Was the first cause of all these Naval slips;
Had he not built, none of these faults had bin:
If no Creation, there had been no Sin.”
Rochester Castle.
The river here is a very busy place, and is under certain circumstances quite picturesque. There is a weird blending of ancient and modern, of the dimly-comprehended past and the blatant, commercial present, along Limehouse Reach, with its tremendous coal-hoists, and its smoking stacks, and its brown-sailed barges and snorting tugs—with the great masses of Rochester Castle and Cathedral looming out behind it all.
Limehouse Reach is, indeed, an appropriate name, for all along this part, especially in the suburbs of Stroud and Frindsbury, the lime and cement-making industries are carried on extensively. Throughout a great deal of its length the Medway Valley is scarred by great quarries cut into the chalk hills; for it is chalk and the river mud, mixed roughly in the proportion of three to one and then burned in a kiln, which give the very valuable Portland cement, an invention now about a century old.
