It is famous as a fifth part of the world different from its fellows. And indeed, if it resembles anything I know it is not with the wide moors of Somerset, Sedgemoor, or the valley of the Brue, nor with the great windy Fenland in the midst of which Ely rises like a shrine or a sanctuary, I would compare it, but with the Campagna of Rome, whose tragic mystery it seems to have borrowed, at least in part, whose beauty it seems to wear, a little provincially, it is true, and whose majesty it apes, but cannot quite command. It is the Campagna in little; the great and noble mountains, the loveliest in the world are sunk to hills pure and exquisite upon which, too, we may still see the cities, here little towns and villages, as Rye, Winchelsea, Appledore, Lympne or Hythe, dear places of England of my heart, and all between them this mysterious and lowly thing not quite of this world, a graveyard one might think, as the Campagna is, a battlefield as is the Trasimeno plain, a gate and certainly an exit not only out of England but from the world and life itself.
As one wanders about England here and there, one comes to understand that if its landscape is unique in its various charm and soft beauty, it is also inhuman in this, that most often it is without the figure of man, the fields are always empty or nearly always, the hills are uniformly barren of cities or towns or villages, it is a landscape without the gesture of human toil and life, without meaning that is, and we can bear it so. But no man could live in the Marsh for a day without that gesture of human life that is there to be seen upon every side. Lonely as it is, difficult as it is to cross, because of its chains and twisting lines of runnels, man is more visibly our comrade there than anywhere else in England I think, and this though there be but few men through all the Marsh. He and his beasts, his work too, and his songs, redeem the Marsh for us from fear, a fear not quite explicable, perhaps, to the mere passenger, but that anyone who has lingered there during a month of spring will recognise as always at his elbow and only kept out of the soul by the humanity which has redeemed this mysterious country, the shepherd with his flock, the dairyman with his cows, the carter with his great team of oxen in the spring twilight returning from the fields. And then there are the churches, whose towers stand up so strong out of the waters and the mist so that their heads are among the stars, and whose bells are the best music because they tell not only of God and his Saints but of man, of the steading and of home.
Take Appledore, for instance, with its fine old church, with its air of the fourteenth century and its beautiful old ivy grown tower, once a port they say, on the verge of the Marsh; what could be more nobly simple and homely? Within, you may, if you will, find, in spite of everything, all our past, the very altar at which of old was said the Holy Mass, the very altar tomb maybe where, upon Maunday Thursday Christ Himself was laid in the sepulchre, an old rood loft, too, certain ancient screens complete, a little ancient glass. What more can a man want or at least expect from England of my heart? And if he demand something more curious and more rare, at Horn's Place, not a mile away, is a perfect chapel of the fifteenth century which served of old some great steading, where, for a hundred years Mass was perhaps said every day and the Marsh blessed. Or take Snargate with its church of St Dunstan. It, too, has a fine western tower of the fifteenth century, but much of the church dates from the thirteenth, and upon the north chancel roof-beams are heraldic devices, among them an eagle and the initials W.R. And here is a piece of fine old glass in which we may see the Lord Christ. Or take Ivychurch; so noble and lovely a thing is the church that even without it catches the breath, while a whole afternoon is not enough to enjoy its inward beauty. Or take Brenzett, where, it is true, the church has been rebuilt, but where you will still find a noble seventeenth century tomb with its effigies in armour.
It is, however, at Romney, Old Romney and New, that we shall find the best there is to be had I think in this strange country from which the waters have only been barred out by the continual energy of man. We are not surprised to find that New Romney is older than Old Romney, it is almost what might have been expected, but no one can ever have come to these places without wonder at the nobility of what he sees.
At New Romney there were of old five churches, dedicated in honour of St John Baptist, St Laurence, St Martin, St Michael, and St Nicholas, for Romney was, in the time of Edward I., the greatest of the Cinque Ports. It fell when, as we are told, in a great storm the course of the Rother was changed so that it went thereafter to serve Rye, and New Romney fell slowly down so that to-day but one of those five churches remains, that of St Nicholas. But what a glorious church it is, and if the rest were like it, what idea must we have of the splendour of New Romney in the thirteenth century? This great Norman church of St Nicholas with its partly fourteenth century nave, its clerestory, its fine chancel with sedilia and Easter sepulchre, and noble pinnacled tower is perhaps the greatest building in the Marsh. It belonged to the Abbey of Pontigny and was served by its monks who had a cell here, and the town it adorns and ennobles, was the capital of all this district.
Nothing so glorious and so old remains in Old Romney, where the church of St Clement has nothing I think, earlier than the thirteenth century, and little of that, being mainly a building of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and yet it is not to be despised, for where else in the Marsh will you find anything more picturesque or anything indeed more English?
Not at Dymchurch for all its Norman fragments. But Dymchurch is to be visited and to be loved for other reasons than that of beauty. It is the sentinel and saviour of the Marsh, for it holds back the sea from all this country with its great wall, twenty feet high and twenty feet broad and three miles long. Also here we have certain evidence of the Roman occupation of the Marsh, and may perhaps believe that it was Rome which first drained it.
I said that the church of St Nicholas at New Romney was the noblest building in the Marsh. When I said so had I forgotten the church of All Saints at Lydd, which is known as the Cathedral of the Marshes. No, glorious as All Saints is, it has not the antiquity of St Nicholas; it is altogether English and never knew the Norman. For all that, it is a very splendid building with a tower standing one hundred and thirty-two feet over the Marsh, a sign and a blessing. And yet before it I prefer the bell tower, built of mighty timber, aloof from the church, lonely, over the waters at Brookland. All Saints at Lydd belonged to Tintern Abbey, but All Saints at Brookland to St Augustine's at Canterbury, and as its font will tell us it dates from Norman times, for about it the Normans carved the signs of the Zodiac.