BARKING ABBEY.
On either bank, unsuspected by the chance excursionist, are frequent powder magazines, which are a sort of introduction to Purfleet, where there is such a store of explosives as, if they were fired, would shake London to its centre, and possibly to its foundations. At Purfleet, by the way, the river banks vary their monotony by rising up sheer and white, in modest imitation of the chalk cliffs of Folkestone and Dover. As we proceed further down the river the smell of chalk-burning will taint the air somewhat disagreeably, and great white clouds of smoke will fly in our faces and almost hide the sky.
Purfleet is a pretty and interesting town, notwithstanding the uses to which it has been put, and the danger there must always be in living there. The chalk hills are crowned with pleasant woods, and over the river one looks across Greenhithe to the Kentish hills. Of the country in that direction Cobbett, writing his “Rural Rides,” had only a disparaging account to give. “The surface is ugly by nature,” he said, “to which ugliness there has just been made a considerable addition by the enclosure of a common, and by the sticking up of some shabby-genteel houses, surrounded with dead fences and things called gardens, in all manner of ridiculous forms, making, all together, the bricks, hurdle-gates, and earth say, as plainly as they can speak, ‘Here dwell Vanity and Poverty.’” But Cobbett was by preference unjust, and the little grey houses, each with its own circle of trees, are an essential portion of the charm of these riverside landscapes, which, else, would look dead and solitary.
BARKING REACH.
Off Purfleet, on one of whose chalky cliffs the standard of England was unfolded when the Spanish Armada threatened our liberties, lies the reformatory training-ship Cornwall, once known as the Wellesley, the flagship of the brave and adventurous Lord Dundonald. These handsome old hulks, some of them used as reformatories, some of them as training-ships for boys who have been rescued from poverty, and one large group as a fever and small-pox hospital, are very frequent between Erith and Northfleet, and greatly increase the interest of a voyage down the Thames. Off Greenhithe, a famous yachting centre, the Arethusa and the Chichester lie moored; at Gray’s Thurrock, on the opposite side of the river, lie the Exmouth and the Shaftesbury, the latter being the vessel which has been found so costly by the London School Board.
The good-looking town of Erith faces the river just above Purfleet, half-surrounded in the summer months by a fleet of small yachts at anchor; and, just below, the Rivers Cray and Darent, making a clear fork of shining water, meet together and flow as one stream into the Thames. “Long Reach” Tavern, a quaint, solitary place, once much frequented in the old prize-fighting, cockfighting days, by persons who are usually spoken of as belonging to “the sporting fraternity,” stands on the flat muddy ground of this estuary of the conjoined rivers; and from this point the River Thames bends inland towards Dartford, again taking a new direction at Ingress Abbey, where Alderman Harmer once lived, in a house built out of the stones of old London Bridge.