THE BACK OF BEYOND (continued)

If we continued along this straight road, the Mecca of the Stone Street carriers, Canterbury, would be reached again. Instead, we turn to the right, and in a mile and a half reach the Elham Valley and the hoary village of Lyminge, looking very new when viewed from a little distance, by reason of the sudden eruption of red-roofed villas come to disturb the ancient seclusion. Have a care how you pronounce the name of this village, lest by some uncovenanted rendering you proclaim yourself a stranger. The cautious in these matters always accost the first inhabitant met with, and ask him the name of the place, a method never known to fail unless the encounter takes place outside the post-office and the inhabitant be a crusty one who, curtly, and with an over-the-shoulder jerk of the thumb, says, "You'll find it written up there."

By the united testimony of the phonetic spelling of the thirteenth century and the twentieth century pronunciation of the natives, "Lyminge" should be enunciated with a short, not a long, "y" for the first syllable; while one should, for the second, pronounce as in "singe" or "hinge." Authority for the ancient pronunciation being the same as now is found in the name of a thirteenth-century rector, spelled "de Limminge," which clinches the matter. It is, however, quite other-guesswork with the meaning or the derivation of the name. One school of antiquaries finds its origin in the Latin name of the Stone Street, which when the Romans came was, they tell us, an ancient British trackway called the Heol-y-Maen, or Stone Path. The Romans reconstructed both the path and its name, which, in the Latinised "Via Limenea," was as near as they could get to the uncouth tongue of the Britons. Unfortunately for this ingenious theory, Lyminge is a mile and a half from the Stone Street. It really derived its name, in common with Lympne, from the Flumen Limenea, or river Limen, which once flowed down the valley, a considerable stream, now shrunken to a tiny brook.

The Romans prevailed largely in these parts, and, despite friend Hogben, performed some wonderful things, even though "foreigners." They certainly colonised at Lyminge, in whose church walls the red Roman tiles from some shattered villa are plentifully worked in among the undoubted Saxon masonry. The present church is the successor of what is considered to have been the first Christian basilica erected under the Roman rule in this island, and reconstructed about A.D. 640 by Ethelburga, daughter of King Ethelbert, on the re-introduction of Christianity. Here that pious princess founded a Benedictine nunnery, and here, in the fulness of time, she died. Portions of her religious establishment long remained, and formed admirable pig-sties, but even those few relics have been improved away. Very much, however, remains in and around the church, to indicate its Roman origin and to prove the old theory that it was reared upon a building of three apsidal aisles. Indeed, the base of one of those same apses is laid open to view on the south side of the building, level with the gravel path. This south side of the church is eminently picturesque, with its wooden porch, and windows of widely-different ages and styles, together with the ancient flying buttress built against the south-east angle of the chancel.

The Elham Valley, in whose basin Lyminge lies nestled, runs up to Bridge and Canterbury, and a branch of the South-Eastern Railway runs down it, taking advantage of the easy gradients in a manner common to railways. Places in it are ceasing to be remote and can no longer strictly be said to be Beyond, much less at the Back of it. Thus we will not pursue this pleasant hollow in the hills very far, but will cut across to Acryse. But not before seeing Elham itself, the capital and metropolis of the vale.

"E-lam"—for that, and not the more obvious way, is the correct local shibboleth—sits boldly in the lap of the hills, visible afar off. Those who hunt the fox with the East Kent Foxhounds know it well, for the kennels are situated here, but few else have made its acquaintance. It was once—in far-off times, when the ancient and beautiful houses in its one broad street were new—a market-town, and if it has lost its trade it has by no means relinquished its dignity. This is no place to speak at length of Elham church, whose tall tower and tapering spire command the valley, nor is it the place wherein to hold forth upon the library within the church, bequeathed some hundreds of years ago to the good folks of Elham by some old-world benefactor, strong in his belief in the civilising influence of literature when dispensed at the hands of the local clergyman—or perhaps merely anxious to be rid of a mass of useless rubbish. That library is reported to contain a valuable collection of Great Rebellion tracts; but what it does contain no Elhamite can with certainty tell you, because their reading runs in the lines of least resistance—which is equal to saying that they prefer the news columns of their weekly paper to the crabbed literature of that revolution which saved us from Popery more than two hundred years ago. For that reason alone the position of church librarian at Elham is a sinecure.

We have, for the purpose of seeing Elham, proceeded a little too far for Acryse, and must retrace our steps, ascending the steep hillsides to the east for that purpose.

