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THE ANCIENT TOWN OF RYE

God save Englonde and the Town of Rye

So prays the Rye Customal as written down in 1564, with a fine sense of civic importance, making it clear that although for centuries it had been one of the bulwarks of England against foreign invasion, it did so as a proud separate entity rather than as a mere subject.

Having conquered Anglo-Saxon England after the decisive battle of Hastings, the Normans were in no mood to welcome any more incomers from the Continent, and began setting up defensive walls and bastions. French threats to the south-east coastline had become so persistent by the beginning of the 12th century that five ports - Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich, known as the Cinque Ports - were granted privileges amounting almost to legal and financial autonomy in return for providing the Crown with a regular complement of warships and other defenses. In the 14th century Rye and Winchelsea were added as "Ancient Towns" with equal rights. One of Rye's most conspicuous watchtowers is the Ypres Tower (usually known nowadays as the Ypres Castle), which served at various times as a shelter for townspeople during French raids, the town hall, a prison, a mortuary, and nowadays as a museum.

In 1377 a devastating raid by the French burned much of the town, and the church bells were among the loot carried away. The following year, men of Rye and Winchelsea combined to launch a revenge raid in Normandy, returning triumphantly with the church bells.

Cobbled streets such as Mermaid Street, Church Square and Watchbell Street (so called after the alarm which was rung here when there was sight of an enemy approaching) preserve such a timeless atmosphere that the sight of Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo walking down them in costume during filming of Captain Hornblower seemed perfectly natural. Rye has played its part in many other films, including Dunkirk and the early black-and-white version of Dr Syn, that immortal tale of a smuggler masquerading as a Romney Marsh parson.

Real-life smugglers used the town as well. In the middle of the 18th century, members of the infamous Hawkhurst Gang used to sit at the windows of the Mermaid Inn "carousing and smoking their pipes, with their loaded pistols lying on the table before them, no magistrate daring to interfere with them."

Lamb House

Just round the corner from the top of Mermaid Street is Lamb House, a graceful Georgian red brick building with a secluded walled garden, built by the locally powerful and none too scrupulous Lamb family. A particularly unpopular member of the family narrowly missed a violent end in March 1743. James Lamb, then Mayor of the town, was on his way to a party but, not feeling too well, asked his brother-in-law to go in his place, and offered him his mayoral cloak as the weather was so bad. So the unlucky Allen Grebell was murdered that night by a local butcher, John Breads, who had a grudge against Lamb and mistook Grebell for his prey. Breads was imprisoned in the Ypres Tower and then hanged, after which his body was left to rot for more than 20 years in an iron cage on Gibbet Marsh. The cage and Breads' skull are still kept in the Town Hall.

Lamb House was, however, later to have much happier associations. In 1897 the American novelist Henry James took a long lease on the property "in the little old, cobble-stoned, grass-grown, red-roofed town, on the summit of its mildly pyramidal hill and close to its noble old church - the chimes of which will sound sweet in my goodly old red-walled garden". Rye being then, as now, a fashionable centre for artists, he found occasional hindrances in daily life there. Emerging on to the front steps of his home, he was in danger of stumbling over groups of English and American lady painters under the tutelage of an art master who, "going his rounds from hour to hour, reminds you of nothing so much as a busy chef with many saucepans on the stove and periodically lifting their covers for a sniff and a stir".

Much of James's work was dictated in a garden room looking down West Street, his voice booming out "through the open window between the tassels of the wisteria, now louder, now softer, as he paced up and down the length of the room and the metallic click of the typewriter made response". This was the description given by the novelist E. F. Benson, who lived for many years in Lamb House after James's death, became Mayor of Rye, and from that garden room contrived many episodes for his characters Mapp and Lucia, of which a television series was filmed in Rye long after World War II. During that war the room was destroyed by a German bomb, but is remembered in a plaque on the garden wall above West Street.

St. Mary's Church

Founded around 1120, the church had to be substantially rebuilt in the 15th century after successive French depredations. In our own century it was greatly enhanced by a window donated in memory of Edward, brother of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, and two by E. F. Benson - one in memory of his brother A. C. Benson, who wrote the words for Land of Hope and Glory, and one to their father Edward, Archbishop of Canterbury. Into the nativity scene in the Archbishop's window, the donor introduced a picture of his own dog and one of himself in his mayoral robes.

