NEW ROMNEY.
It is a fine old Norman building, this church of St. Nicholas, with a tower arcaded and panelled in the well-known Norman style, and a grand, black-browed, ponderous interior, infinitely eloquent of old-time importance. The old altar tomb to Richard Stuppeneye, Jurat of the Marsh in 1509, in times before Mayors of Romney, stands at the east end of the south aisle, and was the spot where the business of the town was transacted in days before a town hall was erected; times when men thought it no ill to employ the house of God in between whiles for certain secular purposes. Stuppeneye's tomb, as an inscription states, was erected by his great-grandson in 1622, "for the use of the ancient meeting and election of Maior and Jurats of this port towne." And surely, if there be anything in associations and surroundings the town's business was like to be hallowed by the place where it was conducted, just as the annual election of a mayor beside the worthy Stuppeneye's resting-place should have secured a fitting magistrate. Let no one cite the mayor who sympathised with and aided the "owlers" as an instance of an unfit representative being chosen, for no one outside the Revenue ever thought any form of smuggling sinful. But old customs were broken some nine years since, and no longer is the mayor chosen beside the tomb of that worthy jurat.
Close beside this monument may be noticed, on the floor, a stone to "Edward Elsted, many years Riding Officer of this Place," who died in 1757, aged 51, doubtless, if he was a true and faithful servant of the Revenue, to the great joy of the smuggling interests of the town; for by the term "Riding Officer," we are to understand a mounted official of the Preventive Service to be indicated.
For the rest, New Romney may easily be dismissed. There is the "New Inn," with a frontage perhaps not older than one century, but with an interior that was only new five hundred years ago, where the smuggling cult used to hold convivial and profit-sharing meetings; there is the Town Hall next door, and there is the broad street with never a new building in it, or anywhere at all in the town. Sandwich is commonly held up as an example of a Cinque Port utterly decayed and dead as Queen Anne, or as the Pharaohs, or anything or anyone of whose demise there cannot possibly be any doubt, but there are new houses and other unmistakable signs of a living existence there, while here the town, reduced to the merest existence, simply continues mechanically, like a clock not yet run down. It is not an unpleasing—nay, it is even an interesting—place, but it gives an odd, weather-beaten, bleak impression, not perhaps so much to the eye as to the mind. It is possible to visit New Romney when the thermometer registers eighty in the shade, and for the mind to convey that bleak impression so acutely to the senses that the body shivers.
If, however, you want something really gaunt and shivery, why then, Littlestone-on-Sea will give all you desire in that sort, in full measure and brimming over. Littlestone-on-Sea might with equal propriety and more exact descriptiveness be named Littlestone-at-the-World's-End. It stands on the shingle-banks that have been thrown up by the sea to ruin Romney, and it is a mere line of sad grey stucco houses with their faces to the immensity of the sea, their backs to the emptiness of the marsh, and their skylights looking up into the vastness of the sky. The place is a resort of golfers in summer, an emptiness in winter, and all the year round an eyesore to those who fare the road between Romney and Dymchurch, and cannot fail to observe those gaunt houses in the distance, notching the coast-line in a hateful commonplace of detached-and semi-detachedness.
Here, along this coastwise road, between this point and Hythe, we make close acquaintance with the Martello towers. A ready way of describing the shape of one of these towers is to picture it as an inverted flower-pot. The proportions of height and circumference are very nearly the same, and what architects and builders would call the "batter"—i.e., the narrowing slope of the sides—runs at very closely the same angle.
A MARTELLO TOWER.
They are just upon a century old. Built solidly, of honest brickwork through and through, in the days of the Great Terror, no enemy's fire has ever been directed against them, but several have been used as targets for the heavy ordnance and high explosives of the modern gunners of Lydd and Dungeness, and, with a great deal of labour and at huge expense, at last destroyed. Some few, also, have been undermined and ruined by the encroachments of the sea. There were originally seventy-six of these towers, costing from £10,000 to £20,000 apiece, according to size. The usual size is thirty feet in height, with a diameter of forty feet at the base, diminishing to thirty at the top. They are in two storeys, with a bomb-proof roof formerly surmounted by a cannon mounted on a swivel-carriage. The walls vary from a thickness of nine feet on the seaward side to six on the landward, which would not be so greatly exposed to assault. Their name is said to derive from that circular fort at Martella, in Corsica, captured only after a long and desperate resistance in the time of Nelson. It has been left for modern times to thoroughly vindicate the plan of the military engineers who designed this first line of defence along an unprotected coast. Fortunately, there has never been any occasion to put these to the test, and it was not until the same blockhouse principle was introduced on the veldt in the second Boer War, that the weary campaign was brought at last to a close.