Situated in a long, dry Kentish valley which runs upwards in a Southerly direction towards the escarpment of the Chalk, and at a distance of about 1½ miles from the railway station at Eynesford, one may see the forlorn wreckage of Maplescombe church (Figs. 9, 10). This church, which had a semicircular apse, still partially remaining, has been in ruins for three centuries. My attention was first called to the spot by Mr Benjamin Harrison, of Ightham, an archaeologist whose knowledge of his native district is unsurpassed. On visiting the ruins in 1904, I found a large, partially-sunken sarsen stone (3´.0´´ × 2´.0´´ × 1´.6´´) occupying what appeared to be the site of the ancient altar. A few smaller sarsens were also discernible, and other specimens, Mr Harrison states, have been carried off, at various times, by hop-pickers, to build hearths in the fields. In the field adjoining the church, the ploughshare has turned up [Illustration: FIG. 9. Ruins of Maplescombe church, Kent. View from the North-West. The ruins are unenclosed, amid a field of cabbages. The interior space is overgrown with brambles and elder bushes, but the semicircular apse can be detected on the left. ] [Illustration: FIG. 10. Sketch plan of the ruins of Maplescombe church, Kent, showing the positions of the sarsen stones.] human bones and other relics[119]. This area was presumably the graveyard, and may have been originally unenclosed, but with this hypothesis we shall deal in a later chapter. Parenthetically, it may be explained to the non-geological reader that a sarsen is a hard mass of rock, which was once part of the Bagshot Sands or the Woolwich and Reading Beds, and which, having resisted denudation, remains on, or near, the present surface of the soil. The earliest record of a church at Maplescombe is A.D. 1291, but the building may, perhaps, be of Norman foundation, and the largest stone may possibly be a sacred relic which existed previously on the present site. The worship of “stocks and stones” died hard, and it is at least conceivable that the church builders adapted one or more megaliths to form an altar. Further than that we cannot go, seeing that sarsens are fairly common in the locality. Examples of churchyard sarsens are abundant in Kent. Mr Harrison informs me that there are specimens at Kemsing Halling and Trottescliffe; in the last-named village, the stone is built into the church wall. At Meopham, there are several blocks just outside the churchyard, but, as the ground is merely fenced in, we have again, doubtless, an instance where the demarcation between consecrated and unconsecrated soil is of modern date. Still further records from Kent have been supplied by Mr F. J. Bennett. The ruins of the churches at Punish and Paddlesworth (near Snodland) enclosed in each case a large sarsen; the nave of the dismantled church at Dode contains a good-sized specimen; several other blocks stand just outside the graveyard wall at