Take Appledore, for instance, with its fine old church, with its air of the fourteenth century and its beautiful old ivy grown tower, once a port they say, on the verge of the Marsh; what could be more nobly simple and homely?  Within, you may, if you will, find, in spite of everything, all our past, the very altar at which of old was said the Holy Mass, the very altar tomb maybe where, upon Maunday Thursday Christ Himself was laid in the sepulchre, an old rood loft, too, certain ancient screens complete, a little ancient glass.  What more can a man want or at least expect from England of my heart?  And if he demand something more curious and more rare, at Horn’s Place, not a mile away, is a perfect chapel of the fifteenth century which served of old some great steading, where, for a hundred years Mass was perhaps said every day and the Marsh blessed.  Or take Snargate with its church of St Dunstan.  It, too, has a fine western tower of the fifteenth century, but much of the church dates from the thirteenth, and upon the north chancel roof-beams are heraldic devices, among them an eagle and the initials W.R.  And here is a piece of fine old glass in which we may see the Lord Christ.  Or take Ivychurch; so noble and lovely a thing is the church that even without it catches the breath, while a whole afternoon is not enough to enjoy its inward beauty.  Or take Brenzett, where, it is true, the church has been rebuilt, but where you will still find a noble seventeenth century tomb with its effigies in armour.

It is, however, at Romney, Old Romney and New, that we shall find the best there is to be had I think in this strange country from which the waters have only been barred out by the continual energy of man.  We are not surprised to find that New Romney is older than Old Romney, it is almost what might have been expected, but no one can ever have come to these places without wonder at the nobility of what he sees.

At New Romney there were of old five churches, dedicated in honour of St John Baptist, St Laurence, St Martin, St Michael, and St Nicholas, for Romney was, in the time of Edward I., the greatest of the Cinque Ports.  It fell when, as we are told, in a great storm the course of the Rother was changed so that it went thereafter to serve Rye, and New Romney fell slowly down so that to-day but one of those five churches remains, that of St Nicholas.  But what a glorious church it is, and if the rest were like it, what idea must we have of the splendour of New Romney in the thirteenth century?  This great Norman church of St Nicholas with its partly fourteenth century nave, its clerestory, its fine chancel with sedilia and Easter sepulchre, and noble pinnacled tower is perhaps the greatest building in the Marsh.  It belonged to the Abbey of Pontigny and was served by its monks who had a cell here, and the town it adorns and ennobles, was the capital of all this district.

Nothing so glorious and so old remains in Old Romney, where the church of St Clement has nothing I think, earlier than the thirteenth century, and little of that, being mainly a building of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and yet it is not to be despised, for where else in the Marsh will you find anything more picturesque or anything indeed more English?