardens—this Rosherville—is a grim and grisly spot, with gaunt, would-be stately stucco-fronted mansions and a vast hotel, empty. A melancholy Parade or Terrace faces the river, and a broad road leads up from it to the Garden entrance, on whose gate-piers are great gilded sphinxes: the whole presenting, even its prime, an awful aspect of Egyptian mysticism, qualified, it is true, by plaster, but still not, you know, ever of a gay and gladsome kind. Children, involuntary partakers of those “Happy Days,” were appalled by these surroundings, and usually howled with dismay at sight of those gate-piers, refusing to be comforted at the explanation that the awful beasts on them were only “spinkses.” Many an unhappy child dreamt horribly afterwards of being pursued by spinks.

The mile-long walk along the shore from Rosherville to Gravesend affords much food for reflection. Here you notice for the first time that the water is salt; obviously sea-water, because the wooden piles are hung with sea-weed. At this time of writing the “Marine Baths” that once were well patronised are being demolished, after a long period of disuse and decay. They fronted upon this parade, in a forbidding, Pharaonic type of architecture that gave to bathing an aspect of partaking in the dread rites of the ancient Egyptian worship of Osiris and all that weird hierarchy of bird-and-beast-headed gods and goddesses. Sea-bathing at Gravesend is a thing of the past, and on the site of these baths the commercial spirit of the age is rearing vast factory-buildings. Thus ends Gravesend’s Early Victorian dream of being a seaside resort; but one would not declare that the place is the less interesting. It is, indeed, of a greater interest than ever, and the busy waterway presents a grand panorama of the might and majesty of modern shipping. For there, on the opposite shore, are Tilbury Docks, to and from whose capacious basins come and go the great liners and cargo boats. There, too, glimpsed across the half-mile of waterway, is Tilbury Fort, where modern and unhistorical batteries stand in company with that old historic blockhouse where Queen Elizabeth reviewed her troops before the threatened arrival of the Spanish Armada.

TILBURY FORT.

The chief feature—ornament it can scarce be styled—of Gravesend’s river-front is the Royal Terrace Pier. It is a construction for use rather than display, and is in fact the headquarters of the sea and river pilots who, to the number of nearly 300, wait here and navigate vessels up and down river to and from London, or out to sea by the “North Channel,” as far as the Sunk Lightship, off Harwich; or by the “South Channel,” as far as Dungeness. At the head of these men is an official of “the Trinity House,” with the title of “Ruler.” The “Ruler of the Pilots” settles all official business and disputes that are not serious enough to be referred to the Trinity House headquarters on Tower Hill.

“Gravesend” is not a pleasant name, even though it may suggest to the imaginative the final triumph of the Christian: “O grave, where is thy sting? O Death, where is thy victory?” with visions of the shining Beyond. But the place-name has not, in fact, anything to do with these considerations or speculations; and refers to some prehistoric trench which in the dim past formed a boundary-line between neighbouring tribes.

Leaving Gravesend, you come down again to the shore by turning to the left out of the main road by the tramway terminus and through the unlovely region of “Coal Road,” past the “Canal Tavern,” and over the Thames and Medway Canal by a footbridge. Here, along the waterside, is the office of a person described on his sign-board as an “Explosive Lighterman.” The place where this alarming creature carries on business is Denton Wharf. Adjoining is the “Ship and Lobster” tavern. Out in front stretches the Thames estuary. It is the spot referred to by Dickens in “Great Expectations,” Chapter LIV., in which Pip is engaged in smuggling the convict, Magwitch, out of the country. The building seen in the distance, by the waterside, is Shornemead Battery.

CURIOUS OLD BOAT-COTTAGE AT CHALK.

It is a curious region: the deserted Thames and Medway Canal on the right, the busy Thames on the left; and it is rendered yet more curious by the whimsical old cottage presently seen, standing in the narrow space between canal and river; an odd, amphibious building, the lower part brick, the upper portion made of an old man-o’-war’s barge, placed keel upwards. It is almost exactly such another as Peggotty’s boat-house on Yarmouth sands, imagined and described by Dickens in “David Copperfield.” The old Wellington man-o’-war’s boat was sold out of the service about 1822, and the cottage has been here since then; obviously, therefore, it must have been well known to Dickens, whose honeymoon days were passed at the neighbouring village of Chalk in 1836. “David Copperfield” was not written until 1850, so it is plain he must have had this queer old place in mind.

It is true that the Peggotty home is described as being in its natural position, keel downwards, and that this old boat of the Wellington man-o’-war is upside down, and forms both roof and upper floor of the cottage; but these are mere matter-of-fact details easily surmounted in a work of fiction.

In all these years these stout timbers have served to shelter the present occupant and his father, and if the occasional tarring they receive is not forgotten, they bid fair to last many generations longer. The upper floor is divided into two bedrooms, and you “come aboard” into them from the brick-walled lower story up a very maritime-looking hatchway. The interior is very quaint, showing the ribs, and, in fact, the whole construction of the boat, while the bedroom, which has the additional advantage of a window cut in the stern, quite realises David Copperfield’s view of the bedroom in the Peggotty establishment, as “the completest and most desirable bedroom ever seen.”

The melancholy shore-line may be followed as far as Shornemead Battery, a heavy masonry fort designed in modern times for the protection of the Thames, its design discredited by later military engineers. Worse discredit is cast upon the design of Cliffe Creek Battery, a mile and a half lower down, and the fort near Coalhouse Point, on the opposite shore, whose fire, it appears, would enfilade one another and do more damage to friends than enemies. Shornemead is the ultima thule of the riverside explorer here. It is alike unpleasant and unprofitable, if not actually impossible, to proceed farther. The point now to be aimed at is Cliffe, and that village is reached by retracing the shoreward path and crossing the railway and canal and then taking the road on left which leads to Chequers Street, near Higham Station, and on past Cliffe station.

SHORNEMEAD BATTERY.

The village of Cliffe, as might be expected, stands high, on a kind of upland whence the ground breaks rapidly away to Cliffe Creek, remarkable for nothing but cement-works, a coastguard station, and mud. Always mud. At low water, mud thick and slab; at high water, mud in solution. Cliffe is otherwise called “Cliffe-at-Hoo,” and is the “Clofeshoch,” or “Cloves-hoo,” (i.e. “Cliff’s Height”) of early Anglo-Saxon synods, long held here annually. They were established by Archbishop Theodore in the seventh century.

CLIFFE BATTERY.

Beyond Cliffe we come by a winding road into Cooling, or Cowling, whose name means “cow pasture.” In advance of the few and scattered houses forming the village is that romantic old building, Cooling Castle gatehouse, almost all that now remains of the fortress built here towards the close of the fourteenth century by Sir John de Cobham, the third Baron Cobham. The work occupied six years, and was the cause of much excited comment among the peasantry. Those were the times of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw and the peasants’ rebellion—threatening times, when it behoved even great nobles to go warily; and so Lord Cobham sought means to avoid criticism and the muttered threats to pull his castle down about his ears. He did this by letting it be understood that his stronghold was built, not for the purpose of overawing the mob, but in view of foreign invasion, and he put his intent on record by placing on one of the gatehouse towers the curious inscription on enamelled copper plates which still remains in its original position. It is designed to resemble a legal document, or charter, and runs thus:

“Knowyth that beth and schul be
That I am mad in help of the cuntre
In knowyng of whyche thyng
Thys is chartre and wytnessyng.”

COOLING CASTLE.

The curious word “beth” we may read as “be-eth,” i.e. “it is”; or, as a rustic might say, even to this day, “it be.” These words are enamelled in black on a white ground. Below them, on a seal, are Lord Cobham’s arms: gules, on a chevron or, three lions rampant sable. He died in 1408, at a very great age; about ninety-five. His granddaughter, Joan, married, as her fourth husband, Sir John Oldcastle, the “good Lord Cobham,” friend of Henry the Fifth and of Wycliffe. He became a religious reformer and friend of the Lollards, and thus incurred the enmity of the Church; churchmen then, as now, and at all times, being eager in heresy-hunting. He was cited to appear before Archbishop Arundel, but when the apparitor appeared he shut himself up behind these formidable walls and defied the citation. But eventually he was brought to trial in London. He denied the doctrine of the Real Presence, and in the disputes with the bench of bishops declared the Pope was Antichrist, the prelates his members, and the friars his tail. He was condemned to be burnt, and although he escaped and wandered about the country nearly four years, he met a martyr’s fate at Christmas 1417, when he was hanged, and burnt hanging. Thus ended the “good Lord Cobham,” one of the earliest victims of a bloodstained Church without pity or remorse.

Of the castle little remains except the gatehouse towers with their bold machicolations, the moat, and the crypt of the Great Chamber. A modern house has been built in the enclosure.

THE “CHARTER,” COOLING CASTLE.

