The modern road to Deal lies open and unfenced for the most part, first across samples of these marshes, and then across chalk downs. It is a pleasant highway, where you get just as much of the dykes and waterlogged scenery as you want, without a depressing surfeit of it. By the time the turning for Worth is reached the shore is nearly three miles distant. Here a signpost directs on the left “To Word,” a spelling which reproduces the olden Saxon pronunciation of “Worth,” still current here; all one with the singular inability of the Kentish folk to enunciate “th”--a strange and widespread trick of the tongue which makes the rustics talk of “de wedder,” instead of the weather. The effect upon strangers is almost that of talking to foreigners. The word “shibboleth” itself would certainly bewray them; they would inevitably make it “shibboled.” “Worth” is pure Anglo-Saxon: deriving from “Weorthig,” meaning an enclosure. The site of it was evidently a very early attempt at cultivation in these marshes. We will not penetrate beyond Worth to the shore, the sands, and marshes, to the site of the old road, but will proceed along the present highway to Deal, through Shoulden. The town of Deal is entered through what might at first be considered the inland modern suburb of Upper Deal, where the very striking red-brick seventeenth-century tower of St. Lawrence’s church confronts the wayfarer. But what is now “Upper” Deal is in fact the original place: the “Addelam” of Domesday, the “Dole” of earlier records. The place-name, which signifies a “dale,” is singularly appropriate for the spot where the rolling chalk hills descend to a long level, stretching to the sea. Before there was any town at all where Deal now faces the Channel, almost awash with the tides, “Upper” Deal was simply “Deal,” and what we now know as Deal was the upstart settlement called “Lower” Deal. Thus oddly is the situation reversed. A curious piece of evidence as to the comparatively recent origin of the town is found in a Chancery case argued in 1663, when a witness seventy-two years of age declared that “he well knew the valley where Lower Deal is situated, and that he knew it before any house had been built there.” The church of St. Lawrence is a singular mixture within, and has a singing gallery, quaintly painted with an East Indiaman in full sail, and bearing the date 1705; together with little pictures of pilots and terrestrial globes, and the inscription: “This Gallery was built by ye Pilots of Deal.” It will be noted that, in the construction of this road into Deal, the old Dutch-like houses here have suffered some mutilation.