EASTBURY HOUSE.
Stanford-le-Hope now comes in view, on the other side of a hollow where a little stream flows to the Thames, two miles away, past the suggestively named village of Mucking. Away across the flats comes the bellowing of the great steamships making for Thames Haven, or passing up to or down from London; and when night has come, the red eye of a lighthouse, screwed to piles set in the fathomless mud, winks solemnly at you from out of the vagueness.
We will pass Vange and Pitsea, on their elevated sites, without comment, the last-named leading on to Hadleigh without any intervening village; for Thundersley, midway between the two, is placed half a mile off the road. Thundersley is a very small and very inoffensive little place, in spite of the terrific dignity given by its name. From the high-placed churchyard of its beautiful but dilapidated little Early English church, the eye ranges over Benfleet and Cauvey Island, and over a world of waters and muddy creeks, perhaps not particularly lovely to read about, but beautiful beyond expression in the sunshine.
HADLEIGH CASTLE.
But Hadleigh, two miles distant, on its steep hillside, presenting a stern and rugged upland to the old pirates who infested the estuary of the Thames in the long ago—Hadleigh takes the palm for historic interest and beauty. Nothing shall be said of Hadleigh Church, fine though it be, and nothing of the Salvation Army’s “Home Colony” for the “submerged tenth,” or the born-tired, or whatever may be the fit and proper title for “General” Booth’s unlovely pets who farm the surrounding fields; Hadleigh Castle only shall be touched upon in these pages. Hubert de Burgh, who built it, built well and truly when he raised its walls, nigh upon seven hundred years ago, and so terrible was the forefront of his fortress, set here on the hilltop,—the first object that attracted the eye of the would-be invader sailing up the Thames,—that the foreign foe on sight of it generally turned tail and fled whence he had come.
Thus it is that Hadleigh Castle has no history in the warlike sort. Its very presence was sufficient. Two hundred years after its towers had been set here to diadem the green hill, the castle was deserted and left to decay, as having served its turn; and since then it has been a quarry to which everyone in the neighbourhood who wanted stone has resorted, so that only the ruined walls of two circular towers are left. But they form a striking and memorable picture, whether you take them for a foreground and gaze thence to Leigh and Southend and the mouth of the Thames, or look upon them and the hill from the pastures below. Constable painted Hadleigh Castle so long ago as 1829, and, truly enough, described its situation as “vastly fine.”