Barham Downs are, of course, the "Tappington Moor," of that terrible legend, the "Hand of Glory," which opens the collection of the Ingoldsby Legends in many editions:
On the lone bleak moor, At the midnight hour,
Beneath the Gallows Tree,
Hand in hand The Murderers stand,
By one, by two, by three!
And the Moon that night With a grey, cold light,
Each baleful object tips;
One half of her form Is seen through the storm,
The other half's hid in Eclipse!
And the cold Wind howls, And the Thunder growls,
And the Lightning is broad and bright;
And altogether It's very bad weather,
And an unpleasant sort of a night!
Barham village, a very different place, lies below, snugly embosomed amid the rich trees of the Stour valley, sheltered and warm. From this point its tall, tapering, shingled spire peeps out from among the massed trees, and a branch road leads directly down to it and to that park and mansion of Barham Court which, had his ancestors of remote times done their duty by posterity, the author of the Ingoldsby Legends firmly believed would have been his.
THE "EAGLE GATES," BROOME PARK.
But here we are come, on the high road, to a striking entrance to a park. The place seems strangely familiar, yet the "Eagle Gates," as the countryfolk call them, of this domain of Broome Park are certainly unknown to us. The mystery is only explained by referring to the woodcut which prefaces most editions of the Ingoldsby Legends, and purports to be a view of "Tappington, taken from the Folkestone Road." Then it is seen that the illustration rather closely resembles this spot, with the trifling exceptions that eagles, and not lions, surmount the pillars, and that the mansion of Broome is really not to be seen through the gateway, although clearly visible a few yards away, when it is seen to be not unlike the house pictured. Many have been the perplexed pilgrims who have vainly sought the ancestral Ingoldsby gates and chimneys between Canterbury and Folkestone, lured to the quest by the original Preface to the Legends. Broome Park, whose lovely demesne is criss-crossed by turfy paths and tracks freely open to the explorer, is beautifully undulating and thickly wooded. In its midst stands the mansion, built in the last years of the seventeenth century by one of the extinct Dixwell family, and gabled, chimneyed, and generally as picturesque as Barham "most pseudonymously" described it, under the title of "Tappington Hall."
BROOME PARK: THE REAL ORIGINAL OF TAPPINGTON HALL.
The Oxenden family have long owned the beautiful old place, which still contains a "powdering closet," as used in the bygone days of huge headdresses and powdered hair. My lady would sit in her boudoir with her head thrust through a hatch in the wall into the "powdering closet"—a contrivance necessary to prevent the powder being scattered over everything.
