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Archaeologia Cantiana -  Vol. 57  1944  page 57

A Canterbury Pilgrimage in 1723 by V. J. Torr

It is unfortunate that so little notice is given to Rochester Cathedral, since there is none at all of her sister at Canterbury. But at least we meet the noble medieval bridge crossing the Medway and which was so deplorably destroyed in the last century, along with that of Maidstone; from considerations so injudicious that the modern successor at Maidstone proved inadequate but a few years later.
   The reader must surely admit the energy of these Georgian riders in so hot a season, as for example accomplishing a ten miles' ride and visits to Cuxton and Cobham, and back in Rochester before noon. It reminds me of the formidable excursions polished off by the Kent Arcaeological Society in the days of horse-brakes, when we read our last century Proceedings.
   Of further general interest is the comment on the exceeding narrowness * of the great Watling Street in many places; and the modern survival in business of the inns named at Dartford, Rochester, Faversham and Canterbury.
   It is remarkable that no notice is taken of the busy town of Sittingbourne in the riders' way. But I suspect that the delightfully human touch of what happened with the poitrin pears may have occurred soon after they left Chatham; and consequently none of them can have been taking much notice of anything for a season. (A human touch worthy of what we read in an unpublished tour through Kent nearly a century earlier, how a "sprightly and pretty French she-rider" undressed herself quite

unselfconsciously during a supper party at Canterbury, a custom "common amongst them of that nation", declares the chronicler sweepingly.) Possibly John Newman's recovery took longer than that of any of them, as he is immortalized by name.
   The lover of Kentish landscape will note that the hop gardens did not escape the eye of our Welshman; nor those thirty miles of orchids east of Medway which in springtime are perhaps the loveliest thing of their kind in all England.
   The remark on Faversham municipal discords and the town's consequent good claim to return a member would imply that the chronicler found contemporary politics about on par with those of
    * One suspects that this anomaly probably lasted throughout almost all the eighteenth century, sweeping improvements becoming necessary, somewhere about 1800, when the stage-coach began to be developed seriously and an excellent national system of fast main road travel came into being. See the text (under Boughton-under-Blean) for Thorpe's information that from the top of the hill a good road had been made all the way into Canterbury about the year 1620. The striking improvement in surface noted at this section would naturally imply also some measure of widening. Thorpe's date seems early, however, in view of the fantastic conditions reported on Watling Street as late as the reign of George I; and may possibly be suspect, since the 1635 tour makes no mention of any particular difference through the Blean: indeed, the road is there called by the writer of that tour a "hedg'd Cawsey", and he comments on the "choking dust" thrown up by the horses, despite the explicit statement in 1723 that the highway had been well maintained ever since about the beginning of the reign of Charles I.—V.J.T.

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