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CHAPTER V

TAPPINGTON HALL

THE central point of the Ingoldsby Country is, of course, the Ingoldsby manor house of Tappington Hall. To discover this we must leave Canterbury by the Dover Road, and, climbing up to the rise of Gutteridge Gate, where a gibbet stood in ancient times and a turnpike-gate until recent years, drop down into the village of Bridge, whose name derives from an arch thrown at an early period across the River Stour. At the summit of the corresponding rise out of Bridge, the road, running exactly on the site of the Roman Watling Street, comes to that bleak and elevated table-land known as Barham Downs, the scene of Caesar's great battle with the Britons on July 23rd, A.D. 56. Twentyseven thousand Roman soldiers, horse and foot, met the wild rush of the Britons, who, with the usual undisciplined and untaught courage of uncivilised races, flung themselves upon the invaders and were thrown back by the impenetrable wall of the serried phalanxes. Recoiling dismayed from this reception, they were instantly pursued by the Roman cavalry and cut up into isolated bands, who fought courageously all that fatal day in the dense woodlands. Protected by mounds and trenches defended with

palisades of stakes cunningly interwoven with brushwood, they prolonged the hopeless contest until nightfall, and then fell back. Cæsar, describing these woodland forts as oppida, gives especial attention to one particularly troublesome stronghold. Being repulsed," he writes, " they withdrew themselves into the woods and reached a place which they had prepared before, having closed all approaches to it by felled timber." This retreat was captured by the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, who, throwing up a mound against it, advanced, holding their shields over their heads in the military formation known as "the tortoise," and drove out the defenders at the sword's point.

This, the last place to hold out, is, despite the eighteen and a half centuries that have passed, still to be seen in Bourne Park, on the summit of Bridge Hill, and is familiarly known in the neighbourhood as "Old England's Hole." "Never forget," the old countryfolk have been wont to impress their children- never forget that this is Old England's Hole, and that on this spot a last stand for freedom was made by your British forefathers."

Everyone in the neighbourhood knows Old England's Hole. It is seen beside the road, on the right hand, just where the cutting through the crest of the hill, made in 1829, to ease the pull-up for the coach-horses, begins. At that same time the course of the road was very slightly diverted, and, instead of actually impinging upon this ancient historic landmark, as before, was made to run a few feet away. Now the spot is seen across the fence of the park, the old course of the road still traceable beside it, as a slightly depressed grassy track,

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plentifully dotted with thistles. The stronghold consists of a crater-like hollow, encircled by earthen banks, still high and steep. A great number of ash-trees and thorns, some very old, gnarled, and decayed, grow on these banks, and cast a dense shade upon the interior.

Barham Downs, stretching for three miles, windswept and bare, above the valley of the Lesser Stour, form a tract of country that must needs appeal strongly to the imaginative man. Only the bunkers and other recent impudent interferences of some local golf club have ever disturbed the ancient lines of Roman entrenchments.

Barham Downs are, of course, the "Tappington Moor," of that terrible legend, the "Hand of Glory," which opens the collection of the Ingoldsby Legends in many editions:

On the lone bleak moor, At the midnight hour,
Beneath the Gallows Tree,

Hand in hand The Murderers stand,

By one, by two, by three!

And the Moon that night With a grey, cold light,
Each baleful object tips;

One half of her form Is seen through the storm,

The other half's hid in Eclipse !

And the cold Wind howls, And the Thunder growls,
And the Lightning is broad and bright;

And altogether It's very bad weather,

And an unpleasant sort of a night!

Barham village, a very different place, lies below, snugly embosomed amid the rich trees of the Stour valley, sheltered and warm. From this point its tall, tapering, shingled spire peeps out from among the massed trees, and a branch road leads directly

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