Cooling is in midst of the grim fenland associated with Dickens’s story, “Great Expectations,” and in fact is the scene of the opening chapter, in which Pip meets the dreadful convict, Magwitch, at night, in the churchyard. According to the story, the district of “the Meshes” is “a most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work,” and it is, truly, dreariness itself in winter or in bad weather. Dickens, of course, stage-managing his story, which opens on a “raw afternoon towards evening,” made the most of these unpleasant surroundings; and those atmospheric conditions, in Cooling churchyard and in company with the grisly row of graves of the Comport family, just to the south of the church-tower, would be sufficient to dishearten any one. Pip, looking out upon “the dark, flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,” began to cry; and no wonder, for he is represented among the tombs of his father and mother, Peter Pirrip and his wife, and of his five brothers. The Comport tombs, which formed the originals for Dickens’s idea of the Pirrip family, actually number ten in a line, with three more behind, and are presided over by a headstone bearing the inscription, “Comport of Cowling Court, 1779.” They are of the most odious and gruesome shape, roughly cylindrical and widening at the shoulders, suggestive of coffins and mummified bodies, and plastered with grey cement over brick. To the imaginative mind, they strikingly resemble so many human chrysalids, awaiting the day when they shall be hatched out as cherubim.

GRAVES OF THE COMPORT FAMILY, COOLING: “LIKE CHRYSALIDS.”

This is a kind of country that responds magically to sunshine, and, given a fine day, the marshes that stretch away for two miles down to the river form a beautiful picture, inviting to exploration. But it is better to keep along the road that goes winding away through High Halstow, Hoo St. Mary, and Allhallows, than to attempt reaching the shore at Egypt Bay, where the convict hulks used to be stationed, and where a coastguard station now stands. Only the most devious and primitive tracks lead that way, and the marshes that look so beautiful in the distant view, grey-green and golden in the sunshine, are commonplace enough on close acquaintance.

At High Halstow we come into the Hundred of Hoo and into the centre of this little-visited region, projecting, out of the beaten track of everyday commerce, between the outlets of the Thames and Medway. “Hoo” signifies a height, and is often found spelt “hoe” in place-names. “The Hoe” at Plymouth is in the nature of a cliff-top. The quaint sound of the word sometimes leads to misunderstandings, as we see by the following newspaper account of some proceedings at the Gravesend Police Court, March 13th, 1914.

Solicitor: Where do you live?

Witness: Hoo.

Solicitor: You.

Witness: Hoo, sir.

Solicitor: You, I mean; you yourself.

Witness: Hoo.

Solicitor: Oh! at Hoo?

Witness: Yes, sir.

Following the road on to Hoo St. Mary, where the large church stands prominently ringed about with trees, the remote little village of Allhallows is reached, rather over half a mile from the shore. Here is an ancient church, with little western bellcote instead of a tower. Turning to left here, along a very bad track, the waterside will be reached at Allhallows Fort, a modern masonry work at the spot called “Bell’s Hard,” looking across to Southend, some four miles away. Southend from this point looks almost as red and yellow, and the sea, under favourable conditions, as blue, as the places pictured on the familiar advertisements of the railway companies. “Almost,” you will observe, not quite! There is nothing on earth really so gorgeous as those. But Southend, from these muddy shores, on a glorious day in July wears the likeness of some Celestial City or New Jerusalem.

In the peaceful times which until recently prevailed the only apparent inhabitant of Allhallows Fort was usually one soldier of the Royal Garrison Artillery, whose chief preoccupation seemed to be the potatoes, cabbages, and beans of a garden at the rear. A mile or so eastward is the muddy Yantlet Creek, which separates the Hundred of Hoo and the Isle of Grain. At the mouth of it, besides a coastguard station, is the obelisk called “London Stone,” marking the limits of the Lord Mayor of London’s jurisdiction as Conservator of the Thames.

STOKE.

The only way to reach the Isle of Grain is to return through Allhallows and proceed to Lower Stoke, a hamlet at the cross-roads, occupying as it were a strategic position midway between a number of extremely small, so-called “villages.” They have nothing in the nature of a shop, and thus the “General Stores” at Lower Stoke fulfils the enviable position of a central emporium. At Lower Stoke, turning left, we come along a marsh road, bordered with deep ditches, across a narrow bridge, into the Isle of Grain, with the railway to Port Victoria running companionably alongside. Port Victoria is glimpsed a mile or so away on the right: all you see of it, across the marshes, being the big funnels of the steamships, some huge oil-tanks, and the great lonely bulk of an hotel. There is no special feature in the Isle of Grain, whose name, by the way, has nothing to do with corn or wheat. It is cognate with the word “groin,” and means a projecting piece of land. Near the shore, overlooking the mouth of the Thames, Southend, and Nore Lightship on one hand, and the Medway and Sheerness on the other, is the village of Grain and the recently restored church, for a number of years little better than a ruin. Here, too, is Fort Grain, with the newly-built naval seaplane station.

Retracing the road to Lower Stoke and turning to left at the cross-roads, we come through Stoke village, with its Early English church and scattered houses set amidst vast flat fields. On the left stretch Stoke saltings, accessible only by water, and frequented only by wild-fowling sportsmen, who thread the oozy channels in their flat-bottomed punts. Along these many salt marshes on either side of the Medway the wild-fowl abound. At a spot oddly called “Beluncle,” where the single-track railway to Port Victoria crosses the road, the vast new sheds and other evidences of the Kingsnorth Medway Airship Base have recently arisen in the open fields. You will seek in vain for “Kingsnorth” on maps, for it is an entirely new name.

ST. JAMES GRAIN.

Reaching Hoo St. Werburgh, we find a considerable village and an old church with weatherbeaten tower and an interesting interior containing, sculptured on one of its pillars, an example of those ancient grotesques which puzzle the modern wayfarer, and seem to him purposeless. They generally, however, represent the Divine gifts either of sight, hearing, or speech, and their grotesque character is often accidental, rather than a matter of intention. This particular example, a monkish head, with left hand approaching the mouth, appears to typify the Gift of Speech; but to a casual observer it might very well be an attempt to portray the horror of some unfortunate person who had accidentally taken poison.

From Hoo St. Werburgh, across Hoo Common and past the hamlet of Wainscot, we come to the turning for Upnor Castle, which lies to the left; paradoxically enough, it would seem, down a village street of the narrowest, steepest, and most rugged description. Surely, thinks the stranger, one should ascend to Upnor. But “Upnor,” which means “up-shore,” refers, not to a height, but to the upper reaches of the Medway estuary.

The castle is a rambling, grey-walled fortress with a series of rugged, cylindrical towers facing the waters of the Medway and looking over to the Chatham Dockyard Extension. Upnor was built in the time of Queen Elizabeth, as a defence of Chatham and Rochester, and seems to have justified itself in the reign of Charles the Second, during that inglorious war of 1667, when the insolent Dutch with sixty vessels took the fort at Sheerness, sailed up the Medway, burning and destroying, and later ascending the Thames to Tilbury Fort, humbled the ancient pride of the Mistress of the Seas. A chain was stretched across the Medway, from Hoo Ness to Folly Point, to bar the passage of the enemy to Chatham, and the men-o’-war Matthias, Monmouth, and Royal Charles stood by, to help repulse De Ruyter’s forces. But the feeblest attempts were made: the Dutch broke the chain, burnt the ships, and continued up-river, capturing the Royal Charles, which was taken by two boats, under the command of one Captain Tobiaz, without any attempt at defence. Next morning, with the purpose of burning the large men-o’-war at anchor above Upnor, the Dutch sent up two of their fighting ships, with six fire-vessels, under cover of a heavy cannonade. Here Upnor Castle was of some service, and considerably hampered the enemy’s operations; but the fireships succeeded in burning the Royal James, Loyal London, and Royal Oak. And then, half-hearted themselves, the invaders retreated. It was well for us they were so cautious, for they might have done what they would. The observers of that time were not indifferent to this indignity. Evelyn, in his diary, styles it “as dreadful a spectacle as Englishmen ever saw, and a dishonour never to be wiped off”; and Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty, was divided in three parts about it. He shared the general shame of the nation; he feared, as an official who might be held personally responsible, and thought dolefully of either being committed to the Tower, or else having his throat cut by a furious mob; and he dreaded, as a citizen, the dangers of an invasion affecting his property and ready cash.

Opposite Upnor the naval activities of the dockyard are very noticeable. There you see battleships and cruisers dry-docked and refitting. When last I was here the waterside loungers readily told me their names. As to the correct rendering of one there was considerable variation, for while one would have it, “Airy-ale-house,” giving a pleasant mental picture of a hedgerow tavern of the type which would have pleased Piscator and Venator, others preferred to style her the “You’re-a-lias,” and some made it “You-rile-us,” which gives a distinctly threatening nemo me impune lacessit kind of braggadocio turn to her proper title, Euryalus. There are other versions of the name—“Airy,” or “Hairy Alice,” for example—which prove the risks of classic nomenclature.

