A curious and but-little-visited part of the Kentish littoral is that which stretches, some eight miles or so, between Iwade, Milton, Sittingbourne, Tonge, and Faversham. It is that part of the country, going down to the low-lying shores of the Swale, which was in olden times spoken of as being possessed of “wealth without health.” The land was, and is still, wonderfully fertile, but in remote days was full of malaria. To-day, as the traveller by the leisurely South-Eastern Railway passes from Sittingbourne, past Teynham to Faversham, he sees orchards and farmsteads, grazing sheep, and many evidences of prosperity and beauty. It seems to him like a Land of Promise. And truly, once past the squalid papermaking and brickmaking purlieus of Sittingbourne, this is a district of exceptional beauty; by no means flat; and rich in orchards of cherry, apple, and pear.

If we retrace our route from Sheppey, and, coming again across the bridge at King’s Ferry, turn off to the left beyond Iwade, we shall presently come into Milton Regis, otherwise Milton-next-Sittingbourne, past the fine and very striking church, of Norman and Early English periods. It is, in this age of silly “suffies,” generally locked, and therefore the tourist finds considerable difficulties in the way of seeing the beautiful interior and the three Northwode brasses: a knight in heraldic tabard; another about 1480; and John Northwode and wife, 1496. But the odd, and much more humble, tombstone in the churchyard to one “Abraham Washiton late Hvsband of Alise Washinton, now living at Milton, whome had in all six hvsbands,” 1601, is easily found. Alice, you will observe, was at that date “now living,” and so, for all we know, may have married again; but possibly she may by that time have struck the surviving men of Milton as rather lethal.

Before ever there was a town of Sittingbourne there was a town of Milton, standing upon Milton Creek. It was from early times a royal manor, and until ages comparatively recent Sittingbourne, as the lesser place, was best described as “Sittingbourne-next-Milton.” But, from being situated directly upon the great Dover Road, Sittingbourne grew, while Milton languished. Great inns sprang up beside that historic highway, to serve the needs of travellers. No less a personage than Henry the Fifth, coming home flushed with the victory of Agincourt in 1415, was entertained at the “Red Lion,” a hostelry still in the forefront in 1541, when Henry the Eighth was its guest, and held there one of his fateful Councils, which probably resulted in some one losing his head. The “George,” the “Rose,” and the “Red Lion” seem to have long been the best inns. Hasted, the historian of Kent, says the “Rose” was the most superb of any in the kingdom; but that must have been at a much later date, for we are not to suppose that those two monarchs stayed at a second-rate house. For the “Red Lion” you will now seek in vain, although there is a “Lion,” without any specified colour; a large old inn, with long, seventeenth-century red-brick frontage: twelve windows in a row; quite the largest in the town, although part is now let off as a bank. A quaint, old-world scene presents itself up the archway entrance to the courtyard, with the prettily framed windows of the coffee-room on one side.

The “Rose,” once “the most superb,” is a thing of the past, for we cannot affect to believe that the small house which now bears that sign is its modern representative. No: what was once the real “Rose” stands adjoining, and is parcelled into four shops. A tablet on the frontage bears the date 1708, with a rose sculptured in full bloom. The elevation is a handsome two-storied one, with projecting eaves supported by richly carved consoles. A tall window at the side, apparently that of an old assembly-room, runs through two floors.

Opposite is the old “George,” red brick, about 1720, with nine windows in a row. The building is in two parts, with two coach-entrances, and must once have been an important inn. Up one entrance is the Liberal Club, and up the other, oddly enough, is the Conservative Club. Along this last, looking back, you see a picturesque tile-hung front, hung with wistaria.

Finally, just past the Wesleyan Chapel is the old “Crown,” now a shop. The old coach-yard, very picturesque, has five old postboys’ dwellings in timber, now much dilapidated, with broken windows.

