Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

A fine road leads from Sheerness on to Minster, past the ugly outlying houses of Miletown. It is with some surprise that the stranger to Sheppey discovers good roads here: the instinctive feeling being, apparently, that coastwise islands are outside the common needs and conveniences of mainlands.

MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY CHURCH.

We may turn to the left and reach the coast overlooking the Nore, but our especial business now is to reach Minster, generally called “Minster-in-Sheppey,” to distinguish it from “Minster-in-Thanet.” Minster stands on the higher lands of the island, and, indeed, can be seen from almost every point; its great squat church tower standing on an abrupt hill, surrounded by the little village of brick and boarded cottages, and further with a belt of trees. The square gatehouse, all that is left of the nunnery founded by Saint Saxburga in early Saxon times, stands by the church, and teas are provided there for the weary. Glorious views are obtained from the churchyard; but it is within the church that the great interest of the place lies, for the tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland is here, and here we are upon the scene of that humorous legend of Barham’s—one of the few of the Ingoldsby Legends written in prose. The tomb is in the south aisle, the effigy of the warrior clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century. “His hands,” says Barham, “are clasped in prayer: his legs, crossed in that position so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in modern days, bespeak him a Soldier of the Faith in Palestine. Close behind his dexter calf lies sculptured in high relief a horse’s head.” The local legend upon which Barham founded his story of “Grey Dolphin” is that the Lord of Shurland, happening to pass by the churchyard of Minster, found a fat friar in the act of refusing, unless he was paid for his services, to say the last rites of the Church over the body of a drowned sailor brought for burial. The Baron was not a man with reverence for the dead, or of particularly deep religious opinions, and had—Barham tells us in his legend—already seen to it that the dead sailor’s pockets had been turned inside out, with ill success, for they contained not a single maravedi, but he was incensed by the refusal to bury him. He promptly slew the friar and kicked his body into the open grave, to bear the sailor company. Mother Church was not particularly fond of the greasy friars who at that time infested the country, but she could not brook so flagrant an insult, and accordingly made things extremely unpleasant for the Baron, who, learning that the King lay aboard ship two miles off the coast of Sheppey, swam there and back on his horse, Grey Dolphin, and obtained a pardon. On returning to the shore, he met an old woman who prophesied that the horse who had now helped to save his life should one day cause his death. To render this, as he thought, impossible, the Baron killed Grey Dolphin on the spot. The next year, however, chancing to pass the place, he kicked against the bleached skull of his old charger, still lying on the beach, and, a fragment of bone penetrating his foot, blood-poisoning set in, and he died of gangrene.

Here, then, is the effigy of the horse’s head carved beside it. The Baron’s hands are not, indeed, “clasped in prayer,” for his arms have been shorn off by some vandals at the elbows; but that is a detail. His sword and lance lie by his side. “It was the fashion in feudal times,” says Barham, “to give names to swords: King Arthur’s was christened Excalibur; the Baron called his Tickletoby, and when he took it in hand, it was no joke.”

Sir Robert de Shurland, unlike many of the figures who flit through the merry pages of the Ingoldsby Legends, was thus a very real personage. He lived in the reign of Edward the First, and the fact of his having been granted “wreck of the sea” may have originated the story which purports to account for the horse’s head, swimming through waves, carved conspicuously on his tomb. “Wreck of the sea” was the right of laying claim to anything along the foreshore of a manor; any flotsam and jetsam that could be reached by the point of a lance when riding as far as possible into the sea at low water. Unless thus specifically granted away, the right of Flotsam and Jetsam along the coasts belonged, and still belongs, to the Crown.

The legend has acquired for Minster Church the local name of the “Horse Church,” and is alluded to in the weathervane of a horse’s head, surmounted by a little effigy of a running horse. Before leaving the building, notice the mutilated effigy, supposed to be that of a Spanish prisoner who died in durance on board at the Nore, and also that of a knight, supposed to be Jordanus de Scapeia, whose clasped hands hold a mystic oval sculptured with a little effigy symbolising the soul.

Given calm weather, or with the wind in one’s favour, cycling in Sheppey is a delight, for the roads, with the exception of this that leads down again from Minster, are either quite flat or gently undulating, and the surface is of the best; and there is practically no traffic to prevent one bowling along at high speed. But with the wind against you—and when there is any wind it blows the greatest of great guns across these unprotected flats—there is absolutely nothing for it but to walk. After two miles’ cycling from Minster we come to Eastchurch. Here is a tiny village with a handsome old church, and, a little distance away, the imposing pile of Shurland House, a Gothic, red brick, battlemented building, built by Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports, about 1550, and the successor of that Shurland Castle inhabited by the Sir Robert de Shurland whom we have seen to be the hero of the Ingoldsby Legend of “Grey Dolphin.”

Turning to the left in the village street of Eastchurch, and bearing to the right at the next turning, Warden is reached in two miles—what is left of Warden, that is to say, for the encroachments of the sea have swept away most of it. All that is left is the inelegantly named “Mud Row,” at whose end a rough bar across the rutty lane prevents one cycling over the edge of the cliffs into the sea. Here is a scene of the wildest desolation. The cliffs, about one hundred feet high, composed of dark, greasy, and crumbling clay, have slipped and fallen in every direction, and the sea at the bottom is discoloured far out with the débris. For many years past this process has been going on, and by this time some eighty acres have been swallowed up and dissolved. In 1836 the parish church was rebuilt with the stones from old London Bridge, demolished in 1832 for the building of the present structure. Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the bridge, gave the stones and rebuilt the church, as a tablet removed from it, and now forming part of a garden wall at Mud Row, tells us. But it was not fated to stand long. The sea had sapped up to the church by 1870, and it was then closed. In 1877 it was pulled down, and the heaps of stones still lie by the beach a mile away. At the same time, the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the previous thirty years were disinterred and removed to Minster. But, as the cliffs continue to fall, the poor remains of the more ancient dead are still exposed here, and bleach in the sun: a grisly sight. It was but a little while ago that the present writer, visiting the spot, observed children engaged in the gruesome and morbid occupation of digging out skeletons for “amusement.” And not the children of ignorant cottagers, for whom there might possibly be some excuse, but of people of perhaps some pretensions to culture and right feeling. Is it not something of a scandal that the ecclesiastical authorities should allow so dreadful a thing? Warden Point, with its village gone but its older inhabitants still thus in evidence, is a melancholy place. The sea heaves and rolls in a muddy discoloration far out, and eats away the island day by day.