Part 15

Queenborough, off to the right, is worth seeing by those who have the time. It lies somewhat apart from modern developments, and looks absolutely the same now as when Hogarth drew it, over a hundred years ago, on that down-the-Thames Cockney trip he made with his friends. That is to say, it consists of one long, broad, empty, Dutch-like street, lifeless, and looking quite unlike a place with a history. Originally “Kingborough,” its name was changed by Edward the Third to the one it still bears, in honour of his Queen, Philippa.

A fine road leads from Sheerness on to Minster, past the ugly outlying houses of Miletown. It is with some surprise that the stranger to Sheppey discovers good roads here: the instinctive feeling being, apparently, that coastwise islands are outside the common needs and conveniences of mainlands.

We may turn to the left and reach the coast overlooking the Nore, but our especial business now is to reach Minster, generally called “Minster-in-Sheppey,” to distinguish it from “Minster-in-Thanet.” Minster stands on the higher lands of the island, and, indeed, can be seen from almost every point; its great squat church tower standing on an abrupt hill, surrounded by the little village of brick and boarded cottages, and further with a belt of trees. The square gatehouse, all that is left of the nunnery founded by Saint Saxburga in early Saxon times, stands by the church, and teas are provided there for the weary. Glorious views are obtained from the churchyard; but it is within the church that the great interest of the place lies, for the tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland is here, and here we are upon the scene of that humorous legend of Barham’s—one of the few of the _Ingoldsby Legends_ written in prose. The tomb is in the south aisle, the effigy of the warrior clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century. “His hands,” says Barham, “are clasped in prayer: his legs, crossed in that position so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in modern days, bespeak him a Soldier of the Faith in Palestine. Close behind his dexter calf lies sculptured in high relief a horse’s head.” The local legend upon which Barham founded his story of “Grey Dolphin” is that the Lord of Shurland, happening to pass by the churchyard of Minster, found a fat friar in the act of refusing, unless he was paid for his services, to say the last rites of the Church over the body of a drowned sailor brought for burial. The Baron was not a man with reverence for the dead, or of particularly deep religious opinions, and had—Barham tells us in his legend—already seen to it that the dead sailor’s pockets had been turned inside out, with ill success, for they contained not a single maravedi, but he was incensed by the refusal to bury him. He promptly slew the friar and kicked his body into the open grave, to bear the sailor company. Mother Church was not particularly fond of the greasy friars who at that time infested the country, but she could not brook so flagrant an insult, and accordingly made things extremely unpleasant for the Baron, who, learning that the King lay aboard ship two miles off the coast of Sheppey, swam there and back on his horse, Grey Dolphin, and obtained a pardon. On returning to the shore, he met an old woman who prophesied that the horse who had now helped to save his life should one day cause his death. To render this, as he thought, impossible, the Baron killed Grey Dolphin on the spot. The next year, however, chancing to pass the place, he kicked against the bleached skull of his old charger, still lying on the beach, and, a fragment of bone penetrating his foot, blood-poisoning set in, and he died of gangrene.

Here, then, is the effigy of the horse’s head carved beside it. The Baron’s hands are not, indeed, “clasped in prayer,” for his arms have been shorn off by some vandals at the elbows; but that is a detail. His sword and lance lie by his side. “It was the fashion in feudal times,” says Barham, “to give names to swords: King Arthur’s was christened Excalibur; the Baron called his Tickletoby, and when he took it in hand, it was no joke.”

Sir Robert de Shurland, unlike many of the figures who flit through the merry pages of the _Ingoldsby Legends_, was thus a very real personage. He lived in the reign of Edward the First, and the fact of his having been granted “wreck of the sea” may have originated the story which purports to account for the horse’s head, swimming through waves, carved conspicuously on his tomb. “Wreck of the sea” was the right of laying claim to anything along the foreshore of a manor; any flotsam and jetsam that could be reached by the point of a lance when riding as far as possible into the sea at low water. Unless thus specifically granted away, the right of Flotsam and Jetsam along the coasts belonged, and still belongs, to the Crown.

The legend has acquired for Minster Church the local name of the “Horse Church,” and is alluded to in the weathervane of a horse’s head, surmounted by a little effigy of a running horse. Before leaving the building, notice the mutilated effigy, supposed to be that of a Spanish prisoner who died in durance on board at the Nore, and also that of a knight, supposed to be Jordanus de Scapeia, whose clasped hands hold a mystic oval sculptured with a little effigy symbolising the soul.

Given calm weather, or with the wind in one’s favour, cycling in Sheppey is a delight, for the roads, with the exception of this that leads down again from Minster, are either quite flat or gently undulating, and the surface is of the best; and there is practically no traffic to prevent one bowling along at high speed. But with the wind against you—and when there is any wind it blows the greatest of great guns across these unprotected flats—there is absolutely nothing for it but to walk. After two miles’ cycling from Minster we come to Eastchurch. Here is a tiny village with a handsome old church, and, a little distance away, the imposing pile of Shurland House, a Gothic, red brick, battlemented building, built by Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports, about 1550, and the successor of that Shurland Castle inhabited by the Sir Robert de Shurland whom we have seen to be the hero of the Ingoldsby Legend of “Grey Dolphin.”

