It is a Roman road that runs along the cliff-top through Lympne to Aldington, passing the hamlet of Court-at-Street that was once the Roman "Belerica," and emerging upon the "open plain" of Aldington Frith. "Allington Fright" as the Kentish peasantry name it, is still an open expanse. The airs of romance blow freely about it to-day, as of old, and although from the high ground by Aldington Forehead distant glimpses of Hythe and its big neighbour, Folkestone, whether you desire it or not, are obtained, the place is solitary, and the country, still unspoiled, dips down southward to "The Mesh" and the sea, over crumbling earthy cliffs, tangled with impenetrable bracken, blackberry brambles, and hazel coppices. This is the especial district of that fine prose legend, "The Leech of Folkestone"--"Mrs. Botherby's Story," as Ingoldsby names it. The place has ever been the home of superstition and the miraculous. To quote Ingoldsby himself, "Here it was, in the neighbouring chapelry, the site of which may yet be traced by the curious antiquary, that Elizabeth Barton, the 'Holy Maid of Kent,' had commenced that series of supernatural pranks which eventually procured for her head an unenvied elevation upon London Bridge." Although that eminent pluralist and cautious though fiery reformer, Erasmus, was Rector of Aldington in 1511, and opposed, alike by policy and temperament, to shams and spiritual trickery, the old leaven of superstition worked freely in his time, and, indeed, survived until recent years. Nay, more than that, these solitudes still harbour beliefs in the uncanny. The district, as of old, has an ill name, and the warlocks and other unholy subjects of Satan, once reported to make its wild recesses their favourite rendezvous, are found even now, in confidential interludes, to be not wholly vanished from the rural imagination. The moralist, from his lofty pinnacle, of course condemns these darkling survivals, but there be those, not so committed to matter-of-fact, who, revolting from the obvious and the commonplace, welcome the surviving folklore, and, plunging into its haunts, forget awhile the fashion of Folkestone, Sandgate, and Hythe. [Illustration: A KENTISH FARM.] [Illustration: THE RUINED CHAPEL, COURT-AT-STREET.]