Cathedrals -- England; England -- Description and travel
Bethersden is connected with the Lovelaces for they owned it, Richard
Lovelace, the poet, having sold Lovelace Place to Richard Hulse, soon
after the death of Charles I. Three members of the Lovelace family
lie in the church, their tombs marked by brasses; William Lovelace
(1459) another William Lovelace, gentleman (1459), and Thomas Lovelace
(1591).
From Bethersden I went on to High Halden, which stands upon a ridge
out of the Weald, a very characteristic and beautiful place, with a
most interesting church dedicated to Our Lady. Indeed I do not know
where one could match the strange wooden tower and belfry and the
noble fourteenth century porch, masterpieces of carpentry, which close
on the west the little stone church of the fifteenth century. Within
the most interesting thing left to us is the glass in the east window
of the south chancel where we see the Blessed Virgin with her lily,
part of an Annunciation. There, too, in another window are the arms of
Castile and of Leon, a strange blazon to find in the Weald of Kent.
But characteristic as Great Chart, Bethersden and High Halden are of
this strange wealden county, they do not express it, sum it up and
dominate it as does Tenterden Town, some two or three miles to the
south of High Halden.
If we look at the ordnance map we shall see that the town of Tenterden
is set upon a great headland thrust out by the higher land of the
Kentish Weald, southward and east towards those low marshlands that
are lost almost imperceptibly in the sea, and are known to us as
Romney Marsh. This great headland, in shape something like a clenched
fist, stands between the two branches of the Rother, the river which
flows into the sea at Rye, and which was once navigable by ships so
far up as Small Hythe just under the southern escarpment of the
headland upon which Tenterden stands. Hither so late as 1509 the
Rother was navigable, and we find Archbishop Warham on the petition of
the people licensing a small chapel there of St John Baptist still in
existence, for the use of the inhabitants and as a sanctuary or a
graveyard for the burial of those wrecked on the "sea-shore" _infra
predictum oppidum de Smallhyth_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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