The road from Faversham to Whitstable winds level for long distances, passing at first through a charming district of cherry-orchards, interspersed with emerald pastures, with sheep feeding under the trees, and evidences of much poultry-keeping, in the many coops filled with anxious hens clucking nervously after their young broods. Here, too, you see hop-gardens; looking more than a little bare in spring, but with plenty of work going on, chiefly in trimming and tarring the ends of the new ash-poles that are to be planted, thick as forests, for the hop-bines to grow upon. Here and there are the hutches in which the hop-pickers will live in August, and now and again you see an oast-house; the old buildings with their quaint outlines, the new apt to be eye-sorrows for angularity and sheer commonplace ugliness.

It is perhaps best to come this way in the sweet of the year, when the cherry-blossom mantles the trees with purest white, and when there is everywhere an inspiring and heartening air of anticipation, not only in the preparations going forward in the hop-gardens, but in the great barns where the thousands of cherry-baskets are collecting, awaiting the cherry-picking.

A lovely, lovable corner, this, past Goodnestone on the way to Graveney, and it seems prosperous, too. Moreover, the yellow gravel road is excellent.

The name of Goodnestone is a corruption of “Godwin’s Town.” It was one of the manors of the great patriot Saxon, Earl Godwin. Graveney stands where the wide-spreading marshes of Seasalter stretch away to the sea. There is little of it, beside the ancient, time-worn church, containing a fine canopied brass to John Martyn and wife, 1436. He was a Judge of the King’s Bench. The effigy shows him holding a heart, inscribed “IHV MCY,” in his hands.

A stone in the churchyard, not otherwise remarkable, mentions a place with the odd name “Old Wives’ Leaze.” One naturally wants to know something of these old wives and of their leaze, but disappointment dogs the footsteps of the inquirer, as closely and as constantly as his own shadow. An old man mowing the grass of the churchyard remarks incuriously, on his attention being drawn to it, that he “’spects it’s only a name.” “What’s in a name?” he seems to suggest with Shakespeare. Much sometimes.

Later inquiries prove “Old Wives’ Leaze” to be a hamlet high on a hill-top, one mile from Chilham, some seven miles distant; but I have no information as to the old wives, nor does any one else appear to possess any. The name, in fact, seems, like so many others, to be a corruption of some forgotten name, and is indeed supposed to have originally been “Overs,” or “Oldwoods Leaze,” or Lees.

In the marshes of Seasalter the hedgerows die away, leaving the flat road open and unfenced and bordered by watery dykes, in which last year’s reeds, rubbing together in the wind, keep up a rustling murmur, looking sere and wan until with the coming of June they are replaced by newer growths. The dykes quarter the marshes in all directions, and keep the pastures efficiently drained, but the sight of men busily engaged in digging thick slab-mud from them proves that they require constant care.

The scenery is that of Holland; even down to the particular detail of grass-grown earthen embankments against the sea, which long ago encroached here and destroyed the original church of Seasalter, and has in modern times caused its successor to be abandoned, in favour of a new building in Whitstable. In any case, it is difficult to see the need of a church where there are but few houses, unless some modern St. Francis were wishful of preaching here to the birds, the seagulls and the curlews that haunt these marshes and maintain a mingled screaming and melancholy piping, varied sometimes with what sounds like demoniacal chucklings or mocking laughter. Inland you see the wooded uplands of the old forest district of Blean, with the whirling sails of distant windmills seeming to beckon over the hills and far away. Of the sea one observes nothing until the grassy embankment is climbed, hard by the “Old Sportsman” inn that stands sheltered under the lee of it, but from the top is seen the entrance of the Swale, dotted with many small vessels, with Sheppey about three miles across the channel and the pink-washed houses of the coastguard shining out yonder on Shellness Point.

