The scenery is that of Holland; even down to the particular detail of grass-grown earthen embankments against the sea, which long ago encroached here and destroyed the original church of Seasalter, and has in modern times caused its successor to be abandoned, in favour of a new building in Whitstable. In any case, it is difficult to see the need of a church where there are but few houses, unless some modern St. Francis were wishful of preaching here to the birds, the seagulls and the curlews that haunt these marshes and maintain a mingled screaming and melancholy piping, varied sometimes with what sounds like demoniacal chucklings or mocking laughter.
Inland you see the wooded uplands of the old forest district of Blean, with the whirling sails of distant windmills seeming to beckon over the hills and far away. Of the sea one observes nothing until the grassy embankment is climbed, hard by the “Old Sportsman” inn that stands sheltered under the lee of it, but from the top is seen the entrance of the Swale, dotted with many small vessels, with Sheppey about three miles across the channel and the pink-washed houses of the coastguard shining out yonder on Shellness Point.
From this spot the embankment gradually dies down and the land rises slightly to Whitstable. Stakes are stuck in the ooze of the foreshore, which is strewn with myriads of cockle and mussel-shells. Passing a coastguard-station where the coastguard’s chief anxieties seem to be concerned rather with his cocks and hens than with guarding the coast, the road comes past the “Jolly Sailor” and the “Blue Anchor,” into the hamlet of Seasalter, and thence winds inland. Here the approach to Whitstable is heralded by the notice-boards of the “Bolingbroke Building Estate,” a would-be suburb that appears by no means to have attained success. It is one of the very many attempts, so curiously characteristic of these speculative and impatient times of ours, to discount the future; to make a place, _ad hoc_, instead of letting it gradually develop, in response to requirements. The essential difference is that in other times places grew by gradual accretion of population. The population grew, and the houses increased gradually to meet its needs; but in this present era of “building estates” on the edges of towns, it is the speculative greed of landowners that seeks to build or let on building lease, and it is the public which is coy. The imaginations of landowners riot so freely on the alluring prospect of ground-rents that there is nowadays scarce a seaside town whose outskirts are not rendered squalid and utterly detestable with projected roads that are grass-grown failures, and with notice-boards in various stages of abject decay, offering “desirable sites” whose desirability appears to be more evident to the vendors than to purchasers. Here, at the approach to Whitstable, notice-boards make what appear to be splendid offers, “Title-free, rates-free, tithe-free”--everything, it seems, but rent-free; and yet the “Bolingbroke Building Estate” has not resolved into much more than a waste of scrubby pasture, dotted plentifully with sign-posts marking imaginary streets and avenues with the most grandiloquent names: Valkyrie Avenue, Medina Road, Wauchope Avenue, and so forth. One would conclude, not merely that the ground is _not_ “ripe for building,” but that it has not even blossomed.