What the Medway is to West Kent the Stour is to East Kent, though in most respects a very different type of river. From its source near Ashford to its mouth near Sandwich its characteristics are entirely and absolutely rural; a quality rather emphasised than otherwise by its picturesque progress through the famous old town of Canterbury. From Ashford to Canterbury is the pick of the Stour which makes the best of company for the traveller, who, whatever his method
of progress, must of necessity go with it. The village of Wye, clustering around its ancient church amid the fields through which the river runs, is a most prepossessing spot, and calls for notice as having acquired much deserved reputation of recent years as an active centre of agricultural science. Still but of modest size and running clear though slow, the Stour skirts the foot of Godmersham Park and the high hills that to the northward are clothed with forests still covering many thousands of acres. By meadowy and woodland ways, hurrying a little here and there as if to remind one that, unlike the Medway, it is a trout stream of old renown, the Stour runs onwards to Chilham where a little village rests on its banks that from an artistic point of view would do credit to Shakespeare’s Avon. Thence by Chartham, with its ancient church and less engaging paper-mill, the stream pursues an even course through narrow meadows, washing the lawn of Harton Manor, with its fourteenth-century chapel in the yard, and the grounds of Milton just below, with a similar interesting and curious survival attached to them; while in the woods high above Chartham the “Pilgrims’ way” to Canterbury can still be traced with ease between its well-defined banks.
The Stour has certainly a high distinction in watering the earliest shrine of English Christianity, and being at its mouth the landing-place of St. Augustine, the creator of it. It traverses in two channels, made picturesque either by carefully tended foliage or fortuitous rows of old houses, the clean and ancient city of Canterbury. The stranger to this corner of England is apt to forget how comparatively remote and countrified a place this famous town still is. Such a considerable slice of West Kent is now involved in the residential districts tributary to London, and the busy shore of the Thames, the county as a whole is apt to take the colouring of these prominent and populous districts in the imagination both of those familiar with them and of others who do not know Kent at all. The whole course of the Stour from its source to its mouth is as continuously and genuinely rural, with as little flavour but that of the soil and its accessories, as any river in Somerset or Shropshire. It is out of reach of all those influences which either disfigure at intervals or give an over-prosperous, artificial, and too decorative touch to so many of the rivers within fifty miles of London. The old families to be sure, as elsewhere in Kent, have practically vanished, but there is
little surface evidence of this, nor of a new plutocracy of various grades with or without acres being in possession. There is nothing, for instance, of the atmosphere of Surrey or Hertfordshire or North Sussex or East Berks. All along the Stour it is quite obvious that people are wholly concerned with wheat and grass, with hops and fruit and cattle. One is out of range of the season-ticket, and in this sense in more of a true Arcadia than even in the upper valley of the Medway. And so as regards Canterbury. With the mind impressed from childhood by its outstanding ecclesiastical importance, one is apt to forget that it is only a clean country town, though a large one, lying remote from any place of importance, and as far from London by rail as Salisbury! Yet its importance in history is overwhelming, its interest as a place of pilgrimage in the modern sense prodigious. Its Cathedral, associated with such a trio as St. Augustine, Lanfranc, and Becket, with several unique features and possessions, is probably the most complete illustration of the procession of English ecclesiastical architecture that we have. There are large sections, too, of the city walls still standing at a considerable elevation, and on foundations, at any rate, dating back to Roman times. The finest embattled entrance gate of any surviving in English towns greets the approaching visitor, and quite a good display of ancient houses is still preserved in one that takes a proper pride in itself; though from the vandalism of two or three generations ago even Canterbury has not escaped. Soon after leaving the city, the Stour runs out in its easterly course towards the sea through wide, marshy meadows that are more interesting than picturesque from the knowledge that they lead to the ancient town of Sandwich, which, like its younger but more conspicuously striking rival at the mouth of the Rother, occupies a place to itself, resembling nothing else in England. As Rye, till the sea receded and left it virtually high and dry, was one of the chief seaports of England, the object of assault, and the seat of counter-strokes continually with our hereditary foes, the French, so at an earlier period was Sandwich the oldest of the Cinque Ports, which was finally shut off from the sea about four hundred years ago. Sandwich, though on the flat and not raised high upon a rock, savours even more of the remote past than Rye, which is a place of business and residence and still lives and moves in a small way far more within the
