Scrapsgate was the scene of a mysterious tragedy many years ago. It has long since been forgotten, and the only reminder of it now to be found is a weather-worn tombstone in the obscure churchyard of the workhouse at Minster, with the following inscription:
“O, earth
cover not my blood!
Sacred
to the memory of
a man unknown, who was
found murdered on the
morning of the 22nd April 1814
near Scraps Gate in this parish, by
his Head being nearly severed from his body
A subscription
was immediately entered into and
one hundred guineas reward
offered on conviction of the
perpetrators of the
horrible act, but they remain at
present undiscovered.”
The perpetrators were never discovered. “Mysterious” I have described this affair, but it was pretty widely understood at the time that the stranger had met his fate at the hands of the smugglers who then found Scrapsgate a convenient spot for their shy trade. His identity and occupation alike remained unestablished, but the supposition was then current that he was either a member of a smuggling band who had turned informer and had been discovered in his treachery, or that he was one of the revenue officers. The ferocity of the smugglers who infested the coasts of Kent stuck at nothing, and this was by no means an exceptional outrage, as the history of their desperate doings sufficiently proves.
A complete and weird contrast from this lovely vale is Warden Point, which lies off to the left of the way to Eastchurch, along two and a quarter miles of solitary winding road. “At Warden Point,” I read in a geological work, “is the finest exposure of the London clay.” And it may be added that, in the many landslips which have occurred here of late years, other things have been exposed. In short, the slipping away of the cliffs has torn asunder the churchyard of Warden, with the shocking result that the coffins and skeletons of the dead are strewn about. You come to this Golgotha at a point where the road, making straight for the cliffs’ edge, has been carefully barred, lest the stranger should descend into the sea and there perish. To the few cottages that stand here, all that is left of the village of Warden, has been given the unlovely name of “Mud Row.” Forming part of the garden fence of one of these is a sculptured stone tablet recording that Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the rebuilding of London Bridge, gave some of the stones of old London Bridge to rebuild Warden church, in 1836; the ancient church having been destroyed by encroachment of the sea. By 1870 the sea had further advanced and the new church was closed, being demolished in 1877, when the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the last thirty years were removed to Minster. Now all that remains of the churches of Warden is this dedication tablet, part of a garden fence. Looking down here, across the yawning rifts and crevasses of the land-ship, you see the poor exposed relics of the dead in the olden churchyard, and out to sea the waters are discoloured with the washings of the clay.
Eastchurch, a pretty village with a charming and well-kept old church, is a pleasant place, associated recently with aviation and the Naval Flying grounds. It is thus appropriate enough that a new stained-glass window should have been placed here in 1912 to the memory of Charles Stuart Rolls and Cecil Grace, who both lost their lives in flying.
Among other memorials is a tablet to Vice-Admiral Sir Richard King, Bart., Commander-in-Chief at the Nore, who, having commanded the Achille at Trafalgar and come scatheless through that action, died of cholera at Sheerness, aged 61. Here, too, is an elaborate monument to Gabriel Livesey, who died at Eastchurch parsonage in 1622. His stately recumbent effigy, under a canopy of coloured and gilded marbles, has in front of it a group of children; among them the kneeling figure of his son Michael, afterwards notorious as one of the Commissioners who tried Charles the First and signed his death-warrant.
Close beside Eastchurch the striking group of Shurland Castle is prominent. This is the embattled manor-house already referred to, built on the site of Sir Robert de Shurland’s stronghold. The building is most imposing from the front, but it puts all its goods in the shop-window, so to say, for it is just a long, shallow house, with nothing of interest within; and all the vast original ranges of buildings in the rear have been demolished. It is, in fact, a farmhouse, and it and the farm, in spite of the old Sheppey proverb, “Sheppey grass none can surpass,” have been unlet for about twenty years. Although the interior is commonplace itself, the front is fine, in good red brick, with vitrified brick in diamond patterns, and moulded brick chimneys. Among the paving-stones leading up to the entrance is an Early English floriated stone coffin-lid, of some beauty.
HARTY CHURCH: FAVERSHAM IN THE DISTANCE
Down from Eastchurch, we come out of the “hill country” of Sheppey, along a beautiful avenue of overarching trees, to the Harty Road station of the Sheppey Light Railway, and thence along the levels to Leysdown and the long, flat shell-beach of Shellness, with the pink-washed coastguard buildings at the extreme end, looking across the Swale to Whitstable. History has been made at Shellness. It was on December 11th, 1688, that James the Second fled, panic-stricken, from his palace of Whitehall, before the advance of the Prince of Orange, who had been proclaimed King in his stead in the market-place of Newton Abbot, on November 7th, by the title of William the Third. The fugitive sovereign, with a wig of unaccustomed modest cut and semi-clerical clothes for disguise, made his hasty exit in company with Sir Edward Hales, a Roman Catholic pervert whom he had recently appointed Master of the Ordnance, Lieutenant of the Tower, and Privy Councillor. This facile person brought with him a gentleman named Sheldon and a Mr. Abbadie, who occupied the position of Page of the Backstairs. If you do but consider a moment, there is something exquisitely appropriate and humorous in a Page of the Backstairs taking part in such a fugitive back-door departure. A librettist in comic opera could have thought of no happier touch.