THE RIVERS OF THE SOUTH-EAST
The physical attractions of the three south-eastern counties--Surrey,
Sussex, and Kent--owe little in comparison with the regions hitherto
treated of to their rivers. But use and custom are all powerful even in
the appeal which Nature and landscape make to persons genuinely
susceptible to their influences. It is tolerably certain that to the
great numbers of such for whom these counties and others, practically of
the same class, represent the rural England with which they have any
sort of intimacy, this want of water, or at any rate waters of an
inspiring kind, ceases to be felt. One might almost say it becomes a
lost sense, from lack of familiarity; and that the standards of
perfection in landscape from this point of view arrange themselves,
regardless of what to another temperament is an irreparable blemish.
No alien, for instance, from the north or west, who has the spirit of
these things within him at all, ever gets over the loss of the rapid
stream. The stir of clear and moving waters, though automatically, of
course, the invariable note of the highest expressions of British
scenery, can never be dispensed with by those reared among them. The
sluggish and turgid river consoles them scarcely more than the entire
absence of any kind of water. Sometimes it is almost an irritant from
the contrast it suggests. Natives of what for brevity we may call the
dry counties, can admire a Welsh or Yorkshire stream as sincerely as a
Welshman or a Yorkshireman, but they would not often be able to
understand how great is the effect of their absence in landscape on the
northern or western temperament.
The rivers of Sussex have at least some marked peculiarities. For though
none of them are chalk streams, yet all but one cut their way through a
high chalk range to the sea. It is only, indeed, as they come within the
influence of salt water and begin to feel its tides, that they have any
distinction at all; since above this they dwindle either into
insignificant brooks or into straight-cut, canal-like waterways, into
which
[Illustration: THE ARUN, AMBERLEY, SUSSEX]
[Illustration]
many of them indeed were fashioned in the canal era. The rivers of
Sussex worthy of mention can be numbered precisely on the fingers of one
hand, and run into the sea at fairly regular intervals. They have
considerable character of a kind, shared, with one exception, by them
all, and are unlike any other rivers in England. They are of small
service to the inland scenery of the county and little account in it,
but they add immensely to the interest of the sea-coast strip. The
noteworthy rivers counting from west to east are the Arun, at
Littlehampton and Arundel; the Adur, at Shoreham; the Ouse, at Lewes and
Newhaven; the Cuckmere near Seaford; and the Eastern Rother, at Rye. All
but the last break through the coast range and are Sussex rivers from
their birth. The Eastern Rother--thus distinguished since the Arun has a
considerable tributary of that name--rises in Sussex near Robertsbridge,
and flowing eastward forms the boundary against Kent for some distance,
and in the days of old wound through the heart of Romney Marsh into the
sea at Lydd. One of those great storms, however, of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries which so greatly changed the coast, turned the
Rother into the present Sussex channel past Rye and so into the sea.
Every one of these rivers makes up in some way for the deficiencies of
its earlier and fresh-water period by the manner of its approach to the
sea. In the case of the Rother, for instance, though the inland valleys
it flows through are in themselves not unpleasing, it is difficult to
warm towards a river that has every characteristic of a canal,
contracting eventually into a respectable ditch. At Rye, however, the
Rother becomes part of one of the most picturesque and most painted
scenes in the south of England. Beneath the rock on which the most
striking by far of south coast towns clusters, the Rother abandons its
canal-like habit and at high tide coils gleaming seaward for its last
two miles through the Sussex end of Romney Marsh, the worthy centre of
probably the most curious and striking outlook between Pool harbour and
the Humber. Two other lesser streams, the Brede and the Tillingham, come
into it through the meadows. But as late as Tudor times all these rivers
formed together a large estuary serving the then ports of Rye and
Winchelsea. These are typical Sussex rivers, flowing down valleys whose
least pleasing feature might almost be said to be the actual streams
that made them. The rich meadows in the flat, the old
[Illustration: THE OUSE, NEAR BARCOMBE MILLS, SUSSEX]
[Illustration]
homesteads, the hop-fields upon the slopes, the charming villages, and
the still surviving windmills surmounting the ridges are of the best
that tranquil southern England has to offer. But the dyked-in waters
themselves, flowing sullenly and monotonously over their muddy bottoms
between raised turf banks, with rare exceptions contribute nothing and
are powerless to charm.
The most easterly of the four chief rivers cutting through the coast
range is the Cuckmere. As one drops down the long westward slope from
Beachy Head into a sequestered and far-spreading Down country this
little river, cleaving a narrow way into the sea below, without port or
harbour or village or anything but an isolated homestead or two within
apparent touch of it, seizes one's fancy not a little. For this reason
the Cuckmere as a replica in miniature of the Ouse and Arun, but of
curiously sequestered habit on this otherwise rather populous coast, has
a place of its own somewhat apart from its fellows.
