The church of Bethersden is dedicated to St Margaret.  It follows the local type having a nave with north and south aisles and a chancel with north and south chapels, vestry, south porch and western tower.  The place is not mentioned in Domesday Book, but about 1194 we find Archbishop Herbert confirming the church of St Margaret of Beatrichesdenne, with the chapel of Hecchisdenne (Etchden) to the Priory of St Gregory in Canterbury.  No sign of this Norman church remains, the building we see in Bethersden being mainly Perpendicular; but the double lighted windows at the west end of the north aisle are Early English and there is a Decorated niche under the entrance to the rood left.  The tower is modern, but possesses a fourteenth century bell.

It is curious that though the church is dedicated to St Margaret and the fair, according to Hasted, was held upon July 20th, St Margaret’s day, the place should be spoken of as Beatrichesdenne as though there were some local St Beatrice; but of her we know nothing.

Bethersden is connected with the Lovelaces for they owned it, Richard Lovelace, the poet, having sold Lovelace Place to Richard Hulse, soon after the death of Charles I. Three members of the Lovelace family lie in the church, their tombs marked by brasses; William Lovelace (1459) another William Lovelace, gentleman (1459), and Thomas Lovelace (1591).

From Bethersden I went on to High Halden, which stands upon a ridge out of the Weald, a very characteristic and beautiful place, with a most interesting church dedicated to Our Lady.  Indeed I do not know where one could match the strange wooden tower and belfry and the noble fourteenth century porch, masterpieces of carpentry, which close on the west the little stone church of the fifteenth century.  Within the most interesting thing left to us is the glass in the east window of the south chancel where we see the Blessed Virgin with her lily, part of an Annunciation.  There, too, in another window are the arms of Castile and of Leon, a strange blazon to find in the Weald of Kent.

But characteristic as Great Chart, Bethersden and High Halden are of this strange wealden county, they do not express it, sum it up and dominate it as does Tenterden Town, some two or three miles to the south of High Halden.

If we look at the ordnance map we shall see that the town of Tenterden is set upon a great headland thrust out by the higher land of the Kentish Weald, southward and east towards those low marshlands that are lost almost imperceptibly in the sea, and are known to us as Romney Marsh.  This great headland, in shape something like a clenched fist, stands between the two branches of the Rother, the river which flows into the sea at Rye, and which was once navigable by ships so far up as Small Hythe just under the southern escarpment of the headland upon which Tenterden stands.  Hither so late as 1509 the Rother was navigable, and we find Archbishop Warham on the petition of the people licensing a small chapel there of St John Baptist still in existence, for the use of the inhabitants and as a sanctuary or a graveyard for the burial of those wrecked on the “sea-shore” infra predictum oppidum de Smallhyth.