Rochester Cathedral
Rochester itself is a quaint old place, standing on the ancient Roman road from Dover to London, and guarding the important crossing of the Medway. It can show numbers of Roman remains in addition to its fine old Norman castle, and its Cathedral with a tale of eight centuries. The town stands to-day much as it stood when Dickens first described it in his volumes. The Corn Exchange is still there—“oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave, red-brick building, as if Time carried on business there, and hung out his sign;” and so are Mr. Pickwick’s “Bull Hotel,” and the West Gate (Jasper’s Gateway), and Eastbury House (Nuns’ House) of “Edwin Drood”; also the famous house of the “Seven Poor Travellers.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Gravesend and Tilbury
The dreary fenland district which stretches from the Isle of Grain inland to Gravesend is that so admirably used by Dickens for local colour in his novel, “Great Expectations.” Some of his descriptions of the scenery in this place of “mudbank, mist, swamps, and work” cannot be bettered.
Here is Cooling Marsh with its quaint, fourteenth-century relic, Cooling Castle Gatehouse, built at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt, when the rich folk of the land found it expedient to do little or nothing to aggravate the peasantry. The builder, Sir John de Cobham, realizing the danger, saw fit to attach to one of the towers of his stronghold a plate, to declare to all and sundry that there was in his mind no thought other than that of protection from some anticipated foreign incursions. This plate is still in position on the ruin, and reads:
“Knowyth that beth and schul be
That I am mad in help of the cuntre
In knowyng of whyche thyng
Thys is chartre and wytnessynge.”