From Sevenoaks, on the South-Eastern Railway, let this tour be begun;
from that Sevenoaks Station rejoicing in the eminently cricketing
name of “Bat and Ball.” There are reasons sufficiently weighty why
the starting-point should not be fixed nearer London, chief among
them being the hilly nature of the way. Sevenoaks itself, quite apart
from the rather uninteresting character of its long street, does not
bulk largely in the affections of the outward-bound wheelman, for to
reach it one has a more than mile-long climb. But, setting our faces
eastward, and avoiding Sevenoaks town, an easier beginning presents
itself along the road to Seal, where, leaving behind the trim gardens
and modern villas that form a kind of suburban and secular halo around
the railway, we plunge into a woodland district.
Seal village is a harbinger of the Thoreau-like solitudes that
succeed along the road to Ightham, standing as it does at the gates
of Seal Chart, where, away from the road on either hand, stretch such
crepuscular alleys of murmuring pines that even Bournemouth itself
never knew. Does there exist a cyclist who can hurry along this road
and not linger here, to rest his trusty steed against the corrugated
stem of one of these aromatic giants of the forest, and listen to the
intoning of the wood pigeons in the cathedral-like half-lights? If such
there be, surely he merits the Tennysonian description, “a clod of
thankless earth.” The far-spreading woods are unfenced and quite open
to the road for one to wander in at will, and never a sound in their
solitudes but belongs to the woodlands themselves; the cooing of the
pigeons, and the rustling of some “sma’ wee beastie” disturbed by the
crackling of the dry twigs under your feet. The squirrels themselves
are noiseless and, to the unpractised eye, invisible; but there are
many of them overhead, running with lightning speed along the red-brown
branches of the pines that so accurately match the rust-red hue of
their fur, and so help to conceal them from casual observation.
Following the road and the woods for two miles, the highway dips
sharply, and takes a left curve just where you glimpse the blue smoke
rising from the rustic chimneys of a wayside inn, down on whose
lichened roof you look in descending. To dismount here, just as the
view begins to disclose itself, is the better way, for only thus will
you be in full receipt of the beauty and the exquisite stillness of the
scene. The woods recede, like some clearing in a Canadian forest, and,
standing back from the road, you see the inn whose roof-tree was first
disclosed. On the other side of the highway, swinging romantically from
the branches of a great Scotch fir, is the picture-sign of the house,
bearing the legend, “Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Crown Point,” and showing
the half-length portrait of a very determined-looking warrior, clad in
armour and apparently deep in thought; while in the background is a
broad river, across whose swift current boat-loads of soldiers, in the
costume of two centuries ago, are being rowed.
[Illustration: CROWN POINT.]
The scene—the old inn, with the smoke curling peacefully upwards
against the blue-black background of the pine-woods, and the
picturesque sign swinging with every breeze—is a realisation of the
places pictured in the glowing pages of romantic novelists. If one were
only a few years younger, and conventions had not come to curb one’s
first impulses, there would be no more suitable spot than this where to
become an amateur Red Indian, or one of the robber chiefs suitable for
such a spot.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “SIR JEFFREY AMHERST.”]
The place has rather a curious story. “Crown Point,” as it is generally
called, is so named after a place in Canada where Sir Jeffrey Amherst
gained a great victory over the North American Indians early in the
eighteenth century. Amherst eventually became Field-Marshal and
Commander-in-Chief to the Forces, and, retiring and settling in Kent,
founded the family of whom the present Earl Amherst is the head. The
scenery here is said to greatly resemble that of Crown Point in Canada.
The sign of the inn is repainted and kept in repair by Earl Amherst.
[Illustration: CROMWELL’S SKULL.]
It may be worth noting that an historical relic is preserved in the
immediate neighbourhood of this place; no less important an one,
indeed, than the skull of Oliver Cromwell, now in the possession of
Mr. Horace Wilkinson. Much discussion has arisen respecting it, but
there seems no room for doubting that this is the veritable skull (or,
rather, mummified head) of the Protector. The relic has a pedigree
that traces it back to the stormy night when it was blown off the roof
of Westminster Hall, where it had been exposed on a spike after the
Restoration. The rusty spike still transfixes it, and on the dried
cranium the reddish brown hair is yet to be seen. It has had many odd
adventures. Picked up by a sentry on duty at Westminster Hall, it
was concealed under his cloak, and afterwards secretly disposed of to
some of Cromwell’s descendants, coming, many years later, into the
possession of a travelling showman, from whom it was purchased by a
relative of the present owner.
[Illustration: Map—Borough Green Statn. to Sevenoaks Statn.]
Ightham village, to which we now make our way, must by no means be
confounded with Ightham Mote, two miles distant from it southward,
past the hamlet of Ivy Hatch. Steeply up, and as steeply down, with
intervals of welcome flatness, goes the road to the village, always
through the pine-woods, and here and there the way is overhung with
little craggy cliffs of yellow sand and gravel, as yet untouched by
the road-surveyors of the County Council, who will doubtless some day
trim away all these rustic selvedges of the forest, and curb and bank
them in a straight line. What will the artists do then? Meanwhile, one
still has here just one of those characteristic scenes Morland and his
school so loved to paint—the hollow road with its steep banks, in whose
crumbling earth the great wayside trees have secured what looks like a
precarious footing, and the sandy earth where the moles and the rabbits
burrow deep amid the gnarled roots. Up on the hillside that looks down
upon the road is Oldbury, a Roman encampment, called by antiquaries
the “Gibraltar of Kent”; but we will take the tales of its strength on
trust, for a bicycle is no aid in exploring hilltop fortifications.
