O for joy my spirits were quick
To hear the bird how merrily she could sing,
And I said, good Lord, defend
England with Thy most holy hand
And save noble George our King.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WEALD AND THE MARSH
Ashford as we see it to-day, a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants,
is altogether a modern place and really in the worst sense, for it
owes its importance and its ugliness to the railway; it is a big
junction and the site of the engineering works of the South Eastern
and Chatham Company. Lacking as it is in almost all material
antiquity, it has little that is beautiful to show us, a fine church
with a noble tower that has been rather absurdly compared with the
Angel Steeple at Canterbury--nothing more--and its history is almost
as meagre. It stands, the first town of the Kentish Weald, where the
East Stour flows into the Great Stour, in the very mouth of the deep
valley of the latter which there turns northward through the Downs. To
the North, therefore, it is everywhere cut off by those great green
uplands, save where the valley, at the other end of which stands
Canterbury, breaks them suddenly in twain.
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