The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

by Charles G. Harper

XVII

MILTON

Having thus disposed of this company of scribbling foreigners, I will get on to Milton-next-Gravesend, which immediately adjoins the town; especially will I do so because, when the old waterside lanes have been explored, little remains to see besides Gordon’s statue and the little cottage where he used to live. The high-road is not at all interesting, unless indeed a Jubilee clock-tower and a number of private houses of the Regent’s Park order of architecture may be considered to lend a charm to it. Just beyond these houses comes Milton: a school, a church, and a public-house standing next one another. The church belongs to the Decorated period, and has a tower built of flints, stone, and chalk. During the last century the churchwardens had the repairing of the nave roof under consideration, and, in order to save twenty pounds on an estimate, they decided to remove the battlements, and to have a slated roof, spanning nave and aisles, and ending in eaves. The thing was done, against the wish of the Vicar and with the approval of the then Bishop of Rochester, and all who pass this way can see how barbarous was the deed. It had not even the merit of economy, for, by the time the work was completed, it had cost the churchwardens several hundreds of pounds more than had been anticipated.

“Trifle not, your time’s but short,” says a very elaborate and complicated sundial over the south porch, looking down upon the road; and, taking the hint, we will proceed at once from Milton Church to the public-house next door. But not for carnal joys; oh no! Only in the interests of this book will we make such a sudden diversion; for, at the rear of the house, on the old bowling-green, is an interesting memorial of one of the jolly fellows who once upon a time gathered here on summer evenings and played a game of bowls when business in the neighbouring town of Gravesend was done for the day.

TO THE MEMORY

Of Mr. Alderman Nynn,

An honeft Man, and an Excellent Bowler.

Cuique est sua Fama.

Full forty long Years was the Alderman feen, The delight of each Bowler, and King of this Greene. As long he remember’d his Art and his Name, Whofe hand was unerring, unrival’d whofe Fame. His Bias was good, and he always was found To go the right way and to take enough ground. The Jack to the uttermoft verge he would fend For the Alderman lov’d a full length at each End. Now mourn ev’ry Eye that hath feen him difplay The Arts of the Game, and the Wiles of his play; For the great Bowler, Death, at one critical Cast Has ended his length, and clofe rubb’d him at laft.

F. W. pofuit, MDCCLXXVI.

And having duly noted this elegy of a truly admirable man, we may leave Milton, pausing but to look down upon the estuary of the Thames, where the great liners pass to and fro the most distant parts of the world, and also to consider the humours of a hundred years ago, when, as now, Milton was in the corporate jurisdiction of Gravesend, and when it sufficed both to employ one watchman between them. This watchman was also Common Crier, and was supported, not by a salary, but (like a hospital) by voluntary contributions. And he did not do badly by the grateful Gravesenders, for he collected, one year with another, £60, which, added to the market-gardening business he also carried on, must have made quite a comfortable income.

DENTON

A little way beyond Milton, where the road curves round to the right, there will be seen on the left an eighteenth-century mansion, standing in extensive grounds. Immediately within the lodge-gates is what looks like a small church, surrounded by trees. It is older and far more interesting than it seems to be. Until 1901 it was, in fact, a roofless ruin; but it was then restored by Mr. George M. Arnold, who then owned Denton Court, the name of the house. The church, now used as a private chapel by the owner of Denton Court, was in fact Denton Chapel, the place of worship of the parish of Denton, which was ecclesiastically separate from Milton until 1879. Denton is a place so small that few maps condescend to notice it, but it is an ancient place, first named in A.D. 950, as “Denetune,” when the manor was given by one Byrhtric to the Priory of St. Andrew at Rochester, which built this chapel of St. Mary. It was on the dissolution of the monasteries in the time of Henry the Eighth that it fell into ruin.

DENTON CHAPEL.

The chapel is of literary interest, for it is the original of Barham’s “Ingoldsby Abbey.” In travelling between Canterbury and London by coach, Barham noticed the ruined walls standing up, silhouetted against the sky, and looking far more important than intrinsically they were; for this was then a cleared space, the new road near by having in 1787 been cut actually through the little churchyard.

Commentators in various editions of the Ingoldsby Legends have stated sceptically “the remains of Ingoldsby Abbey will be found—if found at all—among the ‘Châteaux en Espagne.’” That is not so; for here it is. Barham himself, in a note to the legend “The Ingoldsby Penance,” remarks the ruins are “still to be seen by the side of the high Dover road, about a mile and a half below the town of Gravesend.”

... near
The great gate Father Thames rolls sun-bright and clear,
Cobham woods to the right—on the opposite shore
Laindon Hills in the distance, ten miles off, or more;
Then you’ve Milton and Gravesend behind—and before
You can see almost all the way down to the Nore.

In Domesday Book Denton is written “Danitune,” and it is generally held that the name comes from the raiding Danes, who certainly troubled this estuary; but it is probably “Dene-town,” the place in the vale; perhaps in contradistinction to Higham, which is not far off.

