Southend is a place that labours under many disadvantages. In certain circles, to acknowledge an intimate acquaintance with that salubrious and healthful resort is to be suspect of things unutterable in the Bank Holiday there and back for half a crown way; and the name of Southend—the “Sarfend” or “Soufend” of Cockney speech—certainly brings visions to the mind’s eye of crowded excursion trains or steamboats, where the holiday-making concertina is much in evidence, and the mingled odours of shrimps and water-cresses weight the air as heavily as the scent of the roses in the rose-garden of Omar Khayyam. I am self-condemned by these intimate touches, and indeed I know Southend, and know it in holiday-time and out. I have gone down by cycle and have come up with the concertina; have voyaged from the Port of London to the Port of Southend, and listened the while (however unwillingly) to the music of the band on board playing a once popular ditty called “Three pots a shilling,” or some such romantic title, until, overcome with the exertion, the rolling of the waves, or the effect of the beer they had imbibed—or by all three—they ceased, and a holy calm reigned where the strident cornet and the excruciating violins had but a moment before cast an added melancholy upon the sad sea waves.

Southend, however, is a very fine and a very picturesque place, and extraordinarily bracing; even though the sea of “Southend-on-Sea”—as it prefers to be styled—be indeed half composed of the filthy dregs of London. To it we will make our way by road.

It is the chief disability of this nearest of London’s seaside resorts that one must needs traverse the whole of the unlovely East End in order to reach it, and the cyclist who, like another Strafford, takes for his motto the proud word “thorough,” has no enviable journey before him in his effort to wheel all the way from town. From Whitechapel Church lies his way, down the Commercial and East India Dock roads, and on to Canning Town, where, having crossed the huge iron bridge that spans the Lea and certain of the docks, he finds himself in Essex and within eyeshot of such unpoetic landmarks as Plaistow Marsh, the Northern Outfall Sewer, and the distant pot-bellied gasometers of Beckton. Plaistow and East Ham now lie before him, and, passing these, he comes, across the little river Roding, into the old town of Barking, seven miles from Whitechapel Church and on the edge of the country.

There is a mingled agricultural and maritime air about the distant view of Barking that is not a little alluring; and foreground windmills and fields, and distant views of rust-red sails of barges, peering over ancient roofs, ill prepare the exploratory cyclist for the raw newness and meanness that many of its streets display on a closer acquaintance. Enshrined amid all these modern excrescences are the old Market House and the still older Abbey Gatehouse; this last the sole relic of the once rich and powerful Abbey of Barking, whose Abbess in far-off Saxon days owned a seat in the Witenagemote, the Parliament of that age. It is a mouldering old gateway, this of the old Abbesses of Barking, and oddly at variance with its surroundings; as indeed is the Elizabethan Market House, now the Town Hall. New and old at Barking jostle one another very curiously; the curfew bell still ringing, as a sentimental survival, during six months of every year, as it did in the bad old Norman days, eight hundred years ago.

Flat fields, chiefly serving the useful purpose of the market-gardener, constitute the scenery immediately next the road on leaving Barking; but beyond them, across the turbid estuary of the Thames, made by the witchery of the sunshine to glitter and sparkle as though its waters were of the purest—beyond them rise in the distance the Kentish hills, where the woods of Bostal look down upon busy Plumstead. One mile from Barking, and the traveller sees, rising before him on the right of the flat road, the dark clustered red brick chimneys of an ancient mansion: a furtive-looking, secretive place, for all its size and the fine Tudor style of its architecture. This is Eastbury House, long since abandoned by its owners as a fitting residence, and now occupied by a market-gardener. It was probably the solitary position of the old house and its peculiarly ominous air—as though it could tell a tale an it would—that originally procured it the reputation of being a meeting-place of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. Certainly no scene-painter could devise anything more likely, by the look of it, to have taken part in some dread conspiracy. The very bricks seem to ooze secrets, and in the low doorways and up the darkling staircases Catesbys and Digbys and Guy Fawkeses might reasonably have hidden—only we know they did nothing of the sort, and that the legends about Eastbury House are all fudge and flapdoodle, invented to take away the character of a poor old mansion with no friends of its own. Still, when, as you explore the place, a terrific hullabaloo is heard in one of the staircase turrets and a something black and explosive comes bounding out of a doorway, the incident has perhaps some little heart-shaking qualities, due directly to those legends. It is only when you discover that something to be a spitting and indignant cat, followed by a fox-terrier, that the incident resolves itself into the commonplace.