Upnor Castle is not nowadays a strong place, but the long stretch of foreshore between it and the waterside, down-river, is occupied by great naval powder-magazines, and a pier for the Government light railway running at the rear is a feature. The castle has a certain picturesqueness, and is worth sketching; but the sketcher, selecting the best view-point by the riverside, is soon made aware that he has become an object of interest to the Metropolitan Police on watch within, and presently finds himself plied with amiable inquiries; these being times when espionage is very much to the front.

UPNOR CASTLE.

The inquisitive stranger having thus attracted the attention of the police, and having—let us hope—duly satisfied them, may now make his way up the steep street again, and, reaching the cross-roads, soon come into Frindsbury. From this village, with its hill-top church, whose spire is a prominent landmark, a descent is immediately made into the tramway-infested streets and congested areas of Strood; and from Strood the Medway is at once crossed, into Rochester.

CHAPTER IV
ROCHESTER AND CHATHAM—BROMPTON—GILLINGHAM—GRANGE—OTTERHAM QUAY—LOWER HALSTOW—IWADE

Very little change overtakes Rochester High Street, that narrow, rather gloomy, and distinctly dirty-looking thoroughfare. The Corn Exchange clock still projects its “moon face” over the pavement, as Dickens described it, “out of a grave, red building, as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign”; and the ancient grime still clings to the brickwork houses, and the occasional old weatherboarded tenements still lack the new coats of paint cruelly denied them. One might expend much description upon the High Street of Rochester, from the famous “Bull” hotel of Pickwickian fame, and the tame, characterless front of the “Seven Poor Travellers,” on to the curiously weatherboarded Westgate of the Cathedral Close, familiarly known, through associations with “Edwin Drood,” as “Jasper’s Gateway,” and not forgetting the Early English crypt beneath the “George” inn, nearly opposite the “Bull,” a relic of which very few people know, and little to be suspected from the decidedly commonplace general appearance of that house. There is, indeed, room for a most interesting monograph upon this High Street. I always associate the little weatherboarded house and shop numbered 195, on the left hand as you go towards Chatham, with that where little David Copperfield had his adventure with the half-mad second-hand-clothes shopkeeper who said “Goroo, goroo,” and invoked his lungs and liver. It is a bootshop nowadays; but you go down into it from the street-level just as in the story.

Eastbury House—the “Nuns’ House” of “Edwin Drood”—until recent years a gloomy mansion, mysteriously retired behind a grim brick wall, has lately been restored and the enclosing wall demolished, and has become a museum. It is now a much more worshipful-looking building than before; all the better for its scouring and cleaning, and yet looking none the less antique. Built in 1591, Eastgate House looks every year of its age, and has a very thorough air of historical mystery, although nothing has ever happened there to which one can put a name. Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies, in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” must often have experienced strange thrills and shivers in its darkling rooms and passages.

The allied towns of Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham, and New Brompton do not grow any more attractive, from the tourist’s point of view, with the effluxion of time. They had always a taint of Cockney vulgarity which later industrial and military and naval developments, and an extensive system of electric tramways, have intensified. With all these things, the natural beauties of the site have been almost utterly obscured in mean streets and crowded slums. Those beauties were of a very striking nature. From the lofty side of Chatham Hill the eye ranged over the broad Medway and its marshes, beautiful in the distance, and across to the Hundred of Hoo. To-day that view is qualified by a vista of innumerable roofs and domestic chimneys, and by the many giant chimney-stacks of the Portland cement factories that have to-day become almost as striking a feature of the surroundings as the naval and military establishments, and spread a smoky haze over the scene.

It is not easy to realise Chatham as a waterside place, still less as a port and dockyard, because of the closely-packed houses along the High Street which runs parallel with the Medway. Only the narrowest alleys open to the water, and few of them: the Sun Pier being, in fact, the only view-point. But the outlook upon the busy waterside scenes up-river, along Limehouse Reach, is of an inspiring nature. It is composed, indeed, of widely different elements, but is therefore all the more pictorial. There you see Rochester Castle and Cathedral, contrasting strongly with the huge coal-cranes and the wharves, alongside with the fuming chimneys of the cement factories on the Frindsbury shore, and many picturesque, brown-sailed barges and fussy steam-tugs on the water. The strenuous past, and a much more strenuous present, lend imagination, as well as pictorial quality, to the scene.

The name of Limehouse Reach is exactly descriptive, for the cement factories on the Frindsbury shore give it a character. Here, and above Rochester Bridge, the pleasant Medway valley is scarred and seamed with the chalk-quarrying and the mud-dredging that go towards the making of Portland cement, this neighbourhood being one of the chief centres of that industry. The chalk and the river-mud are mixed roughly in the proportion of three parts of chalk to one of mud, and are then burnt in kilns and ground into a flour-like powder. Portland cement, invented about 1826, is an important industry, with an output of over 3,000,000 tons a year in this country. The price per cask was originally 21s., but the output is now so large and the production has so improved that a better article is now sold at about 4s. a cask.

As to Chatham Dockyard, it is a highly historic place full of keenest interest to a patriotic Briton, but to such a good deal more difficult to explore properly than it is made for distinguished foreigners. Why the native tax-payer who contributes to the support of this establishment so much of his hardly-earned gold should be thus discouraged, while possible enemies—much more keenly concerned to worm out official secrets and far better able to do so—should be shown every particular is more than the plain man can comprehend. But it is the same tale in all our places of arms.

THE MEDWAY: ROCHESTER CASTLE AND CATHEDRAL.

Among the interesting things here in the nature of relics none is more keenly absorbing than the figure-head of the American frigate Chesapeake, the vessel captured by Captain Broke, in command of the Shannon, in 1813. This naval duel was the brightest incident in the three years’ war between England and the United States. The figure-head, a fine specimen of this extinct art, represents a woman with headdress of feathers in the North American Indian fashion.

It is past the Dockyard gates and by High Street, Brompton, and thence across “Chatham Great Lines” that the stranger who wants to find again the coast-line had better trace his course. The district is an unalluring one of tramways, mean streets, and the squalid side of military life. But the Brompton Barracks of the Royal Engineers are rather fine. Here is the Gordon statue, a striking work, representing the General seated on a camel; and here, too, are two triumphal arches displaying the achievements of the Royal Engineers, and four huge bronzes, representing seated Boers with rifles and bandoliers. The “Great Lines,” an upland, common-like expanse, is the scene of that incident in “Pickwick” in which, during the grand review, the timid Mr. Snodgrass, after being violently hustled to and fro, was indignantly asked “vere he vos a-shovin’ to,” together with many other shameful experiences.

Following the tram-lines, we come at last to the terminus at Gillingham, one of the two places of that name in England. The other is in Dorset. Although their names are spelt alike, they are spoken differently: the Dorsetshire town is “Gillingham,” as might be expected: this is, unexpectedly, always locally “Jillingham.”

THE MEDWAY: HOO FORTS.

The ancient church here has a tall tower, conspicuous far and wide on its hill-top; its corner-turret provided with a cresset, or fire-pot, for a beacon. Here, descending the steep and narrow Church Street, and bearing to the right, a hamlet called Gad’s Hill is passed, giving on to a variety of creeks and inlets looking out across the Medway and the circular forts of Gillingham and Hoo, with the wooded heights of the Hundred of Hoo beyond.

By taking the next turning on the right, up a commonplace new street called “King Edward Road,” and then turning left, a large country residence on the right hand will presently be seen. This is the manor of Grange, or Grench, formerly a member of the Cinque Port of Hastings, and a separate parish. Some ancient, ivy-clad ruins in front of the modern house are those of a chapel and a barn built in 1378 by Sir John Philipot, Mayor of London. Not really “Lord” Mayor, strictly speaking, for that dignified title is not known to have been given before 1486.

The manor comprised 120 acres, and was held by the service of finding one ship and two armed men in time of war. Philipot, however, did better than this. His patriotism impelled him to provide 1,000 men and a squadron of vessels, to aid against the French. This ancient manor enjoyed until modern times the singular extra-territorial right of affording shelter to fugitives from justice who escaped thither; and criminals who succeeded in reaching this Alsatia could not be arrested on the warrant of the local magistrates until a confirming warrant had been obtained from Hastings.