It is only by dint of much climbing that one reaches Acryse, for it tops the range of uplands that shut in the Elham valley. Climbing up the lane by which Master Marsh and his man Ralph descended, in the legend of "The Leech of Folkestone," the woods of Acryse are found clothing the crest and extending densely into a shrouded table-land, where the sun-rays percolate but dimly through a heavy overarching interlaced canopy of boughs. Acryse means "Oak Hill," but, whatever the character of these woods may once have been, the oak certainly is not the most numerous in them to-day. If one tree preponderates over any other species here, it is the beech, which in the dim light and closely-serried ranks has grown so spindly that it only begins to throw out branches at a height of some thirty or forty feet from the ground. The simpleton who could not see the wood for the trees is proverbial, but it is at first impossible to see Acryse, on account of the woods. And no wonder, for the woods are so large and Acryse so small. There is not even the semblance of a hamlet. The manor house and the adjoining manorial chapel form the whole of the place, except some scattered few cottages out of sight, for whose inhabitants the chapel serves the function of parish church. The Papillons, who once held the manor of Acryse, have long since relinquished it, and Mackinnons have for three generations past resided here. The butterfly crest of the old owners is therefore sought in vain in manor house or chapel. Chapel and house are discreetly secluded within the mossy woods, and only the diminutive spire of the one and some few glimpses of the outbuildings and bellcote of the other are gained between the clustering tree-stems. History, by association, is making at Acryse, for it is the seat of that Colonel Mackinnon who commanded the C.I.V. in the second Boer War.

If signs of human habitation are small here, those of bird-life are overwhelming. The woods of Acryse are one vast rookery. In winter, when the boughs are unclothed, their nests occupy every fork of the branches, and all the year they make their presence known, not only by the disfigurement of the stranger's clothing as he walks under their roosting-places, but by the rising and falling bursts of cawing that mark all hours of the day, like a perpetual session of Parliament with the Speaker absent and the Irish members in individual and collective possession of the House, each one talking "nineteen to the dozen," and each with a personal grievance to duly ventilate. For the note of the rookery is a distinctly querulous one, always in opposition. Occasionally, when the greater din dies down, grave and reverend—or, at least, deep and self-satisfied—individual voices are heard, like those of well-fed and paunchy ministers rising to defend their departments and themselves, with voices remonstrant, argumentative, or triumphant.

What the rooks find to talk about all day and every day might puzzle anyone who did not read the reports of Imperial Parliament; but those having once been read, there is no room for surprise.

It is only when evening approaches that the rookery is stilled, and even then only after a preliminary clamour from home-coming birds, in conclave, that makes one's ears sing again. After that deafening rally the voices are heard singly, bubbling and gobbling, until at last, when the rim of the sun sinks down below the horizon, the colony is at rest.

Leaving lonely Acryse amid a hoarse parting chorus from its rooks, we will turn our course towards Swingfield Minnis, and thence to St. John's, the scene of that lightest and brightest of the Legends, the "Witches' Frolic." We need expect to find no ruin, for Barham's description in the verse is altogether beside the mark. Thus he, in the character of Grandfather Ingoldsby, apostrophises it:

There is no alderman's house in the neighbourhood, with or without Venetian blinds, but that matters little.

It is by a succession of steeply rising and falling, winding and narrow country lanes that the Preceptory of the Knights Templars of St. John of Jerusalem, near Swingfield Minnis, is reached. Like so many other ancient religious establishments, it is now a farmstead. Not altogether picturesque, and wearing very few outward signs of antiquity, it might readily be passed by those not keenly in quest of it, except for the existence of the three tall Early English windows prominent in one of the gables. An inspection of the farmhouse proves that thrifty use has been made of the old buildings, the hall, the principal ancient feature, with fine old timber roof, being divided for domestic purposes into two floors. Modern walls and fireplaces combine to almost wholly alter the internal arrangements. A long, buttressed, monastic barn of great antiquity is pictured in Knight's Old England, published some sixty years ago, but it has long since disappeared in the insensate rage for "improvement," and there is very little of interest now to be seen outside the farmhouse. But whatever it lacks in picturesque aspect, the glamour of romance thrown over the spot by the legend redeems it from the commonplace.

Rival explanations of the singular name of Swingfield Minnis divide opinion as to whether the first word means "Swinefield" or "Sweyn's Field," but a striking confirmation of the theory that it is named after that Danish king, and of the vague records of his having achieved a victory here, was afforded by the discovery of a quantity of human bones in modern times, in the course of which were described by a newspaper as "some agricultural operations," when the ancient surrounding heath or common-land was, for the first time in its history, enclosed and broken into for cultivation. If we, in our commonplace way, translate "agricultural operations" into "ploughing," we shall probably be correct. The remains were at the time pronounced to be the relics of some long-forgotten fight. "Minnis" is a Cantise word for a piece of rough stony common, such as long existed here.

Barham, as freeholder in the district, was interested in this enclosure and was awarded his share of the spoil. "St. John's," the name by which the farm is known, is, as he says, in his note to the "Witches' Frolic," two miles from Tappington, but it certainly cannot be seen, as he would have us believe, over the intervening coppices, nor in any other way, as we presently discover on coming past Tappington into Denton, there joining on to a route described in an earlier chapter.