FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD (continued)

"Cobb's Hall" stands prominently to the left of the road, after passing by the village of Aldington, and is a very noticeable old half-timbered rustic dwelling-house, now interiorly divided into two cottages. In the upstairs bedroom of one may be seen the remains of a fine decorative plaster ceiling and a strange pictorial plaster frieze surmounting a blocked-up fireplace. This singular design is old enough to have been here in Elizabeth Barton's time, and she must have been familiar with its representations of Adam and Eve and their highly problematical surroundings of queer birds and beasts, not modelled from the life, and now, after centuries of wear and many coats of paint, so blunted and battered that it is difficult to tell certainly whether any particular plaster protuberance is intended for an elephant, a sheep, or a crow.

To the left of Aldington, on a road through the alder thickets, hugging the edge of the cliffs, is Aldington Knoll, a very remarkable hillock rising boldly and bare from above the surrounding brushwood and coppices. In the legend of "The Leech of Folkestone" it is described as "a sort of woody promontory, in shape almost conical, its sides covered with thick underwood, above which is seen a bare and brown summit, rising like an Alp in miniature." To this spot it was that Master Marsh resorted, at the rising of the moon, for his meeting with the conjuror, Aldrovando. Barham well chose this legendary Knoll of Aldington for that miraculous sÉance, for this is not only a well-known landmark, but is the subject of much folklore. Thus, the older rustics will tell how the Knoll is said to be guarded by drowned sailors, keeping watch and ward over a gigantic skeleton with a great sword, unearthed "once upon a time" by a reckless digger for the treasure once popularly supposed to be buried here. Something very terrible happened to that unfortunate spadesman, and since then a general consensus of rustic opinion has left the Knoll alone. A local rhyme tells how—

but that is poetic license, the prehistoric barrow—for such it seems to be—that crests the Knoll is of yellow sand and gravel.

Beyond, in a tract of country thickly covered with scrubwood, is the village of Bilsington, with Bilsington Priory, now a farmhouse, standing remote in midst of eight hundred acres of copse. It is a grimly picturesque house, this desecrated Priory of St. Augustine, and doubly haunted—firstly by a prior who tells red-hot beads, and secondly by the spook of a woman who was murdered by her husband for accidentally smashing a trayfull of china. The nightly crashings are said by the most unveracious witnesses to still continue, but however that may be, the place certainly is haunted by innumerable owls, who roost fearlessly in some of the deserted rooms.

Away by the roadside is Bilsington village, its moated Court Lodge Farm and parish church grouped together. It was Bilsington bell that struck One! in "The Leech of Folkestone," and advised Master Marsh that his torments were, for the time, over.

By Ruckinge and Ham Street we come up Orlestone Hill, that "Quaker-coloured ravine" described in the story of "Jerry Jarvis's Wig." "The road," says Ingoldsby, "had been cut deep below the surface of the soil, for the purpose of diminishing the abruptness of the descent, and as either side of the superincumbent banks was clothed with a thick mantle of tangled copsewood, the passage, even by day, was sufficiently obscure, the level beams of the rising or setting sun, as they happened to enfilade the gorge, alone illuminating its recesses."

The cutting is there to this day, but it must be confessed that neither it nor the hill are so steep as that description would have us believe. Here it was that the body of Humphry Bourne was found, murdered by Joe Washford, demoniacally possessed and incited by the wig that Jerry Jarvis, the scoundrelly solicitor of Appledore, had given him.

From the little church of Orlestone that, with a picturesque black and white manor house crowns the hill, it is five miles into the market-town, and railway centre of Ashford.