The last smuggler has long since died, less in the odour of sanctity than of unexcised schnapps, and not since sixty years ago has a witch been credibly reported, sailing athwart the moon on a besom. Now, when cattle fall victims to the ills common to them, instead of "swimming" the nearest half-daft and wholly ill-favoured old woman, the farmers send to Hythe or Ashford for a veterinary surgeon.
It is a romantic view-point, this outlook from Lympne cliff, and quite unspoiled. You can have it wholly to yourself the livelong day, except for the occasional passage of a farm-hand, whose natural avocations take him past. It has not become a show-place and, by consequence, self-conscious. A steep and rough undercliff, a tangled mass of undergrowth clinging to the cliff itself, a cottage nestling beneath, and church and castle stark against the sky-line—that is Lympne from below. The purest of water spouts from the cliff-face, from a pipe—the shrunken representative of the river Limen—and landsprings give the fields a perennial verdure.
LYMPNE CASTLE.
Lympne, despite its weird spelling, is merely "Lim"; how or why the "p" got into the place-name is unknown. The village—a small and drowsy one—describes a semicircle enclosing the church and its neighbour, and though pretty, is not in any way remarkable, save that it has an inn oddly named the "County Members," and a cottage bearing the quaintly pretty tablet pictured on the next page. The church is a grim stern church, exactly suited to its situation, with massive Early Norman and Early English interior, disdainful of ornament. The heavy door of the north porch is boldly patterned in nails, "A. G. C. W. 1708."
A COTTAGE TABLET, LYMPNE.
It is a Roman road that runs along the cliff-top through Lympne to Aldington, passing the hamlet of Court-at-Street that was once the Roman "Belerica," and emerging upon the "open plain" of Aldington Frith. "Allington Fright" as the Kentish peasantry name it, is still an open expanse. The airs of romance blow freely about it to-day, as of old, and although from the high ground by Aldington Forehead distant glimpses of Hythe and its big neighbour, Folkestone, whether you desire it or not, are obtained, the place is solitary, and the country, still unspoiled, dips down southward to "The Mesh" and the sea, over crumbling earthy cliffs, tangled with impenetrable bracken, blackberry brambles, and hazel coppices. This is the especial district of that fine prose legend, "The Leech of Folkestone"—"Mrs. Botherby's Story," as Ingoldsby names it. The place has ever been the home of superstition and the miraculous. To quote Ingoldsby himself, "Here it was, in the neighbouring chapelry, the site of which may yet be traced by the curious antiquary, that Elizabeth Barton, the 'Holy Maid of Kent,' had commenced that series of supernatural pranks which eventually procured for her head an unenvied elevation upon London Bridge." Although that eminent pluralist and cautious though fiery reformer, Erasmus, was Rector of Aldington in 1511, and opposed, alike by policy and temperament, to shams and spiritual trickery, the old leaven of superstition worked freely in his time, and, indeed, survived until recent years. Nay, more than that, these solitudes still harbour beliefs in the uncanny. The district, as of old, has an ill name, and the warlocks and other unholy subjects of Satan, once reported to make its wild recesses their favourite rendezvous, are found even now, in confidential interludes, to be not wholly vanished from the rural imagination. The moralist, from his lofty pinnacle, of course condemns these darkling survivals, but there be those, not so committed to matter-of-fact, who, revolting from the obvious and the commonplace, welcome the surviving folklore, and, plunging into its haunts, forget awhile the fashion of Folkestone, Sandgate, and Hythe.
A KENTISH FARM.