Proceeding and passing a railed-in redoubt, the road rises. Turning then to left and again to right, we come down beside the estuary of the Medway, amid the pear and cherry orchards, into Lower Rainham, past Otterham Creek, and on to Upchurch. Here the church has a steeple of fantastic ugliness, resembling two wooden extinguishers placed one above another. There is a curious crypt, or bonehouse, under the north chancel aisle. This district is famous for the many finds of Roman pottery in the Medway creeks: the well-known black “Upchurch ware,” generally discovered by punting in the shallow waters and prodding the mud with rods. It is supposed that an extensive industry was seated here in ancient times, on land now more or less submerged. It is now pretty generally supposed (why it should be I know not) that all the finds possible have been made. Hasted, writing of these parts early in the eighteenth century, says “the noxious vapours arising from the marshes subject the inhabitants to continued intermittents, and shorten their lives at a very early period.” This, at any rate, seems to be of the past.

UPCHURCH.

Passing Upchurch, the creek of Lower Halstow is soon seen, with the church away on the left, amid scenes of brickmaking activity. The road in the next half-mile turns sharply right at Parksore, rising steeply; that going straight ahead to a place marked “Funton” on the map, rapidly becoming impassable.

Cresting the hill, a wonderful distant view over across to Sheerness, disclosing the battleships there, like uncanny monsters of fairy-lore, is obtained. Bending right and then left, and passing a moated farm, and then a gate across the road, we come in another mile to cross-roads and there turn left for Iwade, and through the village to the bridge across the Swale into Sheppey, at Kingsferry.

CHAPTER V
SHEPPEY

It was in the Swale that Augustine baptized King Ethelbert on Whit Sunday, June 2nd, A.D. 596, and thus made him a child of God. On Christmas Day the following year he similarly baptized 10,000 of the King’s subjects, but exactly where these chilly ceremonies took place is not recorded. In any case, if the Swale were as muddy then as it is now, the converts must have come out extremely dirty.

LOWER HALSTOW.

The one and only way into Sheppey without ferrying into it is across the Kingsferry Bridge, which here spans the Swale, and is an electrically worked swing-bridge of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway. It is also a road-bridge. Sometimes a week will pass before it is required to be opened to allow a sailing-vessel to pass. The charge for crossing varies from a modest penny for cyclist or pedestrian, up to one shilling and sixpence for a motor-car.

It has for such a long time past been the almost universal custom to speak or write of the “Isle of Sheppey” that it becomes a convenience to follow the popular way; but really the name “Sheppey” includes the designation “island”; being the modern form of the Saxon name for it, “Sceapige,” the “sheep island.” It is said that the Romans knew it as Insula Ovium, the Isle of Sheep; and certainly it has remained through all the succeeding ages a place where flocks have been kept and have flourished. In this connection William Camden gives us some interesting facts relating to Sheppey in his day:

“This Isle of Sheepe, whereof it feedeth mightie great flockes, was called by our auncestours Shepey—that is the Isle of Sheepe.” He then proceeds to speak of the “fatte-tailed sheepe, of exceeding great size, whose flesh is most delicate to taste. I have seen younge lads, taking women’s function, with stools fastened untoe their buttockes to milke, yea, and to make cheese of ewes milke.”

The Kentish Coast: Sheppy to Deal

Centuries ago this industry disappeared, and although the Roquefort cheeses we nowadays import from France in great quantities are similar and popular products, nothing of the kind is now made in Sheppey, or anywhere in England.

The “fat-tailed sheep” will nowadays be sought in vain in Sheppey. There are many of the ordinary breeds, but, on the honour of a traveller, none of that type.

This intimate, yet in some ways remote, island off the Kentish mainland is but eleven miles in length by five broad, and would thus seem to afford little scope for variety; but within this small compass is found scenery of very varied description, ranging from the wide-spreading marshes beside the Swale to a high ridge or backbone, on whose highest point stands the village of Minster-in-Sheppey. A peculiar feature of the low, marshy part of the island is found in the ancient mounds known as “cotterels,” usually said to be burial-places of the Danes; they are large and irregular grassy hillocks, which may more probably be the spoil from olden drainage-trenches. Thus heaped up, they formed, either by accident or intention, refuges for sheep in time of floods. Two of these are seen on the way from Kingsferry.

The chief town of the island, the dockyard town and port of Sheerness, is six miles from Kingsferry. On the way to it you pass near Queenborough, originally “Kingborough,” but renamed by Edward the Third in honour of Queen Philippa, when a fortress was also built. Of that castle, in whose design that distinguished Bishop, William of Wykeham, had a hand, nothing now remains, and the railway station, which stands on the site of it, although no doubt a more useful institution nowadays, frankly makes no attempt at romance. Queenborough is now a rather plaintive-looking town of one broad street, devastated by the gruesome odour, resembling putrid meat, emanating from extensive and diabolically prosperous chemical-manure works. It will thus be judged that Queenborough is an excellent place not to visit. The church itself contains nothing of interest except a battered and illiterate brass on the wall, to one “Henry Knight, sometime maior of this Towne, who was Master of a ship to Greenland, and Harpined there 24 Veiages.

“In Greenland I Whales, Sea horse and Beares did slay,
Though now my bodie is in tombe, in Clay.”

Nor is Sheerness precisely a joyous holiday resort. It is a place of strength, guarding the entrance to the Thames and Medway, and will have to stand in the forefront of any attack; but exactly wherein its strength resides is not at all apparent to the layman. No doubt booms and floating mines, although not spectacular defences, would play a foremost part. The history of this congeries of four towns—Blue Town, Marine Town, Banks Town, and Mile Town—that constitute Sheerness is not a glorious one. The site was a swamp until reclamation was begun under James the First. Continued in the next reign, and through the Commonwealth, the Admiralty in the time of Charles the Second selected this as the site for a dockyard and fortifications to protect Sheppey from invasion. Pepys tells us, under date of August 18th, 1665, how “we,” the King and others, “walked up and down, laying out the ground to be taken in for a yard to lay provisions for cleaning and repairing of ships, and a most proper place it is for the purpose.”

On February 27th, 1667, the King and the Duke of York were at Sheerness to lay out the design for the fortifications, which, four months later, were destroyed by the Dutch.

An odd survival, found where least expected, remains here. Few who walk the planks of the Cornwallis Jetty realise that they are laid over the forgotten hull of the old man-o’-war Cornwallis, seventy-four guns, which figured in the Navy a hundred years ago. Down beneath remains the dim interior of that wooden line-of-battle ship, with the original portholes.

MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY.

For the rest, Sheerness to-day is sheerly and frankly ugly, and Cockney, and quite unashamed. The look of it is as though long lengths of the Old Kent Road and the dullest, dreariest purlieus of Camberwell had come down to the sea and forgotten to return. Let us, then, leaving it behind, hasten along the shore, past the obsolete Barton’s Fort and the hideous brick-and-iron railed Admiralty range-finders that form abominable eyesores on the beach, and make for Minster. To reach that hill-top village, the woebegone attempted developments of a building-estate styled “Minster-on-Sea,” a place without shape or form, are passed; but, these things left behind, the unspoiled country of Sheppey is entered. The “monasterium,” whence Minster derives its name, was the ancient Priory of St. Saxburga, founded in early Saxon times. The square gatehouse of the nunnery, standing by the church, is all that remains of that religious house, and even this building, fashioned of the most amazing admixture of brick, stone, and flint has been wholly secularised and converted into a dwelling-house.

The church is intrinsically interesting for its architecture, its monuments, and its brasses, including the very fine and early brasses of Sir John de Northwode—that knight who, according to the irreverent Ingoldsby, received a black eye from a brickbat at the siege of Shurland Castle—and his wife, Joan, about 1320; but it is far more so as a literary landmark. It is, of course, closely associated with that most engaging among the “Ingoldsby Legends,” the story of “Grey Dolphin,” one of the most genuinely humorous things in literature, which bears reading over and over again, and will remain fresh when the marks of many a later funny fellow have been forgotten. Sir Robert de Shurland, the hero of that story, was a real flesh-and-blood person, who flourished in the thirteenth century and was a very earnest, strenuous, and warlike knight—not at all a farcical person. He went out in the Crusade of 1271, and at a later date was knighted for gallantry at the siege of Caerlaverock. The ladies, it would seem, liked this doughty character. “If I were a young demoiselle,” says an old metrical romance, “I would give myself to that brave knight, Sir Robert de Shurland.”

In the church is the singular tomb of this warrior, with a recumbent effigy not in the least resembling the portrait drawn of him by Ingoldsby, for he is shown to be tall and thin, not short and stockish. Otherwise, the description is exact; and it is indeed the effigy of a “warrior clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century. His hands are clasped in prayer”—or they would be, had not the arms been shorn off at the elbows—“his legs, crossed in that position so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in modern days, bespeak him a Soldier of the Faith in Palestine. Close beside his dexter calf lies sculptured in bold relief a horse’s head.” Ingoldsby, you see, together with the antiquaries of his time, thought the cross-legged effigies on ancient tombs invariably indicated that the person represented had been a Crusader. It has since been proved to demonstration that this was not the case, and that this curious pose was only a convention of the age. The horse’s head is shown rising from some strange carving intended to represent waves, and is an allusion to the grant of “wreck of the sea” which the knight had obtained where his manors extended to the shore. This was ordinarily a privilege of the Crown. It gave him property in all wreckage, waifs and strays, and flotsam and jetsam which he could reach with the point of his lance when riding as far as possible into the sea at ebb-tide.