From this spot the embankment gradually dies down and the land rises slightly to Whitstable. Stakes are stuck in the ooze of the foreshore, which is strewn with myriads of cockle and mussel-shells. Passing a coastguard-station where the coastguard’s chief anxieties seem to be concerned rather with his cocks and hens than with guarding the coast, the road comes past the “Jolly Sailor” and the “Blue Anchor,” into the hamlet of Seasalter, and thence winds inland. Here the approach to Whitstable is heralded by the notice-boards of the “Bolingbroke Building Estate,” a would-be suburb that appears by no means to have attained success. It is one of the very many attempts, so curiously characteristic of these speculative and impatient times of ours, to discount the future; to make a place, ad hoc, instead of letting it gradually develop, in response to requirements. The essential difference is that in other times places grew by gradual accretion of population. The population grew, and the houses increased gradually to meet its needs; but in this present era of “building estates” on the edges of towns, it is the speculative greed of landowners that seeks to build or let on building lease, and it is the public which is coy. The imaginations of landowners riot so freely on the alluring prospect of ground-rents that there is nowadays scarce a seaside town whose outskirts are not rendered squalid and utterly detestable with projected roads that are grass-grown failures, and with notice-boards in various stages of abject decay, offering “desirable sites” whose desirability appears to be more evident to the vendors than to purchasers. Here, at the approach to Whitstable, notice-boards make what appear to be splendid offers, “Title-free, rates-free, tithe-free”—everything, it seems, but rent-free; and yet the “Bolingbroke Building Estate” has not resolved into much more than a waste of scrubby pasture, dotted plentifully with sign-posts marking imaginary streets and avenues with the most grandiloquent names: Valkyrie Avenue, Medina Road, Wauchope Avenue, and so forth. One would conclude, not merely that the ground is not “ripe for building,” but that it has not even blossomed.

Having successfully passed the attractions of “Ye Olde Sportsman,” the “Blue Anchor,” the “Jolly Sailor,” and finally the “Rose in Bloom” and the “Two Brewers,” we come into Whitstable. Domesday Book, which mentions “Seseltre,” says nothing of Whitstable, but there was then a “Hundred of Whitstapele,” a division even then of ancient standing. The name was, in its origin, evidently that of some prominent white pole, or post, or even of some white church-tower; for the word “stapol” means any of these; surviving in modern English as “steeple.” But no one will ever know what that object really was from which, in such roundabout fashion, the town of Whitstable derives its name.

It is, at first sight, a singularly unattractive place; and the more you see of it, the less you like it. The streets are narrow and mean, without the saving grace of picturesqueness, and the sea-front adds to the squalor by being occupied by the railway-station and a very coaly dock.

Having thus successfully taken away the character of Whitstable, I will now address myself to the oyster fishery.

There are numerous conflicting accounts of the reason for Julius CÆsar’s invasion of Britain. Some historians consider he was impressed with the riches of the country in gold and skins, and some—with clearer vision, no doubt—are of opinion that he was actuated by sheer lust of conquest. Whitstable, however, is earnestly of opinion that CÆsar’s coming was entirely and exclusively prompted by an appetite for “Whitstable natives.” It is a flattering belief. At any rate, the “Rutupine oysters” (the “natives” in question) were at that time high in favour at Rome, and continued so with all the Roman emperors; so that one instinctively associates “oyster” and “emperor” in indissoluble company.

No one will ever discover the origin of oyster-eating. The eating of the first must have been a thrilling experiment, as James the First declared. “He was a very valiant man,” said our British Solomon, “who first ventured upon the eating of oysters.”

One can imagine that man, faced with the dilemma of starving or being poisoned, making the awful experiment. Whoever he was, or whenever he flourished, he merits the gratitude of that portion of the world which eats oysters.

Speaking for myself, and those of my fellow men who are illogical enough not to like oysters—never having tried them, and never intending to do so—I am quite cold upon the subject, and therefore am inclined the more to applaud Seneca, who, austere philosopher that he was, described the oyster as “a thing that cannot be called food,” but an abstruse luxury, “a provocative of appetite, causing those who are already full to eat more.” Thus he dismisses oyster-eaters to the cold shades of contempt occupied by such people as those who take bitters and wash themselves out with table-waters. But Seneca himself was an oyster-eater, and spoke, as your true philosopher should speak, at first-hand knowledge.

The Rutupine oyster of Roman times still remains, as the “Whitstable native” of our own day, the prime favourite, and the cultivation of him here employs some three thousand people. We shall see the fishing-grounds to better advantage on having left Whitstable behind and ascending the cliffs of Tankerton. They are not lofty cliffs, but they do assuredly command a fine view, out over this shallow sea at the entrance of the Swale. There, where at low water you perceive the long “Street Stones” stretching out to sea, many of the eighty-five or more of the Whitstable oyster-fleet will, at the beginning of August, when the season begins, generally be seen going to their work of dredging up the young oysters, so far away as Margate, presently to return with the spoils of their dredge-nets, for laying down in these Whitstable grounds. Others are engaged in dredging for the mature oysters, ready for the market. It takes seven years for the Whitstable natives to reach maturity, and they do so only to perfection in this patch of shallow water, some two miles square. There are many theories to account for the especial virtues that reside in these exceptionally favoured waters; but the generally received explanation of the undoubted fact is that the shallowness of the water permits it to be readily warmed by the sun, and that the streams descending from the land keep the sea-bottom free from mud. The Colchester native, from the shores of Essex, has a great reputation, but he is often dredged up and taken to finally mature in Whitstable waters.

