CHAPTER VIII
GOODNESTONE—GRAVENEY—SEASALTER—WHITSTABLE AND THE OYSTER FISHERY
The road from Faversham to Whitstable winds level for long distances, passing at first through a charming district of cherry-orchards, interspersed with emerald pastures, with sheep feeding under the trees, and evidences of much poultry-keeping, in the many coops filled with anxious hens clucking nervously after their young broods. Here, too, you see hop-gardens; looking more than a little bare in spring, but with plenty of work going on, chiefly in trimming and tarring the ends of the new ash-poles that are to be planted, thick as forests, for the hop-bines to grow upon. Here and there are the hutches in which the hop-pickers will live in August, and now and again you see an oast-house; the old buildings with their quaint outlines, the new apt to be eye-sorrows for angularity and sheer commonplace ugliness.
It is perhaps best to come this way in the sweet of the year, when the cherry-blossom mantles the trees with purest white, and when there is everywhere an inspiring and heartening air of anticipation, not only in the preparations going forward in the hop-gardens, but in the great barns where the thousands of cherry-baskets are collecting, awaiting the cherry-picking.
A lovely, lovable corner, this, past Goodnestone on the way to Graveney, and it seems prosperous, too. Moreover, the yellow gravel road is excellent.
The name of Goodnestone is a corruption of “Godwin’s Town.” It was one of the manors of the great patriot Saxon, Earl Godwin. Graveney stands where the wide-spreading marshes of Seasalter stretch away to the sea. There is little of it, beside the ancient, time-worn church, containing a fine canopied brass to John Martyn and wife, 1436. He was a Judge of the King’s Bench. The effigy shows him holding a heart, inscribed “IHV MCY,” in his hands.
A stone in the churchyard, not otherwise remarkable, mentions a place with the odd name “Old Wives’ Leaze.” One naturally wants to know something of these old wives and of their leaze, but disappointment dogs the footsteps of the inquirer, as closely and as constantly as his own shadow. An old man mowing the grass of the churchyard remarks incuriously, on his attention being drawn to it, that he “’spects it’s only a name.” “What’s in a name?” he seems to suggest with Shakespeare. Much sometimes.
Later inquiries prove “Old Wives’ Leaze” to be a hamlet high on a hill-top, one mile from Chilham, some seven miles distant; but I have no information as to the old wives, nor does any one else appear to possess any. The name, in fact, seems, like so many others, to be a corruption of some forgotten name, and is indeed supposed to have originally been “Overs,” or “Oldwoods Leaze,” or Lees.
In the marshes of Seasalter the hedgerows die away, leaving the flat road open and unfenced and bordered by watery dykes, in which last year’s reeds, rubbing together in the wind, keep up a rustling murmur, looking sere and wan until with the coming of June they are replaced by newer growths. The dykes quarter the marshes in all directions, and keep the pastures efficiently drained, but the sight of men busily engaged in digging thick slab-mud from them proves that they require constant care.
The scenery is that of Holland; even down to the particular detail of grass-grown earthen embankments against the sea, which long ago encroached here and destroyed the original church of Seasalter, and has in modern times caused its successor to be abandoned, in favour of a new building in Whitstable. In any case, it is difficult to see the need of a church where there are but few houses, unless some modern St. Francis were wishful of preaching here to the birds, the seagulls and the curlews that haunt these marshes and maintain a mingled screaming and melancholy piping, varied sometimes with what sounds like demoniacal chucklings or mocking laughter.
Inland you see the wooded uplands of the old forest district of Blean, with the whirling sails of distant windmills seeming to beckon over the hills and far away. Of the sea one observes nothing until the grassy embankment is climbed, hard by the “Old Sportsman” inn that stands sheltered under the lee of it, but from the top is seen the entrance of the Swale, dotted with many small vessels, with Sheppey about three miles across the channel and the pink-washed houses of the coastguard shining out yonder on Shellness Point.