So I went on through King’s wood, and as I came out of it southward I saw a wonderful thing.  For I saw before me that division or part of the world which stands quite separate from any other and is not Europe, Asia, Africa nor America, but Romney Marsh.  It lay there under the sunset half lost in its own mists, far off across the near meadows of the Weald, for I was now upon the southern escarpment of the North Downs and in the foreground rose the town of Ashford where I was to sleep.  It was twilight and more, however, before I reached it, for in those woods I heard for the first time that year the nightingale, and my heart, which all day had been full of Rome, was suddenly changed, so that I went down through the dusk to Ashford, singing an English song: 

By a bank as I lay, I lay,
Musing on things past, heigh ho! 
In the merry month of May
O towards the close of day—­
Methought I heard at last—­
O the gentle nightingale,
The lady and the mistress of all musick;
She sits down ever in the dale
Singing with her notes smale
And quavering them wonderfully thick. 
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.  To the south it is cut off by a perhaps greater barrier; between it and the sea, stands the impassable mystery of Romney Marsh.  In such a situation, before the railways revolutionised travel in England, how could Ashford have had any importance?  Even the old road westward from Dover into Britain, the Pilgrims’ Way to Stonehenge or Winchester passed it by, leaving it in the Weald to follow the escarpment of the Downs north or west.  No Roman road served it, and indeed it was but a small and isolated place till the Middle Age began to revive and recreate Europe.  Even then Ashford was probably late in development.