Road Mending

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The meeting with the tenant farmers on Sunday confirmed what I had already been told. Transport of produce was too costly. Getting materials or other goods into the estate and village was expensive. If it couldn't be made or sourced locally we had to do without. But because of the estate's isolation we had a wide range of skills even if not up to professional standards.

That evening I sat down to write some letters. I wrote to Cecilia, a humorous account of the estate's isolation. I included some of the suggestions that had been worked out. I was more explicit about those in the letter to my father, mother and brothers. I also wrote to my Aunt Lucy asking for advice about schooling. She has been involved in pressing for education for women. If anyone knew what I would need to start a school it would be Aunt Lucy.

Tomorrow morning I would send the letters. A stable boy would ride a horse into Faversham. They could be posted from there and would reach Aunt Lucy by Tuesday and my parents by Wednesday or Thursday. The stable boy would collect and pay for any letters for the estate and buy copies of local papers for me.

Writing to Cecilia had been hard. I had accepted her decision to reject my suit. I think she was right. But writing to her made my isolation on this estate more poignant. I would have no visitors, probably not even from the family. All I had contact with were the servants and tenants.

In the study desk I had found some correspondence between Great-Uncle Horace and Mr Page and Mr Stokes. In it Horace had set out his priorities for the estate. He didn't expect it to produce much income but it should not be run at a loss nor should maintenance be neglected. Mr Page and, but it wasn't explicitly stated, Mrs Page, should employ as many servants as the estate could support. Mr Stokes should be sympathetic to the tenant farmers. The rents were set at low rates to reflect the isolation of the estate, but payment in kind, or even inability to pay, were to be accepted if reasonable.

I was pleased to find what Great-Uncle Horace had intended. I would try to follow the same principles but improve the lot of the local people if I could. I had the money Horace had left me and my own considerable income from Wiltshire.

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On Monday morning Mr Stokes and I rode around the estate and beyond. I wanted to look closely at the roads and tracks that linked us to the Roman Road. In the parkland they were well maintained, properly drained, and in very good condition mainly because they were little used. All the other so-called roads on the tenants' farms were appalling. The tracks were worse. The parkland showed that the roads could be improved.

Mr Stokes showed me the gravel deposits that had been used in the parkland. Moving tons of gravel had been hard until a road had been made towards Roman Hill. If I wanted to improve the roads we would have to start close to the gravel and move outwards. If the road surfaces were good we could carry more on a cart.

After luncheon he and I went to the old harbour. It would be low tide. We had to leave the horses at the landward edge of the causeway because it was too uneven. By the time we were standing at the edge of what had been the harbour my breeches were mud-caked almost to my waist. The causeway would need much more than gravel. It would need building with large stone and possibly some masonry culverts to provide for water to pass through it.

Soft mud had filled the old harbour. Mr Stokes threw some stones to show the depth and consistency. He took a driftwood branch and poked. Where the harbour quayside had been the mud was more than six feet deep.

Beyond the harbour the mud flats extended nearly one hundred yards to the navigable channel. Of course at high tide boats and small ships might be able to get closer, but even at the highest tide a small rowing boat would be aground ten yards from any firm land. For most tides the boat wouldn't be able to get closer than twenty-five yards. The mud between the boat and shore would swallow anyone who tried to cross it on foot.

"Where can we get building stone, Mr Stokes?" I asked.

"There was a quarry on the other edge of the estate," he replied. "The stone is Kentish Ragstone but unlike other sources in Kent it was considered too small scale for commercial extraction. We have some men who are competent as quarrymen and a few masons. We can also produce local brick from a brick earth deposit. The problem, like the whole estate, is the state of the local roads."

"Transport costs too high?" I suggested.

"Yes. Other Ragstone quarries are by the River Medway and the stone is taken by ship. The local quarry was last used extensively to extend the blacksmith's forge about forty years ago. Even then it was very difficult to get the stone to the village. It would be easier now because some of the estate's roads are now better surfaced. I understand that the carts had to be pulled by at least eight horses."

"So if I wanted to improve this causeway I could use ragstone from the quarry?"

Mr Stokes scratched his head before answering.

"Um. Mr William, you would have to start with something else first. The track to this causeway would need to be made into a reasonably sound surface. Half a mile of track? That would take two or three years at least if your tenant farmers were doing the work instead of paying rent."

"What if I paid for the work?"

"Pay? That would make a real difference. There are so many agricultural labourers doing nothing. Even so, you couldn't do much in winter. Maybe it could be done in a season from April to October."

"And only after that could we start moving Ragstone?"

"Yes. But rebuilding the causeway would take at least another year, and..."

Mr Stokes tossed another stone into the mud.

"You would still have the problems of the silted up harbour, the collapsed quay, the missing hard..."

"Unless I imported stone into the harbour and worked from both ends."

Mr Stokes looked at me as if I had sworn at him.

"How? Nothing could be unloaded here as it is. Imported stone would cost money, more money than the estate can afford, Mr William."

"I have money, Mr Stokes. Great-Uncle Horace left me capital to improve the estate, and I have income from my Wiltshire lands. I want this estate to be prosperous, not just for me, but for everyone who depends on it. If that means spending money on capital improvements, I will. This could be a usable harbour."

Mr Stokes looked around. He was obviously not convinced.

"If you say so, Mr William. I wouldn't know where or how to start. How do we deal with the mud, for example?"

"Perhaps learn from the Dutch?"

"The Dutch. Why the Dutch? Oh. The Vicar mentioned the Dutch once. I wasn't sure what he was getting at. Perhaps you should talk to him. His studies are more extensive than mine ever were."

"But you, Mr Stokes, have the practical experience and the local knowledge the Vicar doesn't have. I'm sure that between the three of us, with expert advice and help, we can do a lot."

When the stable boy returned he had a large pile of letters. There were so many he hadn't taken enough money to pay for them all but the Postmaster had written an invoice for the amount owing. He was aware that I had sufficient resources to pay the bill.

Most were for me from various relations. There were a couple for the Vicar and about a dozen for various tenant farmers. Some of them had been waiting months to be collected. After he had had some lunch I sent the stable boy to deliver the other letters.

I sat down to read. Most of the relations were congratulating me on my inheritance. If only they knew that the estate would be a drain on my finances for years. One was from Cecilia and her father, very friendly and encouraging.

The local papers were more informative, discussing the state of the local harbour. A Dutch engineer had given a report to the Town Council but they were arguing about the cost and the finance. Who would pay? The