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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of what we read in an unpublished tour through Kent nearly a century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 |
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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. |