The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

_It has been said, by whom I know not, that "prefaces to books are like signs to public-houses; they are intended to give one an idea of the kind of entertainment to be found wi...

The Southwark of Chaucer's time was a very different place. For one thing, it was a great deal smaller. The year in which his Canterbury Pilgrims were supposed to set out has ge...

As for Blackheath, it seems that when, in older days, people had assignations on the Dover Road, they generally selected this place for the purpose; whether they were kings and...

Juan did not understand a word Of English, save their shibboleth, "God damn!" And even that he had so rarely heard, He sometimes thought 'twas only their "Salaam," Or "God be wi...

And here is the traditional home of paper-making in England, for it was in Dartford, in the reign of Good Queen Bess, that John Spielman (majesty, in the person of Gloriana's su...

Bradbery (it is said) when he was building up his London connection, paid a vocalist to go at night from one place of entertainment to another, singing a song in praise of the f...

And having duly noted this elegy of a truly admirable man, we may leave Milton, pausing but to look down upon the estuary of the Thames, where the great liners pass to and fro t...

But the place is old and historic, and celebrated not only for the great fight which the barons made in the thirteenth century against the king, when they fought their way acros...

The "Bull" inn (how remarkably like its frontage is to that other "Bull" at Dartford) is much the same now as when Dickens wrote of it; only there are portraits of Dickens hangi...

Master Watts entertained the Queen at his house on Boley (? Beaulieu) Hill on the last day of her visit, and when that courtly man apologised for the "poor cottage" (he didn't m...

It is not before Rainham is reached that the road becomes once more the open highway. Moor Street is passed, and here the Rainham orchards and the cherry orchards of Gillingham...

Sittingbourne was not a large place in the days that ended with the advent of railway times, but it had an astonishing number of hotels, inns, and beer-houses. People had not at...

Faversham town, lying a mile distant, between Faversham Creek and the turnpike road, will doubtless in the course of a few years adjoin Ospringe, and convert the village into a...

The "Red Lion," where the bodies of the dead were laid out, stands by the roadside at Dunkirk, and a cart-road on the hither side of it, to the left hand, made long after this e...

Archbishop Warham could, as it happened, afford to look upon the ways of Providence with approval, for these events had made him Primate, and he celebrated his accession to the...

When in the last days of 1170 Becket was murdered in his own Cathedral, no one could have foreseen how fertilizing would be the blood of the martyr to religious faith; and not o...

But Caesar's desire to see Britain was only whetted by the deceits which those artful traders had practised upon him, and by the vague reports of his envoy. He lay at Portus Iti...

will be disappointed, for it is one of Barham's embellishments upon fact. "Tappington Moor" is, of course, Barham Downs, and the wild characteristics of the place are very well...

Turn we, though, from these projects to the Admiralty Pier, that centre of interest to visitors and Dover folks alike. Some one--I know not whom--has styled the Admiralty Pier "...

[9] There are "Mockbeggars" in Kent, as in most other counties. There is one near Rochester. Some old buildings pulled down in 1771 at Brighthelmstone were called Mockbeggars. L...