The long pendulum of the Elizabethan clock swings right down into the body of the church. Early this century, when repairs were carried out after a lapse of some generations, it was found that the pendulum swinging above the heads of the congregation was suspended from just one rusty nail.

Other repairs also needed in this century on the cherubic wooden "quarter boys" beside the clock face above Lion Street, before they were replaced by the present replicas, were on two occasions carried out by Jenny Hadfield's forebears: first her great-grandfather Will Sands, a master carpenter to whom all aspiring joiners were apprenticed, and later his equally skilled son Will, who also made the Mayor's chair, within St. Mary's Church, and lived and worked for many years in Elders House, now an integral part of Jeake's House Hotel.

The Landgate

Of the defensive gateways once set into the walls of the inner town, still referred to as "the citadel", only the great drum towers of the Landgate remain, long ago robbed of their drawbridge and portcullis. Purists often complain about the anachronism of the clock set into the arch; but they would not have dared do so in the days of Queen Victoria, when it was inserted as a memorial to her beloved Albert, the late Prince Consort. Running beside a remaining fragment of the town wall here is Turkeycock Lane, so called because of a tale that one of the brethren in a friary whose only surviving fabric is The Monastery on Conduit Hill (now a pottery) had forsaken his vows to order to court a beautiful girl named Amanda from nearby Tower House. When the authorities discovered this, they buried the two of them alive beyond the confines of the friary, after which the ghost of the monk strutted up and down the lane gobbling out his old love songs. In 1850 the South Eastern Railway, while digging foundations, found two skeletons clasped in each other's arms. They were given a proper burial, and the turkeycock noises were - to the disappointment of visitors, if not of sleepless neighbors - never heard again.

THE BEAUTIES OF EAST SUSSEX AND KENT

Day excursions or leisurely wanderings . . . there is plenty of scope. Within easy reach are Rye Harbour, a bustling little village near the mouth of the River Rother, with one pub named after that long-ago invader, William the Conqueror, and another after the Crimean War battle of Inkerman. It also has a sad but proud statue in memory of one of the most devastating blows ever to hit this small community. In November 1928 the lifeboat, the Mary Stanford, put out to sea in a south-westerly gale in answer to a distress call and capsized with the loss of its entire 17-man crew.

Across the river, reached by a long road out of Rye, is the Rye Golf Club, where the President's Putter competition is played annually. Beyond that is the holiday village of Camber Sands, once little more than a few miles of sand dunes but now thriving with a holiday camp and amusements.

But the dominating landscape round here is that of what is always referred to simply and lovingly as "The Marsh".

Romney Marsh

Called by Rudyard Kipling in Puck of Pook's Hill the Sixth Continent, the wide expanse of levels with their special privileges and customs did indeed for centuries regard itself as quite distinct from the rest of the world. The territory of smugglers and sheep farmers, dotted with grand church towers and smaller ones tending to sag at strange angles into the marshland, it has gradually been penetrated by roads linked to Ashford and Folkestone, now dominated by Channel Tunnel traffic, but manages to retain its withdrawn, haunting beauty.

As well as roads and winding, still secretive lanes, there are two railway lines across the levels. One is the line from Hastings to Ashford. Much more enjoyable is the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Light Railway, a narrow-gauge steam link between Dungeness, with its lighthouse and towering nuclear power station, and the smart little town of Hythe, one of the original Cinque Ports. At New Romney there is an elaborate model railway exhibition.

Hythe is also one terminus for the Royal Military Canal, and uses the basin there for annual Venetian Fetes and other regattas. The original purpose of the canal was more serious. Describing an arc across the northern Marsh via Appledore, Rye, and Winchelsea to Cliff End, it was designed as a defense against possible Napoleonic invasion. Straight sections of it are staggered by brief "dog-legs" so that cannon could fire not just across the canal but lengthwise along a whole stretch. Extra firepower was added with the construction of a chain of Martello Towers running from Seaford round to the coasts of Essex and Suffolk.

In the little churchyard of St. Mary-in-the-Marsh is a simple wooden barge-board carved by her second husband in memory of E. Nesbit, the author whose enchanting children's stories include The Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children.

