River Medway

“ The Medway, perhaps because it is the relic of some 232 much greater river now drowned by the sinking of the land, perhaps because its tidal estuary lends it twice a day an artificial breadth, gives one the impression of those continental streams, the Seine or the Meuse, which are sufficient to animate a whole country-side, and which run in so wide a basin that a whole province attaches to their name. ”

“ From its position right at the entrance to the River the Medway tributary has always offered a considerable contribution to the defence of London. Going off as it does laterally from the main stream, the Medway estuary has acted the part of a remarkably fine flank retreat. Our forces, driven back at any time to the refuge of the River, could always split up—part proceeding up the main stream towards London, and part taking refuge in the protected network of waterways behind Sheppey and the Isle of Grain. ”

“ This line of railroad is intended to pass His Majesty's arsenal at Woolwich, and from thence to Gravesend, and to cross the river Medway below Chatham, and thence to Dover, with a branch by Eltham to the vale of the Medway, to Tunbridge and Maidstone, which can be constructed without a tunnel. I feel confident that the line over the river Medway below Chatham is objectionable, inasmuch as the Government will not consent to a bridge being ”

“ The mid-channel of the Medway is so deep, the bed so soft, and the reaches of the river are so short, that it is the safest harbour in the kingdom. Our great ships were riding as in a wet dock, and being moored to chains fixed to the bottom of the river, they swung up and down with the tide. But all these ships, as well as many others of lower rates, were almost entirely deserted by their crews, or rather by those few men who had been put in them early in the spring, rather as watchmen than as sailors ”

“ Every other stream, which can ever have possessed the smallest pretensions to be the river of the Saxon Chronicle, joins the Medway, therefore takes a totally different course. And though the Rother now enters the sea at Rye, there seems sufficient evidence, that its ancient channel, turning north-eastward from Newenden, passed between the upland and Romney Marsh, falling into the sea at or near the present town of Hithe, thus forming the Roman "Portus Lemanis." ”

“ From Boxley to Lenham the plain beneath the Old Road is drained by a stream called the Len, tributary to the Medway. Just before or at Lenham is the watershed: a parting of no moment, not a ridge, hardly observable to one standing above it on the hillside. It is the dividing line between the basins of the Medway and the Stour. All the hydrography of south-eastern England presents this peculiarity. The watersheds are low; the bold ranges do not divide the river-basins, because the water system is geologically older than the Chalk Hills. ”

“ And I should on the whole prefer a derivation [126] from the same root as mead, mulsum, viz., Sansc. mid, to soften, Lat. mitis, Gael. meath, soft, mild—finding in Old Norse mida, to move slowly or softly, the word most nearly approximating to the sense, and thus deriving the name of the Medway from its gentle flow.
Nevertheless it must be observed that as well as the supposed river Medofulli referred to as above by Grimm, we find in a charter of the 10th cent., a river called Medemelacha, which seems evidently to contain the Gael. mealach, sweet, and to mean "sweet as mead." ”

“ Right here at the mouth the River receives its last and most important tributary—the Medway.
For some miles up the estuary and the lower reaches the character of the River is such that it is difficult to imagine anything less interesting, less impressive, less suggestive of what the river approach to the greatest city in the world should be; for there is nothing but flat land on all sides, so flat that were not the great sea-wall in position the whole countryside [17] would soon revert to its original condition of marsh and fenland. ”

“ For the word does not stand alone—the prefix med is [124] found in several names in which the second part can hardly be taken to mean poculum, and the ending way is found in several names of which the former part cannot mean mulsum. In any case, it seems to me that a Saxon derivation can hardly be sustained. For Medoăcus, (=Medwacus) , occurs as the ancient name of a river in Venetia—this appears to be precisely the same name as that of the Medwag or Medway—and in Venetia we can account for a Celtic element, but not for a German. ”

“ Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond. ”

“ He really cared for the estuary as she did for the Pentlands; she need never be afraid of telling him anything that she felt, for it had always turned out that he felt something just like it. But that pleasure had not lasted long. He had shown her the gap where the Medway found its way among the low hills on the Kentish coast, and had told her that the golden filaments the sunlight discovered over the water were the masts and funnels of great ships, and he was pointing westward to the black gunpowder hulks that lay off Kerith Island, when his forefinger dropped. ”

“ The effect of this is best expressed by saying, that it is as though the Medway valley had been scooped 238 out by a huge plough, which not only cut a five-mile gap in the range, but threw the detritus of such a cutting to left and right for miles beyond the point of its passage. It is at the mouth of this gap that the two shoulders or turning-places are to be found; one on the west at Wrotham, the other on the east at Grey Wethers: while beyond them the Downs turn northward either way, to sink at last into the flats of the Thames estuary. ”

“ Port Medway has my heart, as have also its girls—at least, two of them. The traveler comes into the village quite suddenly, to find the houses snuggled down close along little coves, each man his cove. As the village is further penetrated it is to find that the waters have worked long fingers up into the land until many houses back on the water, as well as front on it. An artist might find more to do here in a minute than would keep him busy for a year, it is all so sketchy. ”

“ En route from Medford, motorists travel through great forest areas, along the banks of rushing streams, along the edges of picturesque canyons, and through attractive mountain country. Of particular interest is the Rogue River, well known for its steelhead and cutthroat trout and salmon fishing.
Motorists entering the park by way of Medford often leave by way of the south entrance to Klamath Falls, 62 miles, or arrive that way and leave over the Medford route. ”

“ It is about nine miles from Sunbury to Medway meeting-house, which stands on the high road opposite the Sunbury road. As soon as the congregation broke up I reassumed my travels, proceeding down the high-road towards Fort Barrington, on the Alatamaha, passing through a level country well watered by large streams, branches of Medway and Newport rivers, coursing from extensive swamps and marshes, their sources: these swamps are daily clearing and improving into large fruitful rice plantations, aggrandizing the well inhabited and rich district of St. John’s parish. ”

“ To stand there on the platform a hundred and twenty feet in the air and look out over the Medway crowded with shipping, ringing, echoing with factories on either shore, to see the great ships in the tideway and the fog and smoke of Chatham and its dockyards down the stream, is to receive an impression of the fragile, but tremendous, greatness of our civilisation such as few other places in South England would be able to give us suddenly between two heart beats. ”

“ On either side, the banks of the Medway, covered with cornfields and pastures, with here and there a windmill, or a distant church, stretched away as far as the eye could see, presenting a rich and varied landscape, rendered more beautiful by the changing shadows which passed swiftly across it as the thin and half–formed clouds skimmed away in the light of the morning sun. ”

“ Very delightful indeed is a voyage in the little steamer which plies between Deganwy, Conway, and Trefriw; but it is at Conway Marsh that the river is at its noblest. When the tide is out, this is a broad, sweeping, sandy bay, with oozy spaces of bright green towards its centre; and when the [Pg 219] tide is full, it has the appearance of a large and beautiful islanded lake. The river is walled in on the Conway side, and a thick wood shadows the stream as it bends round towards the sea. ”

“ She made a pet of Maria, and Lord Medway—reclining with half-closed eyes in some luxurious chair—watched his betrothed managing this clever woman, so much [Pg 255] older than herself, with infinite satisfaction and amusement. He foresaw that she would be equal to any social position, and it never occurred to him that it was likely she would manage Lord Medway quite as thoroughly as she managed Madame Jacobus. ”

“ Here the torrent leaps from a height of sixty feet over precipitous rocks, and plunges with a violence that seems to shake the crags and trees around, into a deep pool, from which it proceeds down the dingle, over black and broken fragments, to the river Mawddach. A footpath conducts the tourist to the bottom of the falls, from which, stepping upon some loose stones in the middle of the stream, he will obtain the best view of the cataract. ”

“ He made his painter fast to the post of the tarred gate that lies across the towing path a stone’s-throw from the lock, shouldered the crow-bar and set out to get the sluice gates up. He was an engineer, and to an engineer, the Medway locks of course present no difficulties. Not so if you should be a stockbroker, or an artist, or a city clerk, or a poet. In those cases the crow-bar and the sluice gates combine to laugh at your inexperience, and bite pieces out of your fingers. ”

“ The heroine is that lovely granddaughter of Semples."
"I know her; a little darling! and as good as she is beautiful."
Then Medway, with an inimitable scornful mimicry told the story of the pebble and the note, the alarm of the Highland troops, the arrest of the Elder and his son, the subsequent proceedings in court, the sympathy of the people with the Semples, and the contempt which no one tried to conceal for the informer. ”

“ In its course, it divides broad estuaries, it penetrates the bowels of the loftiest hills, forming an iron-road where the foot of man had never trod, and the hardiest rocks have succumbed to the irresistible energy of human actions and scientific skill—it crosses the important navigable river at Conway, and the Menai Straits, by means of immense iron-tubes, at such an elevation as not to impede the progress of the largest vessels. ”

“ On 12 July they were off a cape which Middleton named Dobbs; and on the 13th they entered ‘an inlet or strait which makes a fair opening.’ A short experience of the tides convinced Middleton that it was only a river, and he named it Wager River. The tides showed him that the Frozen Strait was the passage to the sea; but this was choked with ice, and his men were very sickly. On 15 Aug. he held a council, which determined that they ought to bear away for England. On 15 Sept. they arrived at the Orkney Islands, where several of the sick men were put ashore. ”

“ Kent is less rich in rivers even than Sussex, though happier in the quality; of the only three of recognisable name it possesses the Medway, the{218} Stour, and the Darenth. The latter, which rises at Westerham and flows through the chalk Downs northward to meet the Thames at Dartford, is a small stream with a sometimes swift current, more noted perhaps as a natural trout stream among anglers than on any other account, Farningham having been a well-known tryst of many famous fly-fishermen in days when locomotion was less easy than now. ”

“ You raise the sluices of a Medway lock quite simply: you just hike them up by means of your crow-bar, whose end fits into square holes in the side of the tall tarred post, that is, so to speak, the handle of the spade that is the sluice. You lever this thing up, one hole at a time, and to prevent its slipping when you have got it up, you put in an iron pin that rests horizontally on the top of the lock-gate, and holds up the sluice. ”

“ At the allusion to the proposed fate of his wife, the Don felt a terror which no peril to himself could have aroused.
"What do you advise?" he asked the mate, disguising his emotion as well as he could.
"You can't save the ship," replied the other; "but you may save the woman and the money. You've got the stuff in a strong-box, I suppose? I'll manage to get the long-boat under the stern to-night; it'll be my watch, and Medway thinks I'm with him. We four must get into her with the box, and slide off quietly. It's two to one against us, but it's our last chance. ”

“ This renovation of hope only produced fresh disappointment For it is well known, that the voyage of the Dobbs and California, instead of confuting, strongly confirmed all that Middleton had asserted. The supposed strait was found to be nothing more than a fresh-water river, and its utmost western navigable boundaries were now ascertained, by accurate examination. ”