served by its monks who
had a cell here, and the town it adorns and ennobles, was the capital
of all this district.

Nothing so glorious and so old remains in Old Romney, where the church
of St Clement has nothing I think, earlier than the thirteenth
century, and little of that, being mainly a building of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, and yet it is not to be despised, for where
else in the Marsh will you find anything more picturesque or anything
indeed more English?

Not at Dymchurch for all its Norman fragments. But Dymchurch is to be
visited and to be loved for other reasons than that of beauty. It is
the sentinel and saviour of the Marsh, for it holds back the sea from
all this country with its great wall, twenty feet high and twenty
feet broad and three miles long. Also here we have certain evidence of
the Roman occupation of the Marsh, and may perhaps believe that it was
Rome which first drained it.

I said that the church of St Nicholas at New Romney was the noblest
building in the Marsh. When I said so had I forgotten the church of
All Saints at Lydd, which is known as the Cathedral of the Marshes.
No, glorious as All Saints is, it has not the antiquity of St
Nicholas; it is altogether English and never knew the Norman. For all
that, it is a very splendid building with a tower standing one hundred
and thirty-two feet over the Marsh, a sign and a blessing. And yet
before it I prefer the bell tower, built of mighty timber, aloof from
the church, lonely, over the waters at Brookland. All Saints at Lydd
belonged to Tintern Abbey, but All Saints at Brookland to St
Augustine's at Canterbury, and as its font will tell us it dates from
Norman times, for about it the Normans carved the signs of the Zodiac.

Brookland, hard to get at, stands on the great road which runs south-
westward out of the Marsh and brings you at last out of Kent into
Sussex at Rye. It was there I lingered a little to say farewell.
As one looks at evening across that vast loneliness, so desolate
and yet so beautiful and infinitely subject to the sky, lying
between the hills and sinking so imperceptibly into the sea,
one continually asks oneself what is Romney Marsh, by whom
was it reclaimed from the all-devouring sea, what forces built
it up and gathered from barrenness the infinite riches we see?
Was it the various forces of Nature, the racing tides of the
straits, some sudden upheaval of the earth, or the tireless
energy of men--a