XIV

The old coachmen had an exciting time of it when either entering or leaving Dartford. They skidded down West Hill, when coming from London, to the imminent danger of their necks and those of their passengers, and they painfully climbed the East Hill, on their way out of the town toward Dover. When several accidents had occurred to prove how hazardous to life and property were these roads, the turnpike-trustmongers reduced their steepness by cutting through the hill-tops. This was about 1820. Although the roads were thus lowered, they still have a remarkably abrupt rise and fall, and the traveller in leaving the town for Dover can gain from halfway up the slope of the East Hill quite an extended view over Dartford roof-tops. He, however, remains to sketch at peril of some inconvenience, for the tramps who frequent Dartford take a quite embarrassing interest in art.

DARTFORD BRIDGE.

MARTYRS

Somewhere at this end of the town stood the Chantry of St. Edmund the Martyr, a halting-place at which pilgrims on their way to Canterbury stopped to pray and to kiss the usual relics. The site was probably where the Dartford Cemetery now stands beside the road, on the border of what is now called Dartford Brent, a wide expanse of common land known in other times as Brent, or Burnt Heath. This place came very near to being the site of a battle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, for here it was that the rival armies first confronted one another; but, instead of coming to blows, their leaders held a parley; and so, fair words on their lips, but with deceit in their hearts, they went up to London. Many years later, on July 19, 1555, to be precise, Dartford Brent reappears in history as the place on which three Protestant martyrs, Christopher Wade, Margaret Pollen, and Nicholas Hall, were burnt at the stake, and since then the annals of the place have been quite uninteresting. The gilt-crested spire of the memorial to them peers up on the skyline of the road-cutting, on the way up to the Brent. It stands in the old cemetery, on the left.

Donkin, the historian of Dartford, wrote in 1844:—“On the Brent are the outlines of the ‘Deserter’s Grave,’ cut in the turf, formerly frequented by the scholars of Hall Place School: the sod of which is still continued to be cut away by the country people in memory of the unknown, traditionally said to have been shot in the adjoining pit.”

Some light on this tradition is shed by an item in the churchwardens’ accounts:—

1679. Payed the coroner for setling on a soldier that hanged himself 13s.0d.
Payd for a stake to drive through him0s.6d.
Drink for the Jury1s.6d.

Here the road branches—the Dover Road to the left, the Roman Watling Street to the right; although, the Roman road being older and itself based on an immeasurably more ancient British trackway, it would be more fitting to say that it is the existing Dover Road which branches off from the parent trunk road. From this point of departure on the Heath, until at the north end of Strood High Street the ways again come to a meeting, over eleven miles of the original route have been abandoned for what in mediæval times proved to be the more convenient route round by the waterside at Greenhithe and Gravesend.

But although not for many centuries have these eleven miles or so of abandoned Roman way been in use as a through route, they are not all lost. The first three miles across the Heath form a good local road, which then turns off to the right, leaving the Watling Street to climb the hill of Swanscombe, steeply up, as a tangled lane amid the dense woods. It is a very considerable elevation. Here and there the footpath deviates from the original Roman line, and the ridges, banks and hollows of it can occasionally be glimpsed amid the undergrowth; but in any case it seems evident that the Watling Street in these eleven miles was not straight, but re-aligned in some four limbs or individually straight stretches, partly to avoid going over the extreme crest of Swanscombe Hill. On the shoulder of that hill there was at the time of the road being made or remodelled by the Romans a British village, established inland here away from the Thames estuary probably as being a safer place than any settlement by the riverside.

WATLING STREET

Here, on the slope of the hill, the Watling Street is cut through by the vastly deep and broad excavation in the chalk made by the activities of the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers. The construction of it may even thus be studied in section.

Below, in the levels of Springhead, where a lane takes up the line of the ancient road, there may have been that Roman station called Vagniacæ; although it may possibly have been by the waterside at Northfleet or Southfleet, for it is by no means certain that the Romans themselves had no lesser riverside route along the line of the present Dover Road. However, to lay down a dogma upon so uncertain a matter as the Roman road-system in Britain proves to be would not commend itself to those best qualified by study to judge.

From Springhead the Watling Street continued through Cobham Park, and so at length to a junction with the Dover Road, as already noted, at Strood.