Margaret Shurland, daughter and heiress of this personage, married one William Cheyney. The altar-tomb of their descendant, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports in the time of Queen Elizabeth, stands in the church and is a noble monument. He was a remarkable man, for he filled important offices of State in the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, and in all the tragic changes of those changeful times lost neither head, fortune, nor repute. He was Knight of the Garter, Constable of Dover Castle, a Privy Councillor, and Treasurer of the Household. A man of wealth, he demolished the old castle of Shurland and built in its stead the mansion yet standing, long used as a farmhouse.

TOMB OF SIR ROBERT DE SHURLAND, MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY CHURCH.

Among the other monuments in Minster church is an alabaster effigy sometimes considered to be that of one Jeronimo Magno, a Spanish prisoner of war captured by Drake off Calais Harbour in Armada time. For three years this unhappy hidalgo was kept prisoner aboard ship at the Nore, and then death ended his trials, in 1591. Later criticism, however, identifies the chain worn by the effigy as that of the Yorkist faction: the chain of Suns and Roses, worn by adherents of Edward the Fourth and the House of York; which would date back the monument by some seventy years and thus dispose of the Spanish prisoner theory.

Another very interesting effigy is that of one Jordanus de Scapeia, found in 1833 in the churchyard, buried five feet deep. The clasped mailed hands hold a little mystic oval at the tips of the fingers, bearing a tiny effigy intended to typify the soul.

Out in Minster churchyard on sunny days of wandering breezes the guns of the distant forts and battleships that guard the coast are heard to roar and mutter and rumble, according to their distance, and above the peaked roof of the church tower twirls the odd horse-head weather-vane which gives the local name, the “Horse Church.” Here are many stones to the memory of Sheerness dockyard men; among them one with quaint and weatherworn sculpture and curious verses to one Henry Worth, a gunner, who died in 1770, aged fifty-seven:

“Pallida Mors æquo pede pauperum Tabernas Regumque Turres.

Who e’er thou art, if here by Wisdom led
To view the silent mansions of the Dead
And search for truth from life’s last mournful page
Where Malice lives not, nor where Slanders rage,
Read on. No Bombast swells these friendly lines;
Here truth unhonour’d & unvarnish’d shines.
Where o’er yon sod an envious nettle creeps,
From care escap’d an honest Gunner sleeps.
As on he travell’d to life’s sorrowing end,
Distress for ever claim’d him as a friend;
Orphan & Widow were alike his care;
He gave with pleasure all he had to spare.
His match now burnt, expended all his priming,
He left the world, and us, without e’er whining,
Deep in the earth his Carcase is entomb’d,
Which Love & Grog for him had honeycomb’d.
Jesting apart, Retir’d from winds & Weather,
Virtue & Worth are laid asleep together.”

Leaving this memorial to the charitable and love-worn Worth and his grog-blossoms, we trace the road towards Eastchurch. Along to the left, folded between the hills and sheltered from the winds, are vales where elms and beeches thrive luxuriantly. Such a spot is the ravine of Scrapsgate, very like the “chines” of the Isle of Wight, a charming spot in spring, where one may always be sure of finding violets, primroses, and bluebells in their season.

Scrapsgate was the scene of a mysterious tragedy many years ago. It has long since been forgotten, and the only reminder of it now to be found is a weather-worn tombstone in the obscure churchyard of the workhouse at Minster, with the following inscription:

“O, earth
cover not my blood!
Sacred
to the memory of
a man unknown, who was
found murdered on the
morning of the 22nd April 1814
near Scraps Gate in this parish, by
his Head being nearly severed from his body
A subscription
was immediately entered into and
one hundred guineas reward
offered on conviction of the
perpetrators of the
horrible act, but they remain at
present undiscovered.”

The perpetrators were never discovered. “Mysterious” I have described this affair, but it was pretty widely understood at the time that the stranger had met his fate at the hands of the smugglers who then found Scrapsgate a convenient spot for their shy trade. His identity and occupation alike remained unestablished, but the supposition was then current that he was either a member of a smuggling band who had turned informer and had been discovered in his treachery, or that he was one of the revenue officers. The ferocity of the smugglers who infested the coasts of Kent stuck at nothing, and this was by no means an exceptional outrage, as the history of their desperate doings sufficiently proves.

A complete and weird contrast from this lovely vale is Warden Point, which lies off to the left of the way to Eastchurch, along two and a quarter miles of solitary winding road. “At Warden Point,” I read in a geological work, “is the finest exposure of the London clay.” And it may be added that, in the many landslips which have occurred here of late years, other things have been exposed. In short, the slipping away of the cliffs has torn asunder the churchyard of Warden, with the shocking result that the coffins and skeletons of the dead are strewn about. You come to this Golgotha at a point where the road, making straight for the cliffs’ edge, has been carefully barred, lest the stranger should descend into the sea and there perish. To the few cottages that stand here, all that is left of the village of Warden, has been given the unlovely name of “Mud Row.” Forming part of the garden fence of one of these is a sculptured stone tablet recording that Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the rebuilding of London Bridge, gave some of the stones of old London Bridge to rebuild Warden church, in 1836; the ancient church having been destroyed by encroachment of the sea. By 1870 the sea had further advanced and the new church was closed, being demolished in 1877, when the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the last thirty years were removed to Minster. Now all that remains of the churches of Warden is this dedication tablet, part of a garden fence. Looking down here, across the yawning rifts and crevasses of the land-ship, you see the poor exposed relics of the dead in the olden churchyard, and out to sea the waters are discoloured with the washings of the clay.

Eastchurch, a pretty village with a charming and well-kept old church, is a pleasant place, associated recently with aviation and the Naval Flying grounds. It is thus appropriate enough that a new stained-glass window should have been placed here in 1912 to the memory of Charles Stuart Rolls and Cecil Grace, who both lost their lives in flying.

Among other memorials is a tablet to Vice-Admiral Sir Richard King, Bart., Commander-in-Chief at the Nore, who, having commanded the Achille at Trafalgar and come scatheless through that action, died of cholera at Sheerness, aged 61. Here, too, is an elaborate monument to Gabriel Livesey, who died at Eastchurch parsonage in 1622. His stately recumbent effigy, under a canopy of coloured and gilded marbles, has in front of it a group of children; among them the kneeling figure of his son Michael, afterwards notorious as one of the Commissioners who tried Charles the First and signed his death-warrant.

Close beside Eastchurch the striking group of Shurland Castle is prominent. This is the embattled manor-house already referred to, built on the site of Sir Robert de Shurland’s stronghold. The building is most imposing from the front, but it puts all its goods in the shop-window, so to say, for it is just a long, shallow house, with nothing of interest within; and all the vast original ranges of buildings in the rear have been demolished. It is, in fact, a farmhouse, and it and the farm, in spite of the old Sheppey proverb, “Sheppey grass none can surpass,” have been unlet for about twenty years. Although the interior is commonplace itself, the front is fine, in good red brick, with vitrified brick in diamond patterns, and moulded brick chimneys. Among the paving-stones leading up to the entrance is an Early English floriated stone coffin-lid, of some beauty.

HARTY CHURCH: FAVERSHAM IN THE DISTANCE

Down from Eastchurch, we come out of the “hill country” of Sheppey, along a beautiful avenue of overarching trees, to the Harty Road station of the Sheppey Light Railway, and thence along the levels to Leysdown and the long, flat shell-beach of Shellness, with the pink-washed coastguard buildings at the extreme end, looking across the Swale to Whitstable. History has been made at Shellness. It was on December 11th, 1688, that James the Second fled, panic-stricken, from his palace of Whitehall, before the advance of the Prince of Orange, who had been proclaimed King in his stead in the market-place of Newton Abbot, on November 7th, by the title of William the Third. The fugitive sovereign, with a wig of unaccustomed modest cut and semi-clerical clothes for disguise, made his hasty exit in company with Sir Edward Hales, a Roman Catholic pervert whom he had recently appointed Master of the Ordnance, Lieutenant of the Tower, and Privy Councillor. This facile person brought with him a gentleman named Sheldon and a Mr. Abbadie, who occupied the position of Page of the Backstairs. If you do but consider a moment, there is something exquisitely appropriate and humorous in a Page of the Backstairs taking part in such a fugitive back-door departure. A librettist in comic opera could have thought of no happier touch.

