Look out for Hever, lest you miss it, for beside its grey old church, with the shingled spire, there is little else. Just a farm, a cottage or so, and an inn—the “Henry the Eighth,” formerly the “Bull and Butcher,” or, as legends would have it, the “Boleyn Butchered.” For this was the Kentish home of the beautiful and unfortunate Anne. They still tell you how Henry, ardent lover, used to come riding through the lanes to see his “dearest pet,” the fair chatelaine of Hever Castle, down yonder, amid the oozy water-meadows, and how, bogged in those miry ways, the rustics would pull the Defender of the Faith out of the sloughs. Here, too, in Hever Church may still be seen the altar-tomb and the magnificent brass of Sir Thomas Boleyn, my Lord of Wiltshire and Ormonde, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the ennobled and decorated father of that charmer. Another exquisite brass is that in the chancel to Margaret Cheyne, 1419.
HEVER CASTLE.
Downhill from Hever Church, surrounded still by its ancient moat, is the unspoiled castle, a small but perfect example of the fortified manor-house of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The greater part of the present building was erected in the later years of Henry the Sixth, and was added to in Elizabeth’s time. The Boleyns first became connected with it about 1460, when Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, mercer and Lord Mayor of London, purchased the ruined place and commenced to build anew; but before he could complete this reconstruction he was gathered to his fathers, and it remained for his son Sir Thomas—father of the ill-fated Anne—to complete the work Sir Geoffrey had begun.
It is a private residence, and the interior is very charily shown to strangers—on Wednesdays only. The exterior and the moat, however, are always readily accessible, and are very well worth seeing. The lichened castle walls, with their time-stained masonry and vivid patches of red brick, are extraordinarily picturesque, and the windows, occurring at irregular intervals, with the clustered chimneys and mantling ivy, give the place a romantic quaintness all its own. To complete the picture, apple-orchards face two sides of the moat.
The lanes wind greatly, but are merely undulating, on the route to Chiddingstone, two and a half miles distant. Chiddingstone is generally found to be a dream of beauty by enthusiastic visitors; and the visitor to this lovely hamlet cannot help being enthusiastic.
No less beautiful than Hever, but with a beauty of quite a different character, it stands in a hollow at the gates of Chiddingstone Park, whose magnificent elms and chestnuts overhang in summer a row of old timbered houses, sketched many hundreds of times on paper or canvas by enthusiastic artists. The quaint house next the park gates, in the accompanying sketch, is the ideally placed “Castle Inn,” that might, both as regards its situation and its cosy, old-fashioned interior, have inspired a Washington Irving to transports of eloquence. Everyone who has been to the Royal Academy any year knows Chiddingstone, although he may never have visited it; for artists are continually painting this loveliest of Kentish villages, as it is called, and its embowering trees and quaint timbered houses. Behind these houses, in a field, is the “chiding stone,” a large boulder of red sandstone, outcropped from the underlying geological formation, and said to have been a Druidical seat of judgment or place of exhortation.
The roads grow lonely and degenerate (this expression purely from the cyclist’s point of view), into wooded lanes and tracts between Chiddingstone and Penshurst. If, however, you have that which many cyclists have not—that is to say, a real love of natural woodland and copse, where the hazels grow and the bracken and undergrowth are dense—then the walk of two miles by footpaths through the coppices will be not the least enjoyable part of this trip. This brings one to the scattered and very beautiful old village of Penshurst surrounding the ancient baronial home of the Sidneys, Penshurst Place. On three days in the week—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays—the house is shown at an admission fee of one shilling. It is said that these fees amount in the year to over £300, which gives the annual number of visitors at more than six thousand. The Barons’ Hall is the chief point of interest, and is the oldest part of the historic building, dating back to the fourteenth century.