At Rainham—whose beauties and points of interest, if they exist at all, only reveal themselves to those who have much time to seek them—we do not call a halt, but pass on to Wennington, similarly circumstanced. Beyond this place, instead of taking the Purfleet road, we bear left, and go uphill to Aveley, along a more secluded way than that by the waterside. Interesting old churches here and at Stifford will repay examination and give an interest that the scenery now begins to lack. For here we are come again to the levels and now find ourselves in a tract of country that still retains its old-time name of “Orsett Fen,” even though the fen itself be gone and long level fields take its place. Orsett village itself partakes of this market-gardening and cabbage-growing character, and is distinctly rural, with crazy, weather-boarded cottages a feature of its street. Here our road turns sharply to the right, and again, at the “Cock Inn,” as sharply to the left along a very straight, flat, and dreary highway, whose forbidding character is, however, mitigated by the lovely views of the Essex hills at Laindon and Horndon-on-the-Hill, on the left hand, forming a green and well-wooded range almost at right angles with our course. We have met those hills before in these pages, and somewhat more intimately, and know, therefore, that the distant view of them from these levels is the better part.

Stanford-le-Hope now comes in view, on the other side of a hollow where a little stream flows to the Thames, two miles away, past the suggestively named village of Mucking. Away across the flats comes the bellowing of the great steamships making for Thames Haven, or passing up to or down from London; and when night has come, the red eye of a lighthouse, screwed to piles set in the fathomless mud, winks solemnly at you from out of the vagueness.

We will pass Vange and Pitsea, on their elevated sites, without comment, the last-named leading on to Hadleigh without any intervening village; for Thundersley, midway between the two, is placed half a mile off the road. Thundersley is a very small and very inoffensive little place, in spite of the terrific dignity given by its name. From the high-placed churchyard of its beautiful but dilapidated little Early English church, the eye ranges over Benfleet and Cauvey Island, and over a world of waters and muddy creeks, perhaps not particularly lovely to read about, but beautiful beyond expression in the sunshine.

But Hadleigh, two miles distant, on its steep hillside, presenting a stern and rugged upland to the old pirates who infested the estuary of the Thames in the long ago—Hadleigh takes the palm for historic interest and beauty. Nothing shall be said of Hadleigh Church, fine though it be, and nothing of the Salvation Army’s “Home Colony” for the “submerged tenth,” or the born-tired, or whatever may be the fit and proper title for “General” Booth’s unlovely pets who farm the surrounding fields; Hadleigh Castle only shall be touched upon in these pages. Hubert de Burgh, who built it, built well and truly when he raised its walls, nigh upon seven hundred years ago, and so terrible was the forefront of his fortress, set here on the hilltop,—the first object that attracted the eye of the would-be invader sailing up the Thames,—that the foreign foe on sight of it generally turned tail and fled whence he had come.

Thus it is that Hadleigh Castle has no history in the warlike sort. Its very presence was sufficient. Two hundred years after its towers had been set here to diadem the green hill, the castle was deserted and left to decay, as having served its turn; and since then it has been a quarry to which everyone in the neighbourhood who wanted stone has resorted, so that only the ruined walls of two circular towers are left. But they form a striking and memorable picture, whether you take them for a foreground and gaze thence to Leigh and Southend and the mouth of the Thames, or look upon them and the hill from the pastures below. Constable painted Hadleigh Castle so long ago as 1829, and, truly enough, described its situation as “vastly fine.”

