Among the monuments in Brookland church is a table-tomb to John and Thomas Plomer, father and son, jurats of New Romney, and their family. One, we learn, was “Captain of ye selecte board, sometime burgis at ye parliament for ye same towne, who was one of the portes Barons in carrying ye canopie at the coronation of King James ye first of England.”
FAIRFIELD CHURCH.
Among the curious churches of this region, that of Fairfield, two miles north-west from Brookland, is well worth visiting. It is not a large church, nor beautiful, being, indeed, one of that very numerous company popularly supposed to be the “smallest,” and of a quaint, rather barn-like, appearance. It is not, in fact, the “smallest church in England,” that distinction belonging to the little church of Culbone, in Somerset, which is thirty-three feet in length. The length of Fairfield church is about forty feet, and it is thus somewhere about the same size as Bonnington. But it is very much less ecclesiastical in appearance, being chiefly of seventeenth-century red brick.
There is no village of Fairfield, and there are but two houses in sight in the flat marsh-land. Away in the distance you see the church of Stone in Oxney, cresting the uplands; the skylarks are singing madly in the May skies, and sheep are grazing; but it is a solitary spot. Dykes with tall rushes encircle the church, which for some years before 1913 had been closed, and was fallen into a ruinous condition. In the roof of this little building, dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, there were holes; the small timber bellcote was all on one side, and, of its three bells, one of them was cracked. The windows were broken, the wind-shutters hanging down from them, forlorn. Through the broken casements one might see the whitewashed interior, with the tiny chancel, scarcely lofty enough for a man of average height to stand in, upright, and the tall wooden pews: the whole a roosting-place for birds. The deserted building was at last restored, chiefly from funds granted by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Fairfield is in summer a prime curiosity; in winter, the church is generally inaccessible, through being entirely cut off by flood-water. “A dark place,” said a contemplative, solitary man, met in these wilds. Spiritually dark, he meant. In other ways, Fairfield, standing amid clear, wide horizons, with not a tree near it, is a place of exceptional light and sunshine. The colour of the marshes is vivid and lovely; and not less lovely is the golden hue of the lichened, red-tiled old roof of Fairfield church itself, seen from a little distance.
SMALLHYTHE TOLL-GATE.
There was a time when even Tenterden, now more than ten miles from the sea, was by way of being in touch with it, through the little port of Smallhythe, whose name is sometimes seen spelled on maps “Small Hithe.” This remote little place, some two miles south of Tenterden, on a by-road, stands strangely at a passage into the so-called “Isle of Oxney,” which nowadays presents the appearance of an inland island, so to speak. Looking at a map, no one would at the first glance suspect Oxney of being an isle, but close inspection discovers the fact that it is indeed surrounded by the Rother and its tributaries, and a canal. In olden times, when the Rother was a broad estuary, Oxney was an isle in very sooth, and it was possible for the not very large vessels of those ages to be navigated to Smallhythe. In the reign of Edward the Third, according to tradition, the harbour dues were greater than those of Liverpool at the same time; and the sea is recorded to have flowed to its quays certainly so late as 1508.
“Smallhead,” as the country people call it, is nowadays little like a port. Its street is blocked by a toll-gate leading to a ferry across the narrow stream. Here the pedestrian is mulcted of one farthing. If he have a cycle, his total expenditure is one halfpenny. Toll for a horse and cart is 6d.; for a traction-engine with one truck attached, 10d.; for a horse, mule, or ass, 1d.; bullock, cow, calf, or pig, ½d.; and sheep, 4d. per score. “We make everything pay,” says the gatekeeper, “’cept a dog.” The gate is private property, and was purchased some years ago for £600. The tolls then yielded over £1 a week; but the income has greatly fallen since the other ferries into the isle were freed.
Smallhythe has the unusual privilege of electing its own vicar, instead of running the risk—sometimes the very real risk—of having to receive a persona non grata foisted upon the parish by a patron not in touch with the needs of the place. The electors are the householders and occupiers of land in the parish. This privilege arose out of the establishment of the church in 1509. Until then, the nearest was Tenterden church, but Warham, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, was induced to license one here because of the complaints made by the inhabitants of the bad state of the roads.