A complete and weird contrast from this lovely vale is Warden Point, which lies off to the left of the way to Eastchurch, along two and a quarter miles of solitary winding road. “At Warden Point,” I read in a geological work, “is the finest exposure of the London clay.” And it may be added that, in the many landslips which have occurred here of late years, other things have been exposed. In short, the slipping away of the cliffs has torn asunder the churchyard of Warden, with the shocking result that the coffins and skeletons of the dead are strewn about. You come to this Golgotha at a point where the road, making straight for the cliffs’ edge, has been carefully barred, lest the stranger should descend into the sea and there perish. To the few cottages that stand here, all that is left of the village of Warden, has been given the unlovely name of “Mud Row.” Forming part of the garden fence of one of these is a sculptured stone tablet recording that Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the rebuilding of London Bridge, gave some of the stones of old London Bridge to rebuild Warden church, in 1836; the ancient church having been destroyed by encroachment of the sea. By 1870 the sea had further advanced and the new church was closed, being demolished in 1877, when the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the last thirty years were removed to Minster. Now all that remains of the churches of Warden is this dedication tablet, part of a garden fence. Looking down here, across the yawning rifts and crevasses of the land-ship, you see the poor exposed relics of the dead in the olden churchyard, and out to sea the waters are discoloured with the washings of the clay.
Eastchurch, a pretty village with a charming and well-kept old church, is a pleasant place, associated recently with aviation and the Naval Flying grounds. It is thus appropriate enough that a new stained-glass window should have been placed here in 1912 to the memory of Charles Stuart Rolls and Cecil Grace, who both lost their lives in flying.
Among other memorials is a tablet to Vice-Admiral Sir Richard King, Bart., Commander-in-Chief at the Nore, who, having commanded the _Achille_ at Trafalgar and come scatheless through that action, died of cholera at Sheerness, aged 61. Here, too, is an elaborate monument to Gabriel Livesey, who died at Eastchurch parsonage in 1622. His stately recumbent effigy, under a canopy of coloured and gilded marbles, has in front of it a group of children; among them the kneeling figure of his son Michael, afterwards notorious as one of the Commissioners who tried Charles the First and signed his death-warrant.