But Sittingbourne is not, on the whole, an engaging town, and the bubbling brook, the “seething burn,” as the Anglo-Saxons styled it, which gave the place its name, has since 1830 been hidden away from view in a pipe beneath the road. It used to flow across the highway at the east end of the church. The industrial modern circumstances of Sittingbourne, the making of paper and bricks, are the very denial of beauty. Lloyd’s paper-mills will be found at Milton. There, on the banks of the muddy Milton Creek, you see mountainous stacks of wood-pulp, for the making of paper. The scene, with the greasy mud-banks and the squalid pieces of wrapping-paper, is inexpressibly ugly. If there is any choice, Milton Creek is even more beastly than the brickmaking village of Murston, below Sittingbourne; and even that is a horror.

But, although Milton is so ill a place, full of lodgings for tramps, and all such mean circumstances, there are yet in its narrow streets some fine old houses, of good architectural character, which hint, not obscurely, that this was, two hundred years ago, a place of charm and gentility. On an old house, now the “Waterman’s Arms,” in Flushing Street, may be seen a quaintly sculptured stone sign dated 1662, representing Adam and Eve standing on either side of that fatal apple-tree: Eve about to pluck the fruit which caused all the trouble. The sign is the arms of the Fruiterers’ Company; but the reason of it being here is not known.

It is perhaps worth while to turn aside, on leaving Sittingbourne, to see what manner of place Murston may be. It has already been described in unfavourable terms, but how unutterably wretched a spot this great brickmaking centre is can only be learnt by close inspection. One comes into it by a mile-long road which for the most part stands prominently up above the surrounding country, something in the likeness of a railway embankment; the brick-earth of which the neighbouring fields once consisted having been dug out to great depths on either side. Down below there, in that artificially low level, the valuable brick-earth having been excavated, many of those fields have once again been given over to agriculture. Crops seem to do well in this curious situation, deriving benefit from what a native described to the present writer as the “mysture,” which is apparently Cantise or Cockney for “moisture.”

At the end of this singular interval, close to the shores of Milton Creek, is Murston. Whatever beauty the village once possessed has long been obliterated in its expansion into an industrial slum of long, unlovely, characterless streets of human kennels. Even the parish church has been severely dealt with, only the chancel of the old building being left; and that stands in a mangy little walled and locked enclosure, strewn with old tins and other refuse. Such is Murston; and the “brickies” who live in it match the place completely.

It is pleasant to think and to know that Murston is exceptional. Beautiful country, wholly unspoiled, immediately adjoins it, and one comes pleasantly past Tonge, in search of the coast-line, past Chekes Court Farm and Blacketts, to Conyers Quay. There indeed is again an unpleasant interval, for advantage has been taken of a slimy little creek opening out of the Swale to erect a brick-factory, whence the bricks are barged to Sheerness, and round up the Thames; the barges bringing back from London cargoes of cinders and the contents of London dustbins, which (under the name of “breeze”) is useful in the making of bricks. The immediate and intimate part of Conyers Quay is therefore, it will be readily understood, undesirable alike to sight and smell.

The roads of these parts carefully avoid the shore; the one leaving this spot running directly inland, to Teynham, where orchards and hop-gardens and old cottages neighbour the church, in a pretty, diversified landscape. From Teynham, through the hamlet of Deerton Street, one comes to Buckland, where the scanty ruins of an old church stand in front of a farm, on the other side of Buckland crossing. Near by is a humble old timber-framed cottage on the edge of hop-gardens. This was originally the parsonage. Beyond it, over Stone level-crossing, a road leads away on the left to Luddenham, a solitary parish on rising ground overlooking the marshes. There is no village, only scattered farms and cottages; but the picture formed by the church on its height, neighboured by the Court Lodge, now the largest of the neighbouring farms, devoted partly to hops and in part to fruit, is an unusual and striking one. There you see the church, partly Early English, with an eighteenth-century red-brick tower, displayed against the skyline in company with some hop-oasts, the hollow in the foreground on the left, evidently once a creek, planted with bush-fruit; while on the right the hop-gardens are screened by a weird hedge of polled poplars, looking very knobbly and knuckly with their annual trimming.

From Luddenham we come steeply uphill and then down, through Davington, again into Faversham.