Close beside this monument may be noticed, on the floor, a stone to "Edward Elsted, many years Riding Officer of this Place," who died in 1757, aged 51, doubtless, if he was a true and faithful servant of the Revenue, to the great joy of the smuggling interests of the town; for by the term "Riding Officer," we are to understand a mounted official of the Preventive Service to be indicated.
For the rest, New Romney may easily be dismissed. There is the "New Inn," with a frontage perhaps not older than one century, but with an interior that was only new five hundred years ago, where the smuggling cult used to hold convivial and profit-sharing meetings; there is the Town Hall next door, and there is the broad street with never a new building in it, or anywhere at all in the town. Sandwich is commonly held up as an example of a Cinque Port utterly decayed and dead as Queen Anne, or as the Pharaohs, or anything or anyone of whose demise there cannot possibly be any doubt, but there are new houses and other unmistakable signs of a living existence there, while here the town, reduced to the merest existence, simply continues mechanically, like a clock not yet run down. It is not an unpleasing--nay, it is even an interesting--place, but it gives an odd, weather-beaten, bleak impression, not perhaps so much to the eye as to the mind. It is possible to visit New Romney when the thermometer registers eighty in the shade, and for the mind to convey that bleak impression so acutely to the senses that the body shivers.
If, however, you want something really gaunt and shivery, why then, Littlestone-on-Sea will give all you desire in that sort, in full measure and brimming over. Littlestone-on-Sea might with equal propriety and more exact descriptiveness be named Littlestone-at-the-World's-End. It stands on the shingle-banks that have been thrown up by the sea to ruin Romney, and it is a mere line of sad grey stucco houses with their faces to the immensity of the sea, their backs to the emptiness of the marsh, and their skylights looking up into the vastness of the sky. The place is a resort of golfers in summer, an emptiness in winter, and all the year round an eyesore to those who fare the road between Romney and Dymchurch, and cannot fail to observe those gaunt houses in the distance, notching the coast-line in a hateful commonplace of detached-and semi-detachedness.