Half a mile north of Deal once stood the castle of Sandown, one of Henry the Eighth’s many shoreward castles. They had no opportunity of fighting the foe, and their history has thus been meagre; but to this fortress of Sandown belonged one grim incident. It was selected as the prison of that convinced regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, sometime member of Parliament for Nottingham, who was at first pardoned on the Restoration, and then, in 1663, arrested and sent to the Tower of London. Removed to a solitary imprisonment here in May 1664, his wife and daughter were only permitted to visit him from Deal. According to the “Memoirs” written by his wife, Sandown Castle was even then a “lamentable old ruined place, not weatherproof, unwholesome and damp,” and he died in four months, September 11th, aged forty-nine, from a fever with which it had infected him. Sandown Castle is a thing of the past. Only the black memory of it remains. It was gradually undermined by the sea, and fell in massive ruinous blocks of masonry, unsung, unwept, with no story save that of a sordid and cruel and useless revenge. [Illustration: THE KENTISH COAST: _Deal to Brookland_] The explorer who pushes manfully into these sandy wastes will scarce find that they repay him for his trouble and fatigue. A squalor pervades them, in addition to their essential melancholy; and when a kind of golf club-house has been passed and you come upon a small stone with a barely decipherable inscription, set upon a bank that marks where the sands and the marshes begin, and are told that it marks the site of a murder done there, long ago, you feel it to be a fitting place for such a deed. Here a young woman named Mary Bax was murdered in 1784 by a sailor tramping this way, along the old road to Sandwich. A boy roaming in the marshes saw the crime committed, and hid trembling in the rushes of a dyke, for fear that if he were seen he would be served the same. When the man had gone he raised an alarm, and the countryside was roused. The sailor was tracked to Folkestone and captured in the churchyard of St. Eanswythe. The following account of the affair, and of the conviction and execution of the murderer, appeared in the _Annual Register_ for 1784: