230 THE DOVER ROAD 



the Watling Street are at Bishopsbourne, Bridge, 

 Newington, Northfleet, Sittingbourne, and Woolwich, 

 and all — so close is the connection between the name 

 and ancient dwellings — near the site of undoubted 

 Roman stations or villas. Alike with the equally 

 mysterious name of " Mockbeggar," which also occurs 

 with great frequency, the meaning of " Coldharbour " 

 will probably never be discovered.* 



Standing here beside the road at evening when 

 the sun is going down and these bleak unenclosed 

 uplands grow dark and mysterious, the centuries 

 pass away like a fevered dream. Here and there 

 the solemn expanse of the barren land is diversified 

 by a few trees ; here and there a few yards of hedge, 

 beginning nowhere in particular and ending with 

 equal strangeness, skirt the way ; weather-beaten 

 sign-posts start suddenly out of the moorland, and 

 occasional haycocks take on a dead and awful blackness 

 as the evening light dies out of the sky in long and 

 angry streaks of red. When the moon rises and 

 casts her cold beams upon the road and plays strange 

 pranks with the shadows of trees and bushes, then 

 the days of the Romans are come once more, and the 

 legionaries live again. They rise from their camp 

 of nineteen hundred years ago ; they march along the 

 Watling Street that was made by their descendants ; 

 and the sheen of their armour, the glitter of the pale 

 moonlight on their eagle standards, and the tramp 



* There are " Mockbeggars " in Kent, as in most other counties. There is 

 one near Rochester. Some old buildings pulled down in 1771 at Brighthelm- 

 stone were called Mockbeggars. Local opinion held the belief that there had 

 been a Mendicant Priory, but this was not generally credited. The name 

 seems to have been generally applied to objects wearing at some distance the 

 appearance of an hospitable mansion, to which travellers would be drawn 

 out of their road only to meet with a disappointment in finding an empty 

 house, or no house at all. Two such places, so called, are to be instanced : 

 one is an isolated rock at Bakewell in Derbyshire, presenting from the road 

 the semblance of a house, to whicli it is said beggars and tramps wend their 

 way, only to be mocked by a freak of nature : seeking for bread they find, 

 literally, a stone. The other is an old Tudor mansion, called Mockbeggar Hall, 

 at Claydon in Suffolk, standing in a conspicuous situation, near the road 

 leading from Ipswich to Scole ; a place to which mendicants would naturally 

 be attracted, in expectation of finding inhabitants there, but which has, 

 according to tradition, remained so long unoccupied as to have earned its 

 name a hundred years, or more, ago. 



