The roads of these parts carefully avoid the shore; the one leaving this spot running directly inland, to Teynham, where orchards and hop-gardens and old cottages neighbour the church, in a pretty, diversified landscape. From Teynham, through the hamlet of Deerton Street, one comes to Buckland, where the scanty ruins of an old church stand in front of a farm, on the other side of Buckland crossing. Near by is a humble old timber-framed cottage on the edge of hop-gardens. This was originally the parsonage. Beyond it, over Stone level-crossing, a road leads away on the left to Luddenham, a solitary parish on rising ground overlooking the marshes. There is no village, only scattered farms and cottages; but the picture formed by the church on its height, neighboured by the Court Lodge, now the largest of the neighbouring farms, devoted partly to hops and in part to fruit, is an unusual and striking one. There you see the church, partly Early English, with an eighteenth-century red-brick tower, displayed against the skyline in company with some hop-oasts, the hollow in the foreground on the left, evidently once a creek, planted with bush-fruit; while on the right the hop-gardens are screened by a weird hedge of polled poplars, looking very knobbly and knuckly with their annual trimming. From Luddenham we come steeply uphill and then down, through Davington, again into Faversham. CHAPTER VIII GOODNESTONE--GRAVENEY--SEASALTER--WHITSTABLE AND THE OYSTER FISHERY The road from Faversham to Whitstable winds level for long distances, passing at first through a charming district of cherry-orchards, interspersed with emerald pastures, with sheep feeding under the trees, and evidences of much poultry-keeping, in the many coops filled with anxious hens clucking nervously after their young broods. Here, too, you see hop-gardens; looking more than a little bare in spring, but with plenty of work going on, chiefly in trimming and tarring the ends of the new ash-poles that are to be planted, thick as forests, for the hop-bines to grow upon. Here and there are the hutches in which the hop-pickers will live in August, and now and again you see an oast-house; the old buildings with their quaint outlines, the new apt to be eye-sorrows for angularity and sheer commonplace ugliness. It is perhaps best to come this way in the sweet of the year, when the cherry-blossom mantles the trees with purest white, and when there is everywhere an inspiring and heartening air of anticipation, not only in the preparations going forward in the hop-gardens, but in the great barns where the thousands of cherry-baskets are collecting, awaiting the cherry-picking. A lovely, lovable corner, this, past Goodnestone on the way to Graveney, and it seems prosperous, too. Moreover, the yellow gravel road is excellent.