One is curious to know how it was that King James came to select such a difficult, out-of-the-way place as Sheppey for his departure. He, of course, sought some obscure point for embarkation, but there were easily dozens of sufficiently quiet and unfrequented places suited to his purpose, without taking this extreme trouble. The explanation is that the King was really at this time almost beside himself, and his mind was so disordered that he could not think coherently nor plan anything. Hales was the master at this juncture. He was the owner of property in Sheppey, and had a steward, one Bannister by name, whom he could trust, at his house of Neat’s Court, Minster. The steward was instructed to hire a vessel at Elmley, and did so, and some of the party went aboard there and others were to be picked up here, at Shellness, whence it was hoped to make a passage for France. The hoy was on the point of departure, when Bannister’s livery was noticed by the fishermen. It was a livery well known locally, and little liked since Hales had rendered himself so obnoxious to the Protestants. The spectacle, therefore, of Bannister assisting a company of strange gentlefolk to embark from so unaccustomed a place, at such an untimeous hour, in those times of social, political, and religious disturbance, and in a craft so humble, was one to excite curiosity and suspicion. The fishermen assembled to the number of fifty or sixty on the beach, soon recognised Hales, and, that once done, there was no escaping. They surrounded the fugitives, and prevented them by force from leaving.

LATE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY CHEST, OF GERMAN ORIGIN, CARVED WITH REPRESENTATION OF A TOURNAMENT, HARTY CHURCH.

We shall meet this party again, on the mainland, on the way to Faversham; ourselves tracking laboriously round the coastline, to Harty, which was once in the nature of an island, divided from Sheppey by Cable Fleet and Crog Dick; but these have long been dry.

There are more imposing coastwise walks than this: there cannot well be many duller. Imagine the dun-coloured waters of the Swale, bordered all the way by a continuous grassy embankment, raised to protect the land from being drowned; and further imagine this protective bank carefully winding along the configuration of the shore, so that you progress with painful slowness: there you have the route from Shellness to Harty.

Harty consists of a solitary farm, close by the little church. There is no village, and almost the only other house is the “Ferry Inn” by the waterside, half a mile away. In the church remains a curious and highly dilapidated old chest 4 feet 6 inches long, its front carved with a spirited scene representing two knights tilting. One of them is seen on the point of being unhorsed by his opponent’s lance. The tilting-saddles, with long shields for the riders’ legs, are noticeable. The chest is of German origin, and dates from the close of the fourteenth century. The reason of it being here is unknown, but one may venture the opinion that it is one of the spoils of shipwreck.

From the “Ferry Inn” at Harty, across the unlovely Swale, it is a half-mile passage, a long and laborious business for an oarsman.

CHAPTER VI
THE CAPTURE OF JAMES THE SECOND—FAVERSHAM

It is two miles from this side of Harty Ferry to Faversham, through Oare and Davington. Hard by the landing-place the sinuous and muddy Faversham Creek joins the Swale, and ugly sheds stand here and there on the ill-favoured banks, exhibiting minatory notices for the observance of would-be trespassers. I don’t think any ordinarily sane person fully informed of what those sheds contain would in the least desire to trespass, for they are, in fact, stored with dynamite, the making of which, together with brewing and the manufacture of paper and bricks, forms an industry actively followed in the neighbourhood of Faversham.

The creeks hereabouts—“cricks” they are called locally—and the marshes, or “meshes” in the speech of Kent, are not scenically beautiful nor in any way spectacular, but the brick-barges, gliding by, do at least give, with their great rusty-red sails, a quaint touch. Scarce a duller spot could be found for the scene of an historic incident, but the incident of James the Second being brought here, a prisoner, was itself drab and unheroic. The fishermen who had seized the fugitive King on the long low spit of Shellness did not at first know how important was their capture, that cold December day. The humble hoy was a strange vessel for the conveyance of such gentlefolk as these appeared to be, and the fact, in itself, was suspicious in those troubled times; but the fisherfolk’s thoughts did not rise to the contemplation of a monarch leaving his kingdom in that evasive way. Probably, if the truth of it were known, their idea of a king was that of a personage splendid in appearance and wearing a crown; certainly it was not this tall, thin-faced man, of mingled careworn and severe expression of countenance, and habited in unrelieved black, who was masquerading as chaplain to Sir Edward Hales, the gentleman who appeared to be the chief among the party they had detained. The fishermen, indeed, took them for escaping Jesuits, and thought the King to be that most notorious of them all, Father Petre. “I know him by his lean jaws,” exclaimed one, and another advocated searching “the hatchet-faced old Jesuit,” a suggestion acted upon in earnest. They snatched his money and watch—those they could understand and appraise; but his Coronation Ring and a number of little trinkets he carried they left untouched, together with the diamond buckles of his shoes, which they took to be glass. What indignities to offer the Lord’s Anointed! Then some person recognised him. It was a great moment, and I wonder no painter has ever made that tableau the subject of a picture. Perhaps it would have been done had the King presented a better front. Monarchs are by courtesy “gracious,” and they are supposed, in addition, to be dignified and courageous; but this poor James became, under these circumstances, a distressingly mean figure. Why should he at this juncture have proved a coward: he who, when Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, had shown notable courage: he who, three years before, had been contemptuous of the pitiful appeals for mercy made by Monmouth?

THE TOWN HALL, FAVERSHAM.

He seems to have made no effort to save himself from these indignities, and was really in abject terror, not perhaps of the fishermen, but of the fate which he supposed awaited him when delivered up to his son-in-law, William the Third. Bloodthirsty and merciless himself, he imagined others in his own likeness. These apprehensions are evident enough in the incoherent words he used to those ignorant fishermen and oyster-dredgers, and later, at Faversham, in his frantic appeals to be let go. The exulting mob brought him to that town and lodged him at first in the “Queen’s Arms” inn, now the “Ship” hotel. News then spreading of these strange things, and of the personal danger in which the King appeared to be placed, the Earl of Winchilsea, a Protestant nobleman, but no revolutionary, hurried over with others from Canterbury to protect him, and removed him to the Mayor’s house. There he was kept a prisoner for two days, by rejoicing crowds, who jeered at his terrified appeals: “The Prince of Orange is hunting for my life. If you do not let me fly now,” he exclaimed, “it will be too late. My blood will be upon your heads if I fall a martyr.”

A troop of Life-guards was sent to bring him back to Rochester, whence he was soon after allowed to escape to France. “There is nothing so much to be wished,” William the Third had declared, when the possibility of James fleeing the kingdom had been put before him. Thus, in a truly contemptuous way, he was allowed to depart, and so ended the rule of the House of Stuart. No one in authority had the least desire for his blood; although it is quite certain that his execution would have been extremely popular.

The waterside village of Oare, on the way to Faversham, beside the creek, is one of several places so named, with slightly differing spellings, throughout the country. The name means simply “shore.”

The strangely beautiful stone spire of Faversham parish church, a church oddly dedicated to “St. Mary of Charity,” piques the curiosity of the stranger from afar. It greatly dignifies distant views of the town, and is especially effective against a stormy or overcast sky, when it shows whitely and boldly. It was built in 1797, and was intended for Gothic architecture, as Gothic was then understood. It is, of course, easy enough to criticise its details, but, taken as a whole, it is an exceedingly fine and effective work, and gives Faversham an individuality that would not be obtained by the ordinary type of tower or spire. There are very few such spires as this, supported on flying ribs of stone, in the country. The others are at King’s College, Aberdeen, St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, St. Nicholas, Newcastle, and St. Dunstan-in-the-East, London.

The reality of Faversham is perhaps something of a shock on coming to close quarters, following the invitation of that beckoning spire. There are picturesque and stately corners in this ancient, but still thriving, port, but the corners and purlieus that are by no means pleasant are found along the waterside. There are situated vast heaps of rubbish from London dustbins, brought to these quays by barges, for use in the brickmaking that is one of Faversham’s principal means of livelihood. The great heaps and the barges lying by the quays look picturesque enough in an illustration with the church spire for a background, but the cinders and the dust are distressing when a high wind is blowing.

FAVERSHAM.

The interior of Faversham church should be seen to be believed. It is a curious example of the eighteenth-century way with ancient Gothic architecture, and discloses an attempt to convert a Gothic nave into an Ionic interior. The effort was a half-hearted one, for while the columns are in the Ionic style, the Perpendicular clerestory windows remain; with, however, a fillet of classic ornament around them. The fine large Early English transepts have not been interfered with. On a pillar of the north transept is a twelfth-century fresco representing the Nativity, and in the chancel remains the brass to one William Thornbury, rector and anchorite, 1481.

In the churchyard will be seen this curious epitaph:

William Lepine
of facetious Memory,
Ob. the 11th of March 1778
Æt. 30 Years
Alas

Where be your gibes now?
Your gambols? your flashes
of Merriment that were wont
to set the Table in a roar?

This is, of course, a quotation from Hamlet. Lepine, who ended so untimely, was a dissolute and convivial lawyer of Faversham.

