The only two Surrey rivers of any consequence, the Wey and the Mole, rise in the Weald country and cut through the chalk ranges of the Northern
A STREAM, NEAR LEITH HILL, SURREY
THE ROTHER, FITTLEWORTH, SUSSEX
Downs on their journey to the Thames, precisely as the Sussex rivers cut through the South Downs on their passage to the sea. The Mole is a little river of character and considerable beauty. Rising in the neighbourhood of Redhill it burrows under the chalky heights of Box and so by Leatherhead, Cobham, and Esher to the Thames at Moulsey. Through so ornate a residential region, too, its streams are made the most of in many a pleasant lawn and grove, and by many a country mansion and villa. It runs quite a pace too, here and there over yellow gravel, and sometimes, as between Cobham and Esher, abandons the trammels of civilisation, and slips, in quite wanton fashion, through wild and tangled woodland. But this would bring us within the orbit of the great river-haunting public of the Metropolis, and the ever-widening circles which are part of it. As all mention of the Thames is eliminated from these pages as a subject at once too voluminous, too familiar in fact and in descriptive literature, its Surrey tributaries may fairly be left here to the accomplished brush of the artist.
Kent is less rich in rivers even than Sussex, though happier in the quality; of the only three of recognisable name it possesses the Medway, the Stour, and the Darenth. The latter, which rises at Westerham and flows through the chalk Downs northward to meet the Thames at Dartford, is a small stream with a sometimes swift current, more noted perhaps as a natural trout stream among anglers than on any other account, Farningham having been a well-known tryst of many famous fly-fishermen in days when locomotion was less easy than now. But the Medway is the most important of Kentish rivers, both for the length and quiet beauty of its inland reaches and the world-wide fame of its anchorage as it spreads out to meet the Thames. Rising on the borders of Sussex about Penshurst it flows north by three of the most important Kentish towns—Tonbridge, Maidstone, and Rochester—the last, of course, virtually including its straggling and busy neighbour of Chatham. A slow-running river always, the most representative and typical portion of the Upper Medway is the twelve miles or so between Tonbridge and Maidstone. For much of the distance it flows in a valley sufficiently narrow to display to singular advantage the richness of the steep slopes on either side, the country seats, the upstanding villages, the hop-fields, and the orchards. It runs, too, in sufficient volume to make a fine
broad trail in the valley, and be the occasion for several ancient stone bridges of many arches, such as complete the measure of a river’s beauty. From Yalding, where the little streams of the Teise and Beult—strange names for so homely a locality—come in, to Maidstone is the cream of the river. Indeed, till these three unite the Medway can hardly be said in the matter of size to challenge much attention. For a few miles below Maidstone it maintains somewhat the same characteristics till, broadening out under the influence of the tide at Aylesford, it begins its passage through the high walls of the North Downs. A curious passage it is, too: a struggle as it were between frequent groups of the tall chimneys of cement works belching out smoke, and scenery that before the modern industrial period arrived to smirch it, must have been singularly fine. For some half-dozen miles the river continues to roll through an ever-widening but necessarily contracted channel in a quite deep gorge, the Downs rising on either side to a height of five or six hundred feet. The last bridge is at Rochester, still around its Cathedral a quaint old town redolent of Dickens, with the contrasting clangour and pitiless prose of Chatham spreading, unsightly but significant, far over the heights, and looking down on the broad harbour into which the Medway, having achieved its passage through the range, now expands itself towards the Thames. The whole north fringe of Kent, as every one knows who has travelled the road from Canterbury to Rochester, or in other words the line of Watling Street, is a bleak, cheerless country to look upon; the more so, if the suggestion of paradox be permitted, because so highly cultivated. But looking northward from the high ground about Faversham or Sittingbourne one may forget this in the fine views over the Swale, and Sheppey Island, and the mouth of the Thames that are everywhere disclosed, and finest of all is that of the wide, island-studded estuary of the Medway in all its memorable significance.