in honour of Our Lady is a very beautiful and extraordinarily interesting building of the end of the thirteenth century, in the same style as the practically contemporary work in Westminster Abbey and, according to the architect and historian, G.E.  Street, who restored it, possibly from the design of the same master-mason.  Certainly nothing in the whole county of Kent is better worth a visit.  It would seem to have been built with a part of the money offered at the shrine of St William in the Cathedral of Rochester upon the Pilgrim’s Way; for Stone belonged to the Bishops of Rochester, who had a manor house there.  The nave, aisles, chancel, and tower are all in the Early English style and very noble work of their kind, built in the time of Bishop Lawrence de Martin of Rochester (1251-1274); while to the fourteenth century belongs the vestry to the north of the chancel and the western windows in nave and aisles and the piers of the tower as we now see them.  Perhaps the oldest thing in the church is the doorway in the north aisle which would seem to be Norman, but Street tells us that this “is a curious instance of imitation of earlier work, rather than evidence of the doorway itself being earlier than the rest of the church.”

Within, the church is delightful, increasing in richness of detail eastward towards the chancel where nothing indeed can surpass the beauty of the arcade, so like the work at Westminster, borne by pillars of Purbeck, its spandrels filled with wonderfully lovely, delicate, and yet vigorous foliage.  Here are two brasses, one of 1408 to John Lambarde, the rector in Chaucer’s day, the other of 1530 to Sir John Dew.  In the north aisle we may find certain ancient paintings the best preserved of which represents the Madonna and Child.

The north aisle of the chancel is not at one with the church; it was built in the early sixteenth century by the Wilshyre family as their Chantry.  Here lies Sir John Wilshyre, Governor of Calais in the time of Henry VIII.  The glass everywhere is unfortunately modern.

One leaves Stone church with regret; it is so fair and yet so hopelessly dead that one is astonished and almost afraid.  Less than a mile along the road, to the north of it one passes Ingress Abbey, where once the nuns of Dartford Priory had a grange.  The present house, once the residence of Alderman Harmer, the radical and reformer of our criminal courts, was built of the stone of old London Bridge.

Here upon the high road one is really in the marshes by Thames side; but a little way off the highway to the south on higher ground stands Swanscombe and it is worth while to see it for it is a very famous place.  “After such time,” says Lambarde, quoting Thomas the monk and chronicler of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, “after such time as Duke William the Conqueror had overthrown King Harold in the field at Battell in Sussex and had received the Londoners to mercy he marched with his army towards