Another literary worthy on the Marsh was R. H. Barham, vicar of the little parish of Snargate, who, before being summoned to London as a Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, spent many hours in his lonely vicarage writing the eerie tales and lolloping verse couplets of The Ingoldsby Legends, including The Jackdaw of Rheims, a theme known to all opera lovers under the guise of La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).

Castles

There is a fine choice of spectacular castles within easy driving distance of Rye: some of them romantic ruins, some housing local museums, and some with luxuriant alluring gardens.

Pevesey's earliest fortifications were part of the Roman defenses of "the Saxon Shore". The Saxons nevertheless established themselves eventually in Sussex - land of the South Saxons - and neighbouring regions, but were in turn defeated after the Normans landed in Pevensey Bay in 1066. The ancient fort was then strengthened with its present 12-ft thick walls.

Another name with much more familiar historic echoes is that of Hastings, whose clifftop castle is reached by a funicular railway from the old fishing town. Despite its name being forever associated with the story of William the Conqueror`s victory, the actual encounter took place mainly on Senlac Hill, now crowned by Battle Abbey.

A vulnerable gap through the South Downs was guarded by a Norman Keep at Lewes, today the county town of East Sussex. Its original gatehouse was later supplemented by four towers, two of which survive, and a barbican built into the moat.

In a later century of conflict and danger Henry VIII ordered the construction or updating of a chain of castles along the entire south coast between Cornwall and Kent. The ruins of Camber castle, a leisurely walk across the levels from Rye, are an example of the Tudor rose pattern adopted by several of the fortresses, consisting of a round central keep sprouting semi-circular bastions like petals of a rose. A much better survivor is Deal castle, which was further embellished in the 18th century. It houses a number of historical and especially military displays. Its near neighbour, built to a similar plan, is Walmer castle, residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, now an honorary title held in recent times by Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Robert Menzies, and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. The furnished rooms of one Warden, the Duke of Wellington, who died here, are preserved unaltered. The castle is open to visitors throughout the year, though not when the Warden is in residence - which is a very rare occurrence. The great bastion of Dover, a familiar sight to those approaching by ferry across the Strait of Dover (the Pas de Calais to the French), arose from Roman fortifications which included the still preserved pharos, the lighthouse which guided incoming legions across the Channel.

Other sites in the region have become less warlike over the centuries and are now renowned for their extensive gardens and parkland. Up the River Rother north-west of Rye, Bodiam is a fairy-tale vision within a moat luxuriant with water-lilies, one of the most picturesque showpieces of Sussex. Unfortunately its creator, Sir Edward Dalyngruge, was very far from being Chaucer's concept of "a verray parfit gentil knight", devoting much of his time to local banditry, specialising in abducting and holding to ransom widows and defenseless young women of property.

The gardens of 14th century Scotney castle in Kent are as romantic and colourful as the compact ruins themselves, with lavish displays of rhododendrons, azaleas, wistaria and water-lilies. The remains of a Tudor mansion at Sissinghurst became known as a castle when used for French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. Below the remaining tower in which the author Vita Sackwille-West had her study, she and her husband Harold Nicolson laid out gardens in enclosed sections of different colours and blooms, each as intimate as an individually decorated room. And at Leeds, near Maidstone, the castle sits serenely in the middle of its lake, surrounded by parkland laid out by Capability Brown.

Herstmonceux, with its moat, magnificent gatehouse and mellow red walls, is one of the earliest and most graceful brick castles in the country, created by Flemish craftsmen brought over by Roger Fiennes, one of the heroes of Agincourt. For many years it housed the Royal Greenwich Observatory after the London skies had become too polluted and too blurred by street lighting to make astronomical research practicable. The grounds, open to the public in summer, are dominated by the dome of the Isaac Newton telescope, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1967.

Winchelsea

Surely the visitor must not leave without paying respects to our sister town, which after being flooded and then virtually destroyed by struggles for power in the time of Simon de Montfort, was rebuilt by Edward I in a smart grid pattern on its steep hill. Unlike Rye, it retains two of its old gateways.

Still there are so many intriguing places left to explore.. Next time, maybe . . . ?