Turning to the left in the village street of Eastchurch, and bearing to the right at the next turning, Warden is reached in two miles—what is left of Warden, that is to say, for the encroachments of the sea have swept away most of it. All that is left is the inelegantly named “Mud Row,” at whose end a rough bar across the rutty lane prevents one cycling over the edge of the cliffs into the sea. Here is a scene of the wildest desolation. The cliffs, about one hundred feet high, composed of dark, greasy, and crumbling clay, have slipped and fallen in every direction, and the sea at the bottom is discoloured far out with the débris. For many years past this process has been going on, and by this time some eighty acres have been swallowed up and dissolved. In 1836 the parish church was rebuilt with the stones from old London Bridge, demolished in 1832 for the building of the present structure. Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the bridge, gave the stones and rebuilt the church, as a tablet removed from it, and now forming part of a garden wall at Mud Row, tells us. But it was not fated to stand long. The sea had sapped up to the church by 1870, and it was then closed. In 1877 it was pulled down, and the heaps of stones still lie by the beach a mile away. At the same time, the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the previous thirty years were disinterred and removed to Minster. But, as the cliffs continue to fall, the poor remains of the more ancient dead are still exposed here, and bleach in the sun: a grisly sight. It was but a little while ago that the present writer, visiting the spot, observed children engaged in the gruesome and morbid occupation of digging out skeletons for “amusement.” And not the children of ignorant cottagers, for whom there might possibly be some excuse, but of people of perhaps some pretensions to culture and right feeling. Is it not something of a scandal that the ecclesiastical authorities should allow so dreadful a thing? Warden Point, with its village gone but its older inhabitants still thus in evidence, is a melancholy place. The sea heaves and rolls in a muddy discoloration far out, and eats away the island day by day.

Those who have time may, on returning to Eastchurch, visit Leysdown and Shellness, that low, sandy spit looking on the map like Spurn Head in Yorkshire. It looks across the water to Whitstable, and is an historic spot, sharing with Elmley Ferry the fame of being the place where that frantic bigot, James the Second, was captured when attempting an escape into France. Harty, too, in the flats, may be visited. There is a good deal of exploration possible, even in Sheppey. For ourselves, we will just return to Eastchurch, there taking the left-hand road and following it for four miles, when a left-hand turn conducts to King’s Ferry, which, to the cyclist seeking the island from London and Chatham, is the best way of entering. The road is of splendid quality, running through the sad, sage-coloured marshes to where a railway bridge on the line from Sittingbourne to Queenborough and Sheerness—a railway bridge and a road bridge combined—now spans the ancient King’s Ferry, across the quarter-of-a-mile channel of the Swale. The toll is cheap—a penny for self and cycle inclusive.

There are four other entrances, but the King’s Ferry Bridge is the only way by which the cyclist can wheel across into, or from, the isle. There is a ferry from Faversham and Oare to Harty, and another from Sittingbourne and Murston to Elmley.

Five miles of a winding and gently rising Kentish lane, sandy and bordered with orchards, lead past Iwade. It is not, evidently, a greatly frequented route, for two field-gates bar the way, and necessitate a dismount for opening them. Nearing Newington, a mile of loose flints induces the man careful of his tyres to get off and walk; a change that need be no cause for grumbling here, for the scene is beautiful, with that soft, rich Kentish beauty which has earned the county the name of “the garden of England.”

It is an idyllic and peaceful picture that unfolds itself at Newington, a roadside village, which, like many another place called “new,” is of immense antiquity, standing as it does on that old Roman military way, the Watling Street, between Dover and London, and the successor of a Roman village. Here the cherry, the pear, and apple orchards are at their best, and the hop-gardens are not wanting. Also (another relic of the Romans, who introduced them from Italy), sweet-chestnut trees abound. The ancient parish church is reached at some distance before the high road: a venerable building whose mouldering tower is built in alternate courses of stone and flints. Opposite a postal pillar-box, within a few yards of the church, notice the so-called “Devil’s Stone,” planted at the edge of the road and footpath. A very fine and large effigy of a boot-sole is seen on it. The legend runs that the Devil objected to the church being built, and, placing his back against the tower, and his foot against this stone, pushed. From the illustration, in which this stone and the church are both seen, it will be observed that the Devil must of necessity have been singularly tall to have performed this feat—or to have attempted it. But the builders had built better than they knew, and the church stood immovable. The obvious criticism that the stranger makes on seeing the stone, is that the boot-print is in relief instead of pressed into it. There are things well worth seeing in the old church: brasses and screens, a copy of the eccentric will of an old-time inhabitant, and a curious altar-tomb, with a passage through one of its panels, through which, as a charm, the sick or bewitched were passed to cure them. The church is secluded amid hop-kilns and fruit farms, and backed by a wooded knoll.

It is a run of seven miles from Newington to Chatham, through Rainham, identical in name with the Essex Rainham we have already passed through. One of the finest panoramas in the world lies stretched out below this road, on the right hand, the whole of the way: the panorama, that is to say, of the broad estuary of the Medway, crowded with vessels, large and small, where the Might of the Mailed Hand of England is plain to see, in the big battleships and the smart cruisers that occupy the fairway. Gazing here, down upon these evidences of power, you feel that it is good to be an Englishman, and to have a part and lot in the sovereignty of the sea thus made manifest. And even as you look upon these signs of world-admiralty, a tiny white puff bursts out over the vermicular silver threads where the creeks run through the marshes, and a hoarse roar and a simultaneous concussion of air upon your cheek betoken gun-practice.

A very long and very steep descent leads down from Chatham Hill into the busy town, past the hideous unfinished temple of that mad sect, the Jezreelites, crowning the hilltop and visible for many miles. Jezreel is dead and his sect moribund, but the evidence of his hot gospelling and of the folly of his dupes bulks large in this gigantic pile of bricks and mortar. At Chatham we join on to other runs, described in earlier pages of this volume.

PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, EDINBURGH

Transcriber’s notes:

In the text version, italics are represented by _underscores_, and bold and black letter text by =equals= symbols. Superscripts are represented by ^{} and subscripts by _{}.

Missing or incorrect punctuation has been repaired.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been left as printed.

End of Project Gutenberg's Cycle Rides Round London, by Charles G. Harper