Meanwhile, the more or less modern highway goes on through a dusty district where the builder is contending with the country, and, judging from appearances, he seems likely to get the best of it. All around are glimpses of the Heath, and problematical-looking settlements of houses and institutions are grouped together on the sky-line, with weird, bottle-like towers, extravagantly grotesque, like the architecture of a nightmare, or “Alice in Wonderland.” The City of London Lunatic Asylum is here beside the road; penitentiaries and their like are grouped about; a huge black windmill stands awfully on the Brent; while everywhere are puddles, bricks, old boots, old hats, and fragments of umbrellas. Dartford Brent is a singular place.

At the old hamlet of John’s Hole, just past here, called often in coaching days, “Jack-in-the-Hole,” was one of the Dover Road turnpikes. The old toll-house still remains beside the way. To this succeeds, at a distance of three quarters of a mile, the melancholy roadside settlement of Horns Cross, where a post-office, two inns, and a blasted oak look from one side of the road, across great fields of barley, to the broad Thames, crowded with shipping, below.

Stone Church, one of the most beautiful and interesting in Kent, stands on a hill-top, a short distance from the left-hand side of the road, and commands a wide view of the Thames. To architects and lovers of architecture it is remarkable on account of the striking similarity its rich details bear to those of Westminster Abbey, and it is generally considered that the architect of the one designed the other. This is the more remarkable since the Abbey, with this exception of Stone Church, stands alone in England as a beautiful and peculiarly personal example of Gothic thirteenth-century architecture as practised in France. The architect of Westminster Abbey must have been of French nationality; and so curiously similar, in little, are not only the details of both church and Abbey, but also the varieties of stone of which they are built, that they are most unlikely to have been the work of different men.

THE QUARRIES

Greenhithe lies off the road to the left hand, and fronts on to the Thames. The road, all the way hence to Northfleet, is enclosed by high walls with tall factory-chimneys on either side; or passes between long rows of recent cottages alternating with cabbage-fields in the last stage of agricultural exhaustion. Docks; huge and ancient chalk-pits; great tanks of lime and whitening, and brickfields are everywhere about, for Greenhithe and Northfleet are, and have been for many years, the chief places of a great export trade in flints, chalk, and lime. The flints are sent into Derbyshire, and even to China, where they are used in the making of porcelain; and many thousands of tons are shipped annually. The excavation of chalk and flints during so long a period has left its mark—a very deep and ineffaceable mark, too—upon this part of the road, and, to a stranger, the appearance presented by the scarred and deeply quarried countryside is wild and wonderful. Spaces of many acres have been quarried to a depth, in some places, of over a hundred and fifty feet, and many of these great pits have been abandoned for centuries, accumulating in that time a large and luxuriant growth of trees and bushes. Others are still being extended, and present a busy scene with men in white duck, corduroy, or canvas working clothes cutting away the chalk or loading it into the long lines of trucks that run on tramways down to the water’s edge. Not the least remarkable things in these busy places are the great bluffs of chalk left islanded amid the deepest quarries, and reaching to the original level of the land. They rise abruptly from the quarry floors, are generally quite inaccessible, and have been left thus by the quarrymen, as containing an inferior quality of chalk, mixed with sand and gravel, which is not worth their while to remove.

In midst of scenery of this description, and surrounded by shops and modern houses, stands Northfleet Church, beside the highway. It is a large Gothic building of the Decorated period, and has been much patched and repaired at different times without having been actually “restored.” There are some mildly interesting brasses in the chancel; but the massive western embattled tower is of greatest interest to the student of other times, for it was built, like many of the church towers in the Welsh marches and along the Scots borders, chiefly as a means of defence. The enemies who were thus to be guarded against at Northfleet were firstly Saxon pirates, then the fierce and faithless Danes, and (much later) the French. This defensible tower at Northfleet was largely rebuilt in 1628, but a part of it belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, and it even retains fragments of an earlier building, contemporary with the terrible Sea-rovers who sailed up the estuary of the Thames, burning and destroying everything as they passed.

A significant sign of the quasi-military uses of this extremely interesting tower is the tall stone external staircase that runs up its northern face from the churchyard to the first-floor level. The small doorway that opens at the head of this staircase into the first floor was originally the only entrance to the tower, and before the church could be finally taken the enemy would have had to storm these stairs, exposed to a fire of cloth-yard shafts from arrow-slits, and of heavy stones cast down upon them from the roof.