e fight that
went straggling up through the village. It only tells that Horsa
fell in the moment of victory, and the flint heap of Horsted, which
has long preserved his name, and was held in after-time to mark his
grave, is thus the earliest of those monuments of English valour of
which Westminster is the last and noblest shrine. The victory of
Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the English; it struck
the keynote of the whole English conquest of Britain."

This cromlech, known as Kit's Coty House, consists of three upright
dolmens of sandstone, with a fourth, much larger, crossing them above
horizontally. In a neighbouring field there is another group of stones,
scattered in disarray amongst the brushwood, to which, as also to
Stonehenge and other so-called "Druidical" remains, there attaches the
local superstition that they cannot be counted. It would be pleasanter
to believe that the current story, to which reference has already been
made, that Dickens was poking fun at the antiquarian's reverence for
this hoary relic in his narrative of Mr. Pickwick's "BIL STUMPS"
inscription, is altogether erroneous. Certainly it is open to anyone who
wishes to be incredulous, for there is as much dissimilarity as possible
between the massive cromlech near Aylesford and the small slab that Mr.
Pickwick discovered at Cobham.

The most salient feature in the Medway valley between Rochester and
Maidstone is the height of Blue Bell, or Upper Bell. Here Dickens, who,
as he said, had come to realize that the Rochester to Maidstone road
passed through some of the most beautiful scenery in England, would
often picnic with his visitors. Undulating slopes of pasture and
cornfields, hop gardens, orchards, and woodlands, with many a deep-sunk
lane embowered in overarching trees that rise from hedgerow clusters of
dog-rose, ivy, and honeysuckle, and with snugly nestling homesteads and
quaintly-cowled "oast-houses" sprinkled here and there, sweep across the
valley, through which the river winds in sinuous curves, onwards to a
long range of hills upon the skyline.

Somewhere in this district Dickens came across the types of the
oldfashioned and jovially comfortable home of the English yeoman,
represented by his Manor Farm, Dingley Dell, and of the little country
town, represented by the Muggleton of _Pickwick_, in which local
enthusiasm for cricket was ardent, if the standard of skill was somewhat
low.