62 THE DOVER ROAD 



while everywhere are puddles, bricks, old boots, old 

 hats, and fragments of umbrellas. Dartford Brent 

 is a singular place. 



At the old hamlet of John's Hole, just past here, 

 called often in coaching days, " Jack-in-the-Hole," 

 was one of the Dover Road turnpikes. The old 

 toll-house still remains beside the way. To this 

 succeeds, at a distance of three quarters of a mile, 

 the melancholy roadside settlement of Horns Cross, 

 where a post-office, two inns, and a blasted oak look 

 from one side of the road, across great fields of barley, 

 to the broad Thames, crowded with shipping, below. 



Stone Church, one of the most beautiful and 

 interesting in Kent, stands on a hill-top, a short 

 distance from the left-hand side of the road, and 

 commands a wide \'iew of the Thames. To architects 

 and lovers of architecture it is remarkable on account 

 of the striking similarity its rich details bear to those 

 of Westminster Abbey, and it is generally considered 

 that the architect of the one designed the other. 

 This is the more remarkable since the Abbey, with 

 this exception of Stone Church, stands alone in 

 England as a beautiful and peculiarly personal example 

 of Gothic thirteenth-century architecture as practised 

 in France. The architect of Westminster Abbey 

 must have been of French nationality ; and so curiously 

 similar, in little, are not only the details of both church 

 and Abbey, but also the varieties of stone of which they 

 are built, that they are most unlikely to have been 

 the work of different men. 



Greenhithe lies off the road to the left hand, and 

 fronts on to the Thames. The road, all the way 

 hence to Northfleet, is enclosed by high walls with tall 

 factory-chimneys on either side ; or passes between 

 long rows of recent cottages alternating with cabbage- 

 fields in the last stage of agricultural exhaustion. 

 Docks ; huge and ancient chalk-pits ; great tanks of 

 lime and whitening, and brickfields are everywhere 

 about, for Greenhithe and Northfleet are, and have 