CHAPTER VII
MILTON-NEXT-SITTINGBOURNE—SITTINGBOURNE OLD INNS—MURSTON—LUDDENHAM

A curious and but-little-visited part of the Kentish littoral is that which stretches, some eight miles or so, between Iwade, Milton, Sittingbourne, Tonge, and Faversham. It is that part of the country, going down to the low-lying shores of the Swale, which was in olden times spoken of as being possessed of “wealth without health.” The land was, and is still, wonderfully fertile, but in remote days was full of malaria. To-day, as the traveller by the leisurely South-Eastern Railway passes from Sittingbourne, past Teynham to Faversham, he sees orchards and farmsteads, grazing sheep, and many evidences of prosperity and beauty. It seems to him like a Land of Promise. And truly, once past the squalid papermaking and brickmaking purlieus of Sittingbourne, this is a district of exceptional beauty; by no means flat; and rich in orchards of cherry, apple, and pear.

If we retrace our route from Sheppey, and, coming again across the bridge at King’s Ferry, turn off to the left beyond Iwade, we shall presently come into Milton Regis, otherwise Milton-next-Sittingbourne, past the fine and very striking church, of Norman and Early English periods. It is, in this age of silly “suffies,” generally locked, and therefore the tourist finds considerable difficulties in the way of seeing the beautiful interior and the three Northwode brasses: a knight in heraldic tabard; another about 1480; and John Northwode and wife, 1496. But the odd, and much more humble, tombstone in the churchyard to one “Abraham Washiton late Hvsband of Alise Washinton, now living at Milton, whome had in all six hvsbands,” 1601, is easily found. Alice, you will observe, was at that date “now living,” and so, for all we know, may have married again; but possibly she may by that time have struck the surviving men of Milton as rather lethal.

THE CHURCH, MILTON REGIS.

Before ever there was a town of Sittingbourne there was a town of Milton, standing upon Milton Creek. It was from early times a royal manor, and until ages comparatively recent Sittingbourne, as the lesser place, was best described as “Sittingbourne-next-Milton.” But, from being situated directly upon the great Dover Road, Sittingbourne grew, while Milton languished. Great inns sprang up beside that historic highway, to serve the needs of travellers. No less a personage than Henry the Fifth, coming home flushed with the victory of Agincourt in 1415, was entertained at the “Red Lion,” a hostelry still in the forefront in 1541, when Henry the Eighth was its guest, and held there one of his fateful Councils, which probably resulted in some one losing his head. The “George,” the “Rose,” and the “Red Lion” seem to have long been the best inns. Hasted, the historian of Kent, says the “Rose” was the most superb of any in the kingdom; but that must have been at a much later date, for we are not to suppose that those two monarchs stayed at a second-rate house. For the “Red Lion” you will now seek in vain, although there is a “Lion,” without any specified colour; a large old inn, with long, seventeenth-century red-brick frontage: twelve windows in a row; quite the largest in the town, although part is now let off as a bank. A quaint, old-world scene presents itself up the archway entrance to the courtyard, with the prettily framed windows of the coffee-room on one side.

The “Rose,” once “the most superb,” is a thing of the past, for we cannot affect to believe that the small house which now bears that sign is its modern representative. No: what was once the real “Rose” stands adjoining, and is parcelled into four shops. A tablet on the frontage bears the date 1708, with a rose sculptured in full bloom. The elevation is a handsome two-storied one, with projecting eaves supported by richly carved consoles. A tall window at the side, apparently that of an old assembly-room, runs through two floors.

THE TOWN HALL, MILTON REGIS.

Opposite is the old “George,” red brick, about 1720, with nine windows in a row. The building is in two parts, with two coach-entrances, and must once have been an important inn. Up one entrance is the Liberal Club, and up the other, oddly enough, is the Conservative Club. Along this last, looking back, you see a picturesque tile-hung front, hung with wistaria.

Finally, just past the Wesleyan Chapel is the old “Crown,” now a shop. The old coach-yard, very picturesque, has five old postboys’ dwellings in timber, now much dilapidated, with broken windows.

But Sittingbourne is not, on the whole, an engaging town, and the bubbling brook, the “seething burn,” as the Anglo-Saxons styled it, which gave the place its name, has since 1830 been hidden away from view in a pipe beneath the road. It used to flow across the highway at the east end of the church. The industrial modern circumstances of Sittingbourne, the making of paper and bricks, are the very denial of beauty. Lloyd’s paper-mills will be found at Milton. There, on the banks of the muddy Milton Creek, you see mountainous stacks of wood-pulp, for the making of paper. The scene, with the greasy mud-banks and the squalid pieces of wrapping-paper, is inexpressibly ugly. If there is any choice, Milton Creek is even more beastly than the brickmaking village of Murston, below Sittingbourne; and even that is a horror.

But, although Milton is so ill a place, full of lodgings for tramps, and all such mean circumstances, there are yet in its narrow streets some fine old houses, of good architectural character, which hint, not obscurely, that this was, two hundred years ago, a place of charm and gentility. On an old house, now the “Waterman’s Arms,” in Flushing Street, may be seen a quaintly sculptured stone sign dated 1662, representing Adam and Eve standing on either side of that fatal apple-tree: Eve about to pluck the fruit which caused all the trouble. The sign is the arms of the Fruiterers’ Company; but the reason of it being here is not known.

SIGN OF THE ADAM AND EVE, MILTON-NEXT-SITTINGBOURNE.

It is perhaps worth while to turn aside, on leaving Sittingbourne, to see what manner of place Murston may be. It has already been described in unfavourable terms, but how unutterably wretched a spot this great brickmaking centre is can only be learnt by close inspection. One comes into it by a mile-long road which for the most part stands prominently up above the surrounding country, something in the likeness of a railway embankment; the brick-earth of which the neighbouring fields once consisted having been dug out to great depths on either side. Down below there, in that artificially low level, the valuable brick-earth having been excavated, many of those fields have once again been given over to agriculture. Crops seem to do well in this curious situation, deriving benefit from what a native described to the present writer as the “mysture,” which is apparently Cantise or Cockney for “moisture.”

At the end of this singular interval, close to the shores of Milton Creek, is Murston. Whatever beauty the village once possessed has long been obliterated in its expansion into an industrial slum of long, unlovely, characterless streets of human kennels. Even the parish church has been severely dealt with, only the chancel of the old building being left; and that stands in a mangy little walled and locked enclosure, strewn with old tins and other refuse. Such is Murston; and the “brickies” who live in it match the place completely.

It is pleasant to think and to know that Murston is exceptional. Beautiful country, wholly unspoiled, immediately adjoins it, and one comes pleasantly past Tonge, in search of the coast-line, past Chekes Court Farm and Blacketts, to Conyers Quay. There indeed is again an unpleasant interval, for advantage has been taken of a slimy little creek opening out of the Swale to erect a brick-factory, whence the bricks are barged to Sheerness, and round up the Thames; the barges bringing back from London cargoes of cinders and the contents of London dustbins, which (under the name of “breeze”) is useful in the making of bricks. The immediate and intimate part of Conyers Quay is therefore, it will be readily understood, undesirable alike to sight and smell.

LUDDENHAM.

The roads of these parts carefully avoid the shore; the one leaving this spot running directly inland, to Teynham, where orchards and hop-gardens and old cottages neighbour the church, in a pretty, diversified landscape. From Teynham, through the hamlet of Deerton Street, one comes to Buckland, where the scanty ruins of an old church stand in front of a farm, on the other side of Buckland crossing. Near by is a humble old timber-framed cottage on the edge of hop-gardens. This was originally the parsonage. Beyond it, over Stone level-crossing, a road leads away on the left to Luddenham, a solitary parish on rising ground overlooking the marshes. There is no village, only scattered farms and cottages; but the picture formed by the church on its height, neighboured by the Court Lodge, now the largest of the neighbouring farms, devoted partly to hops and in part to fruit, is an unusual and striking one. There you see the church, partly Early English, with an eighteenth-century red-brick tower, displayed against the skyline in company with some hop-oasts, the hollow in the foreground on the left, evidently once a creek, planted with bush-fruit; while on the right the hop-gardens are screened by a weird hedge of polled poplars, looking very knobbly and knuckly with their annual trimming.

From Luddenham we come steeply uphill and then down, through Davington, again into Faversham.

CHAPTER VIII
GOODNESTONE—GRAVENEY—SEASALTER—WHITSTABLE AND THE OYSTER FISHERY

The road from Faversham to Whitstable winds level for long distances, passing at first through a charming district of cherry-orchards, interspersed with emerald pastures, with sheep feeding under the trees, and evidences of much poultry-keeping, in the many coops filled with anxious hens clucking nervously after their young broods. Here, too, you see hop-gardens; looking more than a little bare in spring, but with plenty of work going on, chiefly in trimming and tarring the ends of the new ash-poles that are to be planted, thick as forests, for the hop-bines to grow upon. Here and there are the hutches in which the hop-pickers will live in August, and now and again you see an oast-house; the old buildings with their quaint outlines, the new apt to be eye-sorrows for angularity and sheer commonplace ugliness.