JOE GARGERY’S FORGE.

CHALK

Chalk is the next place on the road, and Chalk is quite the smallest and most scattered of villages, beginning at the summit of the hill leading out of Milton and ending at Chalk church, which stands on a hillock retired behind a clump of trees nearly a mile down the road, and far away from any house. All the way the road commands long reaches of the Thames and the Essex marshes, and on summer days the singing of the larks high in air above the open fields can be heard.

At Chalk, in 1836, Charles Dickens rented a honeymoon cottage, on his marriage with Catherine Hogarth. Great controversies arose some years ago, following upon what is said to be a wrong identification of the place with a residence called the “Manor House”; and it was stated that the real dwelling in question was the weather-boarded and much humbler cottage at the fork of the old and new roads between Gravesend and Northfleet, still standing, and with a commemorative tablet on it. Opposite is “Joe Gargery’s Forge.”

ANCIENT CARVING—CHALK.

Chalk church is a very much unrestored building of flint and rubble, dating from the thirteenth century. Its south aisle was pulled down at some remote period. There still remains, and in very good preservation, too, a singular Early English carving over the western door representing a grinning countryman holding an immense flagon in his two hands and gazing upward towards a whimsically-contorted figure that seems to be nearly all head and teeth. Between the two is an empty tabernacle which at one time before the destruction of “idolatrous statues” would have held a figure of the Virgin. The two remaining figures probably illustrate the celebration of “Church ales,” a yearly festival formerly common to all English villages, and held on the day sacred to the particular saint to whom the church was dedicated. On these occasions there was used to be general jollity; feasting and drinking; manly sports, such as boxing, wrestling, and games at quarter-staff, would be indulged in, and the day was held as a fair, to which came jugglers and players of interludes and itinerant vendors from far and near. The Church, of course, being the original occasion of the merry-making, looked benignly upon it, and provided the funds for the malt from which the so-called “Church ales” were brewed.

SAILORS’ FOLLY. (After Julius Cæsar Ibbetson).

JACK COME HOME AGAIN.

THE “LORD NELSON”

There is one other item of interest at Chalk, and that is an old wayside tavern, the “Lord Nelson,” one of those old houses that occupied, during last century, and the first quarter of the nineteenth, a position between the coaching inn and the mere beer-house. This type of tavern is still very largely represented along the Dover Road, although the sailors who chiefly supported them are no longer seen tramping the highways between the seaports. They have, most of them, little arbours and trim gardens with skittle- and bowling-alleys, and here the sailor would sit and drink, spin yarns, or play at bowls; swearing strange oaths, and telling of many a hard-fought fight. If he had kindred company, there would be, I promise you, a riotous time; for no schoolboy so frolicsome as Jack ashore, and hard-won wages and prize-money, got at the cost of blood and wounds, he spent like water. Nothing was too expensive for him, nor, indeed, expensive enough, and if he was sufficiently fortunate to leave his landing-place with any money at all, he would very likely post up to town with the best on the road, holding, very rightly, that life without experiences was not worth the having. And of experiences he had plenty. He lived like a lord so long as his money lasted, and when he went afloat again he was shipped in a lordly state of drunkenness; but once the anchor was weighed his was a slave’s existence. Not that any word of his hardships escaped him; he took them as inseparable from a seaman’s life; and, indeed, once the first rapture of his home-coming was over, the sea unfailingly claimed him again. And when ashore all his talk was of battles and storms; he damned Bonaparte, believed that one Englishman could thrash three “darned parleyvoos,” despised land-lubbers, and sang “Hearts of Oak” with an unction that was truly admirable. His failings were only those of a free and noble nature, and it is very largely owing to his qualities of courage and tenacity that England stands where she is to-day. Let us not, however, decry, either directly or by implication, the sailors who now man our ships. They live in more peaceful times, and have neither the discomforts nor the hard knocks that were distributed so largely years ago; but they have approved themselves no whit less stalwart than their ancestors who wore pigtails, fought like devils; talked of Rodney, Nelson, Trafalgar, and the Nile, and finally disappeared somewhere about the time of the Battle of Navarino.

THE LIGHT FANTASTIC. BANK HOLIDAY AT CHALK.

It was for the delight and to secure the custom of these very full-blooded heroes that these old taverns with signs so nautical and bowling-greens so enticing were planted so frequently on this very sea-salty road, and now that the humblest traveller finds it cheaper to pay a railway-fare than to walk, they look, many of them, not a little forlorn. As for the “Lord Nelson,” at Chalk, I fear it lies too near London suburbs to last much longer. Already, on Bank Holidays, when the Cockney comes to Gravesend, literally in his thousands, riotous parties adventure thus far, and dance in the dusty highway to sounds of concertina and penny whistle. Their custom will doubtless enrich the place, and presently a gin-palace will be made of what is now a very romantic and unusual inn, grey and time-stained; its red roof-tiles thickly overgrown with moss and house-leek, and its gables bent and bowed with years.

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