The natural history of the oyster is interesting. There is, for one thing, no “race-suicide” about what would-be eloquent journalists were once used to term the “succulent bivalve,” for it has been estimated that each oyster produces 276,000 little ones. It will thus be readily supposed that it takes all the efforts of the busy dredgers to prevent over-population. But the oyster has many enemies, from his birth upwards. Beginning as “spat,” or spawn, in June or July, the young swim about for a while, a prey for everything else that swims. They then settle down to grow shells, at the rate of one inch in diameter every year, for three years, after which the growth is slower. Meanwhile, sand, mud, and weeds, but especially crabs and starfish, slay the oysters in hundreds of thousands; and frosts often cause great havoc, that in the winter of 1890–91 being responsible for £15,000 damage. But the starfish is the oyster’s worst enemy. He spreads two or three of his arms over the upper shell of the oyster and places the others firmly on the ground, his position being such that his central orifice, or mouth, is at the edge of the shell at the point farthest from the hinge. Then he applies a steady pull. In course of time the oyster gets tired, his big muscle gradually relaxes, and the shell reluctantly opens. The rest is silence.

Thus it happens that the oyster-fishers regard the starfish with the bitterest hatred. It is probably the worst feeling these burly, genial, jerseyed fellows entertain; for they don’t really dislike the person who doesn’t eat oysters. Him they regard merely with a half-amused, half-pitying contempt. Always, of course, excepting oyster-poachers, against whom no law can, of course, be sufficiently severe. To deal with the poachers who come out at night to dredge in the preserves of the fishermen who, after ages of oyster-culture, were incorporated by Act of Parliament into the Corporation of Free Dredgers, in 1793, and have in latter years converted themselves into the “Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company,” there are guard-boats always at hand, and, should they not be sufficient, there are artful contrivances laid upon the sea-bed, called “the creeps.” These consist of chains with barbed grapnels attached at intervals, which intercept and destroy the dredge-nets of these illegal dredgers.

There are not many prettier sights than that of the oyster-fleet, on a sunny day; the red-brown sails of the ten- to twenty-ton yawls going in stately procession over these shallow waters. They come back with uncounted millions of “brood” for laying down in this restricted pasture off Whitstable, or with mature oysters for the markets. In the season, which extends by Act of Parliament from August 5th to May 14th, as many as 200,000 “natives” are despatched from Whitstable in a day; and great is the activity to be observed here in that time, on the foreshore, and in the wooden shanties where they are scrubbed clean and packed carefully in barrels. Be sure, the Whitstable folk will impress upon you that there is no competition possible with the local specialty.

Surely he must have been one of these local patriots who originally propounded this excruciating conundrum: “What is the difference between a Whitstable oyster and a bad one?” the answer being, “One is a native, the other a settler!”

A pretty, pretty wit!

Among other efforts on this subject this may be recalled: “Why is an oyster the greatest curiosity in the world?” “Because you have to take it out of its bed before you can tuck it in.”

One quaint old feature of Whitstable beach is the unconventional lighthouse, cobbled up out of some old copperas-works. It makes not a bad picture, looking out across the Swale, with the cliffs of Warden Point beyond, and the oyster-dredging fleet in between. At low water the shallow channel displays a long rocky ridge called the “Street Stones,” supposed to be the remains of a Roman causeway.

At the farther end of Whitstable, and giving character to an otherwise featureless shore, is the wooded bluff of Tankerton, the growing residential suburb that Whitstable is at last throwing off. New roads strike through it, and there are fond hopes that the place will become a great seaside resort; but it has hitherto been slow in developing. Meanwhile, the cliff-top—a very modest cliff-top though it be—affords the best view of the “Street Stones” and of the crowded flotilla of the oyster-fleet. The coast-line through the hamlet of Swalecliffe, and on to and through Herne Bay, is protected from wastage by the sea by serried ranks of closely-set wooden groynes, erected in the shingle at enormous expense and looking, in the long perspective, like gigantic combs.