FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD (_continued_)
[Illustration: COBB'S HALL.]
"Cobb's Hall" stands prominently to the left of the road, after passing
by the village of Aldington, and is a very noticeable old half-timbered
rustic dwelling-house, now interiorly divided into two cottages. In the
upstairs bedroom of one may be seen the remains of a fine decorative
plaster ceiling and a strange pictorial plaster frieze surmounting a
blocked-up fireplace. This singular design is old enough to have been
here in Elizabeth Barton's time, and she must have been familiar with
its representations of Adam and Eve and their highly problematical
surroundings of queer birds and beasts, not modelled from the life, and
now, after centuries of wear and many coats of paint, so blunted and
battered that it is difficult to tell certainly whether any particular
plaster protuberance is intended for an elephant, a sheep, or a crow.
[Illustration: ALDINGTON KNOLL.]
[Illustration: BILSINGTON WOODS.]
To the left of Aldington, on a road through the alder thickets, hugging
the edge of the cliffs, is Aldington Knoll, a very remarkable hillock
rising boldly and bare from above the surrounding brushwood and
coppices. In the legend of "The Leech of Folkestone" it is described
as "a sort of woody promontory, in shape almost conical, its sides
covered with thick underwood, above which is seen a bare and brown
summit, rising like an Alp in miniature." To this spot it was that
Master Marsh resorted, at the rising of the moon, for his meeting
with the conjuror, Aldrovando. Barham well chose this legendary
Knoll of Aldington for that miraculous _séance_, for this is not only
a well-known landmark, but is the subject of much folklore. Thus,
the older rustics will tell how the Knoll is said to be guarded by
drowned sailors, keeping watch and ward over a gigantic skeleton with
a great sword, unearthed "once upon a time" by a reckless digger for
the treasure once popularly supposed to be buried here. Something very
terrible happened to that unfortunate spadesman, and since then a
general consensus of rustic opinion has left the Knoll alone. A local
rhyme tells how--
Where he dug the chark shone white
To sea, like Calais Light;
but that is poetic license, the prehistoric barrow--for such it seems
to be--that crests the Knoll is of yellow sand and gravel.
[Illustration: BILSINGTON PRIORY.]
Beyond, in a tract of country thickly covered with scrubwood, is
the village of Bilsington, with Bilsington Priory, now a farmhouse,
standing remote in midst of eight hundred acres of copse. It is a
grimly picturesque house, this desecrated Priory of St. Augustine,
and doubly haunted--firstly by a prior who tells red-hot beads, and
secondly by the spook of a woman who was murdered by her husband for
accidentally smashing a trayfull of china. The nightly crashings are
said by the most unveracious witnesses to still continue, but however
that may be, the place certainly is haunted by innumerable owls, who
roost fearlessly in some of the deserted rooms.
Away by the roadside is Bilsington village, its moated Court Lodge Farm
and parish church grouped together. It was Bilsington bell that struck
_One_! in "The Leech of Folkestone," and advised Master Marsh that his
torments were, for the time, over.
[Illustration: BILSINGTON CHURCH.]
By Ruckinge and Ham Street we come up Orlestone Hill, that
"Quaker-coloured ravine" described in the story of "Jerry Jarvis's
Wig." "The road," says Ingoldsby, "had been cut deep below the surface
of the soil, for the purpose of diminishing the abruptness of the
descent, and as either side of the superincumbent banks was clothed
with a thick mantle of tangled copsewood, the passage, even by day, was
sufficiently obscure, the level beams of the rising or setting sun, as
they happened to enfilade the gorge, alone illuminating its recesses."
The cutting is there to this day, but it must be confessed that neither
it nor the hill are so steep as that description would have us believe.
Here it was that the body of Humphry Bourne was found, murdered by Joe
Washford, demoniacally possessed and incited by the wig that Jerry
Jarvis, the scoundrelly solicitor of Appledore, had given him.
[Illustration: ORLESTONE HILL.]
From the little church of Orlestone that, with a picturesque black
and white manor house crowns the hill, it is five miles into the
market-town, and railway centre of Ashford.