Leigh, that looks so picturesque from this hilltop, keeps that quality even at close quarters. It is a shrimping, winkling, cockling, and whelking town, and all along its maritime street, where beery fishermen, very deliberate in their movements, and broad and patchy in the stern, lounge and gossip, are the most perplexing little cottages and taverns and bothies, with spaces large and spaces small in between; and over all a generous and penetrating scent of shell-fish in process of being cooked. It is a smell that will not be denied, and no wonder, since in almost every one of these little sheds and bothies, and indeed often in the open air, shell-fish and shrimps are, in fact, being cooked by wholesale. That is the business of Leigh, as evidenced by the mountain ranges of winkle and other shells along the foreshore; permanent and indubitable evidence of the success of the local industry.

To reach this part of Leigh—having come from Hadleigh, and carefully negotiated the descent of Bread and Cheese Hill—we turn to the right in midst of the hilltop portion of the village, by the parish church, whose tower is so prominent a landmark, and then walk down the precipitous descent to the fishing community. Between the seashore of Leigh and that of Southend is Westcliff—Westcliff-on-Sea as it is proudly styled, or (still more proudly) “the New Eldorado.” Why styled by so auriferous a name only those responsible for the alluring advertisements of this newly developed building estate can tell; even supposing that they can give a reasonable explanation. Who that has waited weary half-hours at London railway stations has not seen coloured pictorial advertisements of Westcliff; the trees very green, the houses very red, the sea of a more cerulean blue than the Mediterranean in the Bay of Naples, and all the roads as yellow as fine gold? Well, here is the place itself, for comparison.

Southend—maligned Southend, curiously regarded by superior persons as being throughout the year infested with crowds of the worst type of tripper—lies basking in the sunshine, sheltered from northerly winds by rising ground, and looking southward, across where the Thames and the sea mingle, to the Kentish shore and Sheppey, six miles away. Excursion trains and steamboats notwithstanding, Southend, apart from Saturdays in summer and the usual Bank Holiday rush, is not the Cockney pandemonium it is generally represented to be, but a goodly sized and cheerful watering-place, greatly in favour as a residence with many City men, and, with its mild and dry air, one of the healthiest of places for children. The cautious scribe would be afraid to state how far the sea recedes here at the ebb, and certainly one would not like to say how long Southend Pier is now. Some years ago it was a mile and a quarter in length, but since then it has been lengthened, for the purpose of giving a landing-place for steamers at the pier-head at all times of the tide. A pilgrimage from end to end of this structure—doubtless the longest of its kind in England—would be a weariness but for the electric railway that runs its length.

We have now journeyed forty-three miles from London, but if the summer days be long and weather propitious, there is no reason why the tour should not be extended, to include that Isle of Sheppey whose shores are visible from here. Steamers constantly make the passage between this and Sheerness.

Comparatively few cyclists know Sheppey, which is, in fact, very much of an unknown member of the British Isles, even to those who are in a favourable position for reaching it. Does the average man, indeed, stop to consider that the British Isles, all told, large and small, number considerably over two hundred? Of them Sheppey is one of the least remote in point of mileage, but among the loneliest in actual fact, even although its capital—Sheerness—is a large and growing dockyard town.

It is a redundancy to talk of the “Isle of Sheppey,” because its name, deriving as it does from the Saxon “Sceapige” (the “Isle of Sheep”), includes the designation of “island.” It is eleven miles in length, and five miles across its broadest part, and includes the two so-called “isles” of Harty and Elmley, which, once divided from it by slimy creeks, are now practically joined, since modern drainage works have been in progress. Sheppey is a place of the very greatest interest. Its scenery, divided into the marshes that border the Swale, which separates it from the mainland, and into a high ridge or backbone that runs the greater length of the isle, from Sheerness to Warden, is of a peculiarly weird quality, whether you are looking at the low-lying marshlands or at the dull-hued clayey cliffs that face the North Sea, and are continually crumbling away. Trees are few, and grow only in the more sheltered parts of the island. Landing at the jetty by Sheerness railway station, under the guns of the guardship swinging at anchor in the roadstead, and well covered by a circular iron fort springing out of the water, we are in the dockyard town and maritime port of Sheerness, a place, like most towns of the dockyard kind, squalid and mean, coal-gritty and unlovely. There is, it is true, another and a better quarter, Bluetown by name, where the dignified heads of departments and their kind reside, but it does not lie on our line of exploration.

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[285]
[286] 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.

The END

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