Ightham is a village that looks as though it had at some time aspired
to become a town, so urban in character are some of its houses; urban,
that is to say, in no ill sense. There is, for instance, the so-called
“Town House,” one of the most beautiful and dignified architectural
compositions of that late seventeenth or early eighteenth century
character which in its Renaissance ideals makes so thorough a departure
from the older English Gothic models. By “Town House” you are to
understand a building devoted to public purposes; what we should,
nowadays, more grandiloquently term a “Town Hall.” There was a time
when Ightham bade fair to take on a new era of importance, in the early
days of cycling, when it enjoyed a great popularity that was stolen
away by Ripley, nowadays itself in the cold shade of neglect.
[Illustration: IGHTHAM MOTE.]
Turning to the right out of Ightham, through the pretty hamlet of Ivy
Hatch, the Mote House is reached in two miles of shady lanes. Like many
another old English house, Ightham Mote is tucked away coyly from the
sight of the casual wayfarer. Looking diligently, you see it on the
left hand, on coming down into a hollow, just a glimpse of its magpie
black and white north front glimmering through the surrounding woods.
It is one of the earliest of the fortified manor-houses, something
between a castle and a residence, built when people had greater ideas
of comfort than obtained when the Edwardian strongholds were
erected, and yet before it was safe to build a house incapable of
defence. Nowadays one finds a preference for an open, breezy situation;
in those times, if they did not build upon sites difficult of access
in one way they did in another; if they did not select a rocky crag
they sought some oozy hollow, where, with some little ingenuity, it
was possible to form a broad moat by damming the surrounding streams.
This was the resort adopted here, and in Ightham Mote to-day one sees
the original idea of a watery girdle, from whose inner sides rise
defensible walls enclosing a courtyard. The only way across this moat
was by a drawbridge, now replaced by masonry, the drawbridge defended
by the still-remaining entrance-tower. Originally the ornamental part
of the residence was strictly kept within the courtyard. The walls
looking outward were either blank or else very sparingly provided
with window openings. Later centuries have somewhat altered this, and
the picturesque, half-timbered gables and outbuildings tell a tale of
increasing security. There are those who will have it that Ightham Mote
is the most picturesque old house in England. Perhaps it is, for its
moss-grown stone walls, going sheer down into the clear water of the
moat, its nodding, peaked gables, reflected in that beautiful ceinture,
and the mellow red of the old brick entrance-tower, form a wonderful
picture. Five hundred years have passed, and it is still a home. The
tapestried hall, with its boldly timbered roof, yet forms the central
point of the house, and the bedrooms where the Selbys, the old-time
owners, slept for many generations are in use in these latter times.
Modernity has crept in with regard to the essentials of comfortable
living, but nowhere does it appear to mar the perfect old-world beauty
of the place.
[Illustration: THE COURTYARD, IGHTHAM MOTE.]
The imaginative may yet, without much difficulty in the mental
exercise, people the quaint paved courtyard with the conventionally
fair ladies and gentle knights of the age of chivalry; those ladies
who, to judge by the works of the Old Masters, were so extremely plain,
and those knights who could teach the tiger and the hyæna something
in ferocity. Not that the old owners of Ightham Mote were men of this
kind. Their old home plainly tells us they were not, desiring rather
a peaceful seclusion than the ambitions and contentions of courts and
camps. Defence, not defiance, was the watchword of those who lived
in this picturesque hollow, barred in at night from the chances,
surprises, and alarums of the riotous outer world.
The interior arrangements include original fireplaces, carved and
painted ceilings, and a chapel. The grounds without and the forest
trees beyond are green and luxuriant beyond belief outside the wonders
of fairy tales—to whose realms, indeed, Ightham Mote more nearly
belongs than to this workaday world. The moat, fed by a crystal stream,
is clear and sparkling, and birds and butterflies skim over it and
into the thickets of shrubs and wild flowers like so many joyous souls
escaped from a life of care and pain to rejoice for ever and ever in
sunshine and a careless existence. It is with a sigh that the Londoner
turns away from a place whose loveliness fills him with a glorious
discontent.
Many of the Selbys lie in Ightham Church, and some have their memorials
in the little domestic chapel attached to the Mote House. Dame Dorothy
Selby was a very phœnix of all the virtues, if we may believe her
epitaph, wherein she is compared with a number of notable biblical
characters, all very edifying.
The monument to her “pretious name and honor” is still to be seen on
the chancel wall of Ightham Church. She appears to have been a person
of many accomplishments. Firstly, a needlewoman of considerable parts—
“She was a Dorcas
Whose curious Needle turn’d th’ abused Stage
Of this leud World into the golden Age;
Whose Pen of Steele, and silken Inck enroll’d
The Acts of Jonah in Records of Gold.”
Then it is claimed for her that she discovered the Gunpowder Plot, in
these words—
“Whose Arte disclos’d that Plot, which, had it taken,
Rome had tryumph’d and Britan’s walls had shaken.”