It is perhaps best to come this way in the sweet of the year, when the cherry-blossom mantles the trees with purest white, and when there is everywhere an inspiring and heartening air of anticipation, not only in the preparations going forward in the hop-gardens, but in the great barns where the thousands of cherry-baskets are collecting, awaiting the cherry-picking.

A lovely, lovable corner, this, past Goodnestone on the way to Graveney, and it seems prosperous, too. Moreover, the yellow gravel road is excellent.

The name of Goodnestone is a corruption of “Godwin’s Town.” It was one of the manors of the great patriot Saxon, Earl Godwin. Graveney stands where the wide-spreading marshes of Seasalter stretch away to the sea. There is little of it, beside the ancient, time-worn church, containing a fine canopied brass to John Martyn and wife, 1436. He was a Judge of the King’s Bench. The effigy shows him holding a heart, inscribed “IHV MCY,” in his hands.

A stone in the churchyard, not otherwise remarkable, mentions a place with the odd name “Old Wives’ Leaze.” One naturally wants to know something of these old wives and of their leaze, but disappointment dogs the footsteps of the inquirer, as closely and as constantly as his own shadow. An old man mowing the grass of the churchyard remarks incuriously, on his attention being drawn to it, that he “’spects it’s only a name.” “What’s in a name?” he seems to suggest with Shakespeare. Much sometimes.

Later inquiries prove “Old Wives’ Leaze” to be a hamlet high on a hill-top, one mile from Chilham, some seven miles distant; but I have no information as to the old wives, nor does any one else appear to possess any. The name, in fact, seems, like so many others, to be a corruption of some forgotten name, and is indeed supposed to have originally been “Overs,” or “Oldwoods Leaze,” or Lees.

In the marshes of Seasalter the hedgerows die away, leaving the flat road open and unfenced and bordered by watery dykes, in which last year’s reeds, rubbing together in the wind, keep up a rustling murmur, looking sere and wan until with the coming of June they are replaced by newer growths. The dykes quarter the marshes in all directions, and keep the pastures efficiently drained, but the sight of men busily engaged in digging thick slab-mud from them proves that they require constant care.

The scenery is that of Holland; even down to the particular detail of grass-grown earthen embankments against the sea, which long ago encroached here and destroyed the original church of Seasalter, and has in modern times caused its successor to be abandoned, in favour of a new building in Whitstable. In any case, it is difficult to see the need of a church where there are but few houses, unless some modern St. Francis were wishful of preaching here to the birds, the seagulls and the curlews that haunt these marshes and maintain a mingled screaming and melancholy piping, varied sometimes with what sounds like demoniacal chucklings or mocking laughter.

Inland you see the wooded uplands of the old forest district of Blean, with the whirling sails of distant windmills seeming to beckon over the hills and far away. Of the sea one observes nothing until the grassy embankment is climbed, hard by the “Old Sportsman” inn that stands sheltered under the lee of it, but from the top is seen the entrance of the Swale, dotted with many small vessels, with Sheppey about three miles across the channel and the pink-washed houses of the coastguard shining out yonder on Shellness Point.

From this spot the embankment gradually dies down and the land rises slightly to Whitstable. Stakes are stuck in the ooze of the foreshore, which is strewn with myriads of cockle and mussel-shells. Passing a coastguard-station where the coastguard’s chief anxieties seem to be concerned rather with his cocks and hens than with guarding the coast, the road comes past the “Jolly Sailor” and the “Blue Anchor,” into the hamlet of Seasalter, and thence winds inland. Here the approach to Whitstable is heralded by the notice-boards of the “Bolingbroke Building Estate,” a would-be suburb that appears by no means to have attained success. It is one of the very many attempts, so curiously characteristic of these speculative and impatient times of ours, to discount the future; to make a place, ad hoc, instead of letting it gradually develop, in response to requirements. The essential difference is that in other times places grew by gradual accretion of population. The population grew, and the houses increased gradually to meet its needs; but in this present era of “building estates” on the edges of towns, it is the speculative greed of landowners that seeks to build or let on building lease, and it is the public which is coy. The imaginations of landowners riot so freely on the alluring prospect of ground-rents that there is nowadays scarce a seaside town whose outskirts are not rendered squalid and utterly detestable with projected roads that are grass-grown failures, and with notice-boards in various stages of abject decay, offering “desirable sites” whose desirability appears to be more evident to the vendors than to purchasers. Here, at the approach to Whitstable, notice-boards make what appear to be splendid offers, “Title-free, rates-free, tithe-free”—everything, it seems, but rent-free; and yet the “Bolingbroke Building Estate” has not resolved into much more than a waste of scrubby pasture, dotted plentifully with sign-posts marking imaginary streets and avenues with the most grandiloquent names: Valkyrie Avenue, Medina Road, Wauchope Avenue, and so forth. One would conclude, not merely that the ground is not “ripe for building,” but that it has not even blossomed.

Having successfully passed the attractions of “Ye Olde Sportsman,” the “Blue Anchor,” the “Jolly Sailor,” and finally the “Rose in Bloom” and the “Two Brewers,” we come into Whitstable.

Domesday Book, which mentions “Seseltre,” says nothing of Whitstable, but there was then a “Hundred of Whitstapele,” a division even then of ancient standing. The name was, in its origin, evidently that of some prominent white pole, or post, or even of some white church-tower; for the word “stapol” means any of these; surviving in modern English as “steeple.” But no one will ever know what that object really was from which, in such roundabout fashion, the town of Whitstable derives its name.

It is, at first sight, a singularly unattractive place; and the more you see of it, the less you like it. The streets are narrow and mean, without the saving grace of picturesqueness, and the sea-front adds to the squalor by being occupied by the railway-station and a very coaly dock.

Having thus successfully taken away the character of Whitstable, I will now address myself to the oyster fishery.

There are numerous conflicting accounts of the reason for Julius Cæsar’s invasion of Britain. Some historians consider he was impressed with the riches of the country in gold and skins, and some—with clearer vision, no doubt—are of opinion that he was actuated by sheer lust of conquest. Whitstable, however, is earnestly of opinion that Cæsar’s coming was entirely and exclusively prompted by an appetite for “Whitstable natives.” It is a flattering belief. At any rate, the “Rutupine oysters” (the “natives” in question) were at that time high in favour at Rome, and continued so with all the Roman emperors; so that one instinctively associates “oyster” and “emperor” in indissoluble company.

No one will ever discover the origin of oyster-eating. The eating of the first must have been a thrilling experiment, as James the First declared. “He was a very valiant man,” said our British Solomon, “who first ventured upon the eating of oysters.”

One can imagine that man, faced with the dilemma of starving or being poisoned, making the awful experiment. Whoever he was, or whenever he flourished, he merits the gratitude of that portion of the world which eats oysters.

Speaking for myself, and those of my fellow men who are illogical enough not to like oysters—never having tried them, and never intending to do so—I am quite cold upon the subject, and therefore am inclined the more to applaud Seneca, who, austere philosopher that he was, described the oyster as “a thing that cannot be called food,” but an abstruse luxury, “a provocative of appetite, causing those who are already full to eat more.” Thus he dismisses oyster-eaters to the cold shades of contempt occupied by such people as those who take bitters and wash themselves out with table-waters. But Seneca himself was an oyster-eater, and spoke, as your true philosopher should speak, at first-hand knowledge.

The Rutupine oyster of Roman times still remains, as the “Whitstable native” of our own day, the prime favourite, and the cultivation of him here employs some three thousand people. We shall see the fishing-grounds to better advantage on having left Whitstable behind and ascending the cliffs of Tankerton. They are not lofty cliffs, but they do assuredly command a fine view, out over this shallow sea at the entrance of the Swale. There, where at low water you perceive the long “Street Stones” stretching out to sea, many of the eighty-five or more of the Whitstable oyster-fleet will, at the beginning of August, when the season begins, generally be seen going to their work of dredging up the young oysters, so far away as Margate, presently to return with the spoils of their dredge-nets, for laying down in these Whitstable grounds. Others are engaged in dredging for the mature oysters, ready for the market. It takes seven years for the Whitstable natives to reach maturity, and they do so only to perfection in this patch of shallow water, some two miles square. There are many theories to account for the especial virtues that reside in these exceptionally favoured waters; but the generally received explanation of the undoubted fact is that the shallowness of the water permits it to be readily warmed by the sun, and that the streams descending from the land keep the sea-bottom free from mud. The Colchester native, from the shores of Essex, has a great reputation, but he is often dredged up and taken to finally mature in Whitstable waters.