The Ouse, the next, going westward, to cut through the Downs, is a very
much larger stream. It breaks through the here narrow but lofty chalk
range some five miles from the sea at Lewes, and then winds through the
meadows as a tidal river to Newhaven--a stretch of country familiar
enough to every one using this route to the Continent. The cleft in the
Downs made by the Ouse below the ancient and picturesque town of Lewes
is one of the boldest and most precipitous scenes of its kind in the
whole chalk system. Looking down from the top of the prodigiously steep
streets of Lewes, or from the summit of the castle, the opposite Down
rises like an inaccessible green wall for five or six hundred feet, and
one might fancy there was scarcely room for the slow running river to
push its way through what one is almost tempted to call the defile
below. The Ouse rises in many feeders about the edges of Ashdown forest
but is quite insignificant till, after the manner of Sussex rivers, it
makes this fine effort at Lewes. Hence strong tides rush up and down the
seven miles or so of channel which winds through the banked-in meadows
to Newhaven.
The Adur, which joins the sea at Shoreham, between Brighton and
Worthing, follows the same tactics, and is a still more insignificant
stream up the country, but winds for some way through the chalk range,
from Bramber, where it has some claim to be a river to the two
Shorehams, the old and the new. But the Arun, the most westerly of all
the Sussex
[Illustration: THE OUSE, NEAR LEWES, SUSSEX]
[Illustration]
rivers, is the best known and the most important. It, too, draws near
the sea by Amberley and Arundel to Littlehampton with a rapid
transformation from comparative insignificance to scenes that always
compel one's interest and sometimes one's admiration. Meeting the
Western Rother at the old Roman station, now covered by Pulborough,
which lifts itself above the flat, the two little streams make together
one of a reasonable size that, flowing on through wide water meadows,
enters the gap in the Downs at Amberley, and there, under the influence
of the tide, begins to rise and fall upon a muddy bed. Arundel Castle,
raised above the town with its wooded park swelling up the face of the
Down behind, makes a really noble background to the reaches of the Arun,
both above and below. It is an awkward river for boating on account of
the pace with which the tide rushes up its reedy, muddy bed, and the
distance over which it makes its force felt. But it is perfectly
feasible, if forethought be taken, to ascend with the tide for many
miles above Arundel, and return with it to great advantage. The swell of
the Downs, clad above Arundel with beech-woods approaching at places
close to the bank, and the rich scented meadows, through which the river
winds for miles, aloof from dwellings or villages, more than compensate
for the slightly deterrent qualities of the turgid and muddy waters.
Even these blemishes, however, are obscured when the tide is high. But
it is not well, when it has begun to turn, to tie the bow of your boat
to a tree trunk and take an unwary siesta beneath its shade in the
stern, or, as once happened to the present writer, you may peradventure
be awakened by the water running over your shoulders and the nose of the
boat pointing heavenward at an angle of forty-five degrees.
From Arundel bridge the river runs a navigable course through salt
meadows for some seven miles to its mouth at Littlehampton with no
appreciable widening of its channels. The Arun above Arundel and all the
way up past Amberley is a noted haunt of the humbler class of London
anglers, whom the railroad, for a quite trifling sum, brings down here
by hundreds. At intervals along the banks for miles you find the patient
bream-fisher from the East End, having spent the night often beneath the
sky, watching his float throughout the day with unremitting
concentration.
The only two Surrey rivers of any consequence, the Wey and the Mole,
rise in the Weald country and cut through the chalk ranges of the
Northern
[Illustration: A STREAM, NEAR LEITH HILL, SURREY]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE ROTHER, FITTLEWORTH, SUSSEX]
[Illustration]
Downs on their journey to the Thames, precisely as the Sussex rivers cut
through the South Downs on their passage to the sea. The Mole is a
little river of character and considerable beauty. Rising in the
neighbourhood of Redhill it burrows under the chalky heights of Box and
so by Leatherhead, Cobham, and Esher to the Thames at Moulsey. Through
so ornate a residential region, too, its streams are made the most of in
many a pleasant lawn and grove, and by many a country mansion and villa.
It runs quite a pace too, here and there over yellow gravel, and
sometimes, as between Cobham and Esher, abandons the trammels of
civilisation, and slips, in quite wanton fashion, through wild and
tangled woodland. But this would bring us within the orbit of the great
river-haunting public of the Metropolis, and the ever-widening circles
which are part of it. As all mention of the Thames is eliminated from
these pages as a subject at once too voluminous, too familiar in fact
and in descriptive literature, its Surrey tributaries may fairly be left
here to the accomplished brush of the artist.
Kent is less rich in rivers even than Sussex, though happier in the
quality; of the only three of recognisable name it possesses the Medway,
the Stour, and the Darenth. The latter, which rises at Westerham and
flows through the chalk Downs northward to meet the Thames at Dartford,
is a small stream with a sometimes swift current, more noted perhaps as
a natural trout stream among anglers than on any other account,
Farningham having been a well-known tryst of many famous fly-fishermen
in days when locomotion was less easy than now. But the Medway is the
most important of Kentish rivers, both for the length and quiet beauty
of its inland reaches and the world-wide fame of its anchorage as it
spreads out to meet the Thames. Rising on the borders of Sussex about
Penshurst it flows north by three of the most important Kentish
towns--Tonbridge, Maidstone, and Rochester--the last, of course,
virtually including its straggling and busy neighbour of Chatham. A
slow-running river always, the most representative and typical portion
of the Upper Medway is the twelve miles or so between Tonbridge and
Maidstone. For much of the distance it flows in a valley sufficiently
narrow to display to singular advantage the richness of the steep slopes
on either side, the country seats, the upstanding villages, the
hop-fields, and the orchards. It runs, too, in sufficient volume to make
a fine
[Illustration: THE WEY, SURREY]
[Illustration]
broad trail in the valley, and be the occasion for several ancient stone
bridges of many arches, such as complete the measure of a river's
beauty. From Yalding, where the little streams of the Teise and
Beult--strange names for so homely a locality--come in, to Maidstone is
the cream of the river. Indeed, till these three unite the Medway can
hardly be said in the matter of size to challenge much attention. For a
few miles below Maidstone it maintains somewhat the same characteristics
till, broadening out under the influence of the tide at Aylesford, it
begins its passage through the high walls of the North Downs. A curious
passage it is, too: a struggle as it were between frequent groups of the
tall chimneys of cement works belching out smoke, and scenery that
before the modern industrial period arrived to smirch it, must have been
singularly fine. For some half-dozen miles the river continues to roll
through an ever-widening but necessarily contracted channel in a quite
deep gorge, the Downs rising on either side to a height of five or six
hundred feet. The last bridge is at Rochester, still around its
Cathedral a quaint old town redolent of Dickens, with the contrasting
clangour and pitiless prose of Chatham spreading, unsightly but
significant, far over the heights, and looking down on the broad
harbour into which the Medway, having achieved its passage through the
range, now expands itself towards the Thames. The whole north fringe of
Kent, as every one knows who has travelled the road from Canterbury to
Rochester, or in other words the line of Watling Street, is a bleak,
cheerless country to look upon; the more so, if the suggestion of
paradox be permitted, because so highly cultivated. But looking
northward from the high ground about Faversham or Sittingbourne one may
forget this in the fine views over the Swale, and Sheppey Island, and
the mouth of the Thames that are everywhere disclosed, and finest of all
is that of the wide, island-studded estuary of the Medway in all its
memorable significance.
What the Medway is to West Kent the Stour is to East Kent, though in
most respects a very different type of river. From its source near
Ashford to its mouth near Sandwich its characteristics are entirely and
absolutely rural; a quality rather emphasised than otherwise by its
picturesque progress through the famous old town of Canterbury. From
Ashford to Canterbury is the pick of the Stour which makes the best of
company for the traveller, who, whatever his method
[Illustration: THE MEDWAY, AYLESFORD, KENT]
[Illustration]
of progress, must of necessity go with it. The village of Wye,
clustering around its ancient church amid the fields through which the
river runs, is a most prepossessing spot, and calls for notice as having
acquired much deserved reputation of recent years as an active centre of
agricultural science. Still but of modest size and running clear though
slow, the Stour skirts the foot of Godmersham Park and the high hills
that to the northward are clothed with forests still covering many
thousands of acres. By meadowy and woodland ways, hurrying a little here
and there as if to remind one that, unlike the Medway, it is a trout
stream of old renown, the Stour runs onwards to Chilham where a little
village rests on its banks that from an artistic point of view would do
credit to Shakespeare's Avon. Thence by Chartham, with its ancient
church and less engaging paper-mill, the stream pursues an even course
through narrow meadows, washing the lawn of Harton Manor, with its
fourteenth-century chapel in the yard, and the grounds of Milton just
below, with a similar interesting and curious survival attached to them;
while in the woods high above Chartham the "Pilgrims' way" to Canterbury
can still be traced with ease between its well-defined banks.
The Stour has certainly a high distinction in watering the earliest
shrine of English Christianity, and being at its mouth the landing-place
of St. Augustine, the creator of it. It traverses in two channels, made
picturesque either by carefully tended foliage or fortuitous rows of old
houses, the clean and ancient city of Canterbury. The stranger to this
corner of England is apt to forget how comparatively remote and
countrified a place this famous town still is. Such a considerable slice
of West Kent is now involved in the residential districts tributary to
London, and the busy shore of the Thames, the county as a whole is apt
to take the colouring of these prominent and populous districts in the
imagination both of those familiar with them and of others who do not
know Kent at all. The whole course of the Stour from its source to its
mouth is as continuously and genuinely rural, with as little flavour but
that of the soil and its accessories, as any river in Somerset or
Shropshire. It is out of reach of all those influences which either
disfigure at intervals or give an over-prosperous, artificial, and too
decorative touch to so many of the rivers within fifty miles of London.
The old families to be sure, as elsewhere in Kent, have practically
vanished, but there is
[Illustration: THE WEY, ELSTEAD, SURREY]
[Illustration]
little surface evidence of this, nor of a new plutocracy of various
grades with or without acres being in possession. There is nothing, for
instance, of the atmosphere of Surrey or Hertfordshire or North Sussex
or East Berks. All along the Stour it is quite obvious that people are
wholly concerned with wheat and grass, with hops and fruit and cattle.
One is out of range of the season-ticket, and in this sense in more of a
true Arcadia than even in the upper valley of the Medway. And so as
regards Canterbury. With the mind impressed from childhood by its
outstanding ecclesiastical importance, one is apt to forget that it is
only a clean country town, though a large one, lying remote from any
place of importance, and as far from London by rail as Salisbury! Yet
its importance in history is overwhelming, its interest as a place of
pilgrimage in the modern sense prodigious. Its Cathedral, associated
with such a trio as St. Augustine, Lanfranc, and Becket, with several
unique features and possessions, is probably the most complete
illustration of the procession of English ecclesiastical architecture
that we have. There are large sections, too, of the city walls still
standing at a considerable elevation, and on foundations, at any rate,
dating back to Roman times. The finest embattled entrance gate of any
surviving in English towns greets the approaching visitor, and quite a
good display of ancient houses is still preserved in one that takes a
proper pride in itself; though from the vandalism of two or three
generations ago even Canterbury has not escaped. Soon after leaving the
city, the Stour runs out in its easterly course towards the sea through
wide, marshy meadows that are more interesting than picturesque from the
knowledge that they lead to the ancient town of Sandwich, which, like
its younger but more conspicuously striking rival at the mouth of the
Rother, occupies a place to itself, resembling nothing else in England.
As Rye, till the sea receded and left it virtually high and dry, was one
of the chief seaports of England, the object of assault, and the seat of
counter-strokes continually with our hereditary foes, the French, so at
an earlier period was Sandwich the oldest of the Cinque Ports, which was
finally shut off from the sea about four hundred years ago. Sandwich,
though on the flat and not raised high upon a rock, savours even more of
the remote past than Rye, which is a place of business and residence and
still lives and moves in a small way far more within the
[Illustration: THE MEDWAY, MAIDSTONE, KENT]
[Illustration]
world's orbit than the other; for the famous golf links with which
Sandwich has again, in widely different fashion, made its name familiar
throughout England, affect the old town itself but little. A walk now
runs along the old walls within which the beautiful Norman tower of St.
Clement's Church rises above the low roofs. Open spaces and gardens lie
easily about in the little town which, as an unchanged survival from
Tudor or Mediæval times, has no equal in England. Before the Norman
Conquest it was the chief port of the nation. As late as 1446 its
harbour, now dry land, is described by a German ambassador as
"wonderful, the resort of ships of all sizes from all parts of Europe."
By the water-gate at the entrance to the old bridge over the Stour is
the Barbican. But the behaviour of the Stour as it draws towards the sea
under present conditions is the most remarkable; for when within half a
mile of the south end of Pegwell Bay opposite Ramsgate it bends suddenly
southward, runs for 3 or 4 miles parallel with the east coast to
Sandwich, and then doubles back upon the same course to meet the sea at
the spot where its original intention of ending its career seems
obviously to have been. Close to its mouth upon the other side is the
shingle spit of Ebbsfleet, where not merely St. Augustine, but more than
a century earlier Hengist and Horsa, first planted their pagan feet upon
British soil.
On the very banks of the river are the long embankments still strewn
with tiles and pottery, marking the site of the Roman Rutupium, a
station of sufficient importance to be the headquarters of the Second
Legion in the third century, or, in other words, of a garrison of about
8000 men. And in scarcely any part of England has such a mass of coins
been recovered, while on the rising ground the graves of the early Saxon
settlers and invaders lie thick amid the chalk. But the mouth of the
Stour, where the action of the sea alone during the long centuries since
Roman times affords in itself a fascinating subject, is so rich besides
in human memories that I should be in danger of slipping too deeply into
the maritime aspect of English rivers, which I have described as having
no immediate concern with the nature of this book. Still, it must be
admitted, though less with the Kentish than the Sussex rivers, that
their real interests and their physical attractions only begin with the
first breath of the sea.
[Illustration: THE MEDWAY, ROCHESTER]
[Illustration]