Not at Dymchurch for all its Norman fragments.  But Dymchurch is to be visited and to be loved for other reasons than that of beauty.  It is the sentinel and saviour of the Marsh, for it holds back the sea from all this country with its great wall, twenty feet high and twenty feet broad and three miles long.  Also here we have certain evidence of the Roman occupation of the Marsh, and may perhaps believe that it was Rome which first drained it.

I said that the church of St Nicholas at New Romney was the noblest building in the Marsh.  When I said so had I forgotten the church of All Saints at Lydd, which is known as the Cathedral of the Marshes.  No, glorious as All Saints is, it has not the antiquity of St Nicholas; it is altogether English and never knew the Norman.  For all that, it is a very splendid building with a tower standing one hundred and thirty-two feet over the Marsh, a sign and a blessing.  And yet before it I prefer the bell tower, built of mighty timber, aloof from the church, lonely, over the waters at Brookland.  All Saints at Lydd belonged to Tintern Abbey, but All Saints at Brookland to St Augustine’s at Canterbury, and as its font will tell us it dates from Norman times, for about it the Normans carved the signs of the Zodiac.

Brookland, hard to get at, stands on the great road which runs south-westward out of the Marsh and brings you at last out of Kent into Sussex at Rye.  It was there I lingered a little to say farewell.  As one looks at evening across that vast loneliness, so desolate and yet so beautiful and infinitely subject to the sky, lying between the hills and sinking so imperceptibly into the sea, one continually asks oneself what is Romney Marsh, by whom was it reclaimed from the all-devouring sea, what forces built it up and gathered from barrenness the infinite riches we see?  Was it the various forces of Nature, the racing tides of the straits, some sudden upheaval of the earth, or the tireless energy of men—­and of what men?  Those seventeen miles of richest pasture which lie in an infinite peace between Appledore and Dungeness, to whom do we owe them and their blessedness?  That wall at Dymchurch which saves the marshes, Romney, Welland, Guildford and Denge, who contrived it and first took advantage of those great banks of shingle and of sand which everywhere bar out the great tides of the straits and have thus created and preserved this strange fifth part of the world?  Was it the Romans?  May we see in Romney Marsh the greatest material memorial of their gigantic energy and art to be found in the western provinces, a nobler and a greater work than the Wall as well as a more lasting?  And if this be so, how well is the Marsh named after them, for of all they did materially in our island, this work of reclamation was surely the worthiest to bear their name.