In two miles from Minster we come to Eastchurch, a populous and pretty village whose beautiful church warms the enthusiasm of the pilgrim. Across the meadows rises the imposing frontage of Shurland House, now, as we have said, a farmhouse, but a Gothic battlemented structure built by Sir Thomas Cheyney, when Warden of the Cinque Ports, about 1550, and the not undignified successor of the Shurland Castle inhabited by that Sir Robert who was the hero of the legend of "Grey Dolphin." Sir Thomas, the builder of this great place, was succeeded by his son, "the extravagant Lord Cheyney" of Toddington, Bedfordshire, after whose fall Shurland House reverted to the Crown. James I. granted it to Philip Herbert, a son of the Earl of Pembroke, and now, after many vicissitudes, it belongs to the Holfords. [Illustration: SHURLAND CASTLE.] By turning to the left in the village street of Eastchurch, and bearing to the right at the next turning, all that is left of Warden is reached in two miles. The little that remains of the village is known by the inelegant name of "Mud Row," whose few decrepit houses lead direct to what would be destruction for the speedy cyclist, were it not for the rough bar thrown across the rutty lane. Dismounting here, the astonished stranger finds that the road ends suddenly and without warning, and with it the island as well. It is just a little nerve-shaking. Here one looks down upon a scene of wildest desolation, upon the sea, a hundred feet below, at the bottom of a dark mass of clayey cliffs, slipping and sliding into the water, and torn by repeated landslips into yawning fissures and fantastic pinnacles. The sullen sea is discoloured as far as eye can reach with the dissolving clay, and, horrible to tell, out of many fissures grin bleached skulls, while strewn here and there are human bones. It is a Golgotha. Here stood the church and churchyard of Warden until 1877, and this tumbled landslip is all that remains of them. For many years this encroachment of the sea at Warden has been in progress, until, up to now, over eighty acres have been washed away. The vanished church has a curious history, having been rebuilt in 1836 with the stones from old London Bridge, demolished four years earlier for the building of the present structure. It was Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the bridge, who gave the stones and rebuilt the church of Warden, as duly set forth on a sculptured stone tablet now forming part of a garden wall at Mud Row. By 1870 the sea had crept up to the church, and it was closed, to be pulled down in 1877, when the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the previous thirty years were disinterred and removed to Minster. They are the more ancient dead whose poor remains are exposed with every fall of earth, to bleach in the sun.