y the Pilgrims' Road or another,
into the little hill-village of Chilham, into the piazza there, which
is an acropolis, without delight. It is one of the surprises of
England, a place at once so little, so charming and so unexpected that
it is extraordinary it is not more famous. It stands at a point where
more than one little valley breaks down into the steep valley of the
Stour and every way to it is up hill, under what might seem to be old
ramparts crowned now with cottages and houses, till suddenly you find
yourself at the top in a large piazza or square closed at the end by
the church, at the other by the castle, and on both sides by old lines
of houses; really a walled _place_.

The church dedicated in honour of Our Lady is of some antiquity in the
main and older parts, a work of the fourteenth century replacing
doubtless Roman, Saxon and Norman buildings, but with later additions,
too, of the Perpendicular time in the clerestory, for instance, and
with much modern work in the chancel. Of old the place belonged to the
alien Priory of Throwley in this county, itself a cell of the Abbey of
St Omer, in Artois; but when these alien houses were suppressed,
Chilham like Throwley itself went to the new house of Syon, founded by
the King. To-day, apart from the English beauty of the church, not a
work of art but of history, its chief interest lies in its monuments,
some strangely monstrous, of the Digges family--Sir Dudley Digges
bought Chilham at the beginning of the seventeenth century--the
Colebrooks, who followed the Digges in 1751 and a Fogg and a Woldman,
the latter holding Chilham until 1860. There is little to be said of
these monuments save that they are none of them in very good taste,
the more interesting being those to Lady Digges, and a member of the
Fogg family, both of the early seventeenth century, in which the
Purbeck has been covered with a charming arabesque and diapered
pattern in relief.

[Illustration: CHILHAM]

But it was not the church, beautiful though I found it on that
afternoon of spring, that made me linger in Chilham, but rather the
castle, which occupies the site of a Roman camp; and perhaps of what a
camp? It may be that it was here Caesar lay on the first night of his
resumed march after the disaster of the ships. It may be that it was
here, after all, that Quintus Laberius fell, and that here he was
buried so that the ancient earthwork known as Julaber's Grave, though
certainly far ol