The conservative qualities of Lydd may perhaps be judged by the fact that the Mayor, Alderman Edwin Finn, brewer, has been elected to the office thirty-one years; thus far outdistancing the record of FitzAilwyn, Mayor of London twenty-two years. [Illustration: LYDD CHURCH.] Lydd is the place whence Dungeness, four and a quarter miles distant, is most readily arrived at. The best-advised explorers go by train. Others, who walk it, generally wish they had not. It is a specious and alluring road, starting fairly enough, and at the end of two miles still fairly easy walking; but thenceforward all road disappears. Even the track vanishes, and the pedestrian plunges wistfully on, through loose shingle, guiding his course by the more seaward of the two lighthouses. Knowing ones walk along the railway line; but that is not an inspiriting exercise. Dungeness, as described by Lambarde in 1567, is a “Neshe, called in Saxon nesse, which seemeth to be derived of the Latin Nasus, and signifieth a Nebbe or Nose of the land extended into the Sea.” “Before this Neshe,” he continues, “lieth a flat into the Sea, threatening great danger to unadvised Sailers.” It is indeed the most remarkable projection--hardly to be called a promontory, for that indicates also a height--along the coast of Kent, and makes a bold figure on the map, thrusting itself in a striking manner well into the Channel. In that, and in the singularity of it being merely a flat, shingly extension of Dunge and Walling marshes, lies its great menace to all shipping. A promontory, such as either of the Forelands, could be easily distinguished from the sea; but at night and in hazy weather this land is readily to be mistaken for water, as many ships for centuries past have disastrously found. A great aggravation of these sufficient perils is constituted by the remarkable depth of water existing close inshore. The shingle rises steeply, twenty-two feet out of the sea, and large steamers of deep draught can, and do, come quite close in. The natural perils of Dungeness were greatly aggravated from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards by the new lofty tower of Lydd church, built by Cardinal Wolsey. Complaints were bitterly made of it. The tower, it was said, in the reign of James the First, resembled from the sea “the forme of the saile of some talle shippe,” leading unfortunate mariners in uncertain lights to steer directly for the shore and destruction.