The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

COOLING CASTLE.

The curious word “beth” we may read as “be-eth,” i.e. “it is”; or, as a rustic might say, even to this day, “it be.” These words are enamelled in black on a white ground. Below them, on a seal, are Lord Cobham’s arms: gules, on a chevron or, three lions rampant sable. He died in 1408, at a very great age; about ninety-five. His granddaughter, Joan, married, as her fourth husband, Sir John Oldcastle, the “good Lord Cobham,” friend of Henry the Fifth and of Wycliffe. He became a religious reformer and friend of the Lollards, and thus incurred the enmity of the Church; churchmen then, as now, and at all times, being eager in heresy-hunting. He was cited to appear before Archbishop Arundel, but when the apparitor appeared he shut himself up behind these formidable walls and defied the citation. But eventually he was brought to trial in London. He denied the doctrine of the Real Presence, and in the disputes with the bench of bishops declared the Pope was Antichrist, the prelates his members, and the friars his tail. He was condemned to be burnt, and although he escaped and wandered about the country nearly four years, he met a martyr’s fate at Christmas 1417, when he was hanged, and burnt hanging. Thus ended the “good Lord Cobham,” one of the earliest victims of a bloodstained Church without pity or remorse.

Of the castle little remains except the gatehouse towers with their bold machicolations, the moat, and the crypt of the Great Chamber. A modern house has been built in the enclosure.

THE “CHARTER,” COOLING CASTLE.

Cooling is in midst of the grim fenland associated with Dickens’s story, “Great Expectations,” and in fact is the scene of the opening chapter, in which Pip meets the dreadful convict, Magwitch, at night, in the churchyard. According to the story, the district of “the Meshes” is “a most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work,” and it is, truly, dreariness itself in winter or in bad weather. Dickens, of course, stage-managing his story, which opens on a “raw afternoon towards evening,” made the most of these unpleasant surroundings; and those atmospheric conditions, in Cooling churchyard and in company with the grisly row of graves of the Comport family, just to the south of the church-tower, would be sufficient to dishearten any one. Pip, looking out upon “the dark, flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,” began to cry; and no wonder, for he is represented among the tombs of his father and mother, Peter Pirrip and his wife, and of his five brothers. The Comport tombs, which formed the originals for Dickens’s idea of the Pirrip family, actually number ten in a line, with three more behind, and are presided over by a headstone bearing the inscription, “Comport of Cowling Court, 1779.” They are of the most odious and gruesome shape, roughly cylindrical and widening at the shoulders, suggestive of coffins and mummified bodies, and plastered with grey cement over brick. To the imaginative mind, they strikingly resemble so many human chrysalids, awaiting the day when they shall be hatched out as cherubim.

GRAVES OF THE COMPORT FAMILY, COOLING: “LIKE CHRYSALIDS.”

This is a kind of country that responds magically to sunshine, and, given a fine day, the marshes that stretch away for two miles down to the river form a beautiful picture, inviting to exploration. But it is better to keep along the road that goes winding away through High Halstow, Hoo St. Mary, and Allhallows, than to attempt reaching the shore at Egypt Bay, where the convict hulks used to be stationed, and where a coastguard station now stands. Only the most devious and primitive tracks lead that way, and the marshes that look so beautiful in the distant view, grey-green and golden in the sunshine, are commonplace enough on close acquaintance.

At High Halstow we come into the Hundred of Hoo and into the centre of this little-visited region, projecting, out of the beaten track of everyday commerce, between the outlets of the Thames and Medway. “Hoo” signifies a height, and is often found spelt “hoe” in place-names. “The Hoe” at Plymouth is in the nature of a cliff-top. The quaint sound of the word sometimes leads to misunderstandings, as we see by the following newspaper account of some proceedings at the Gravesend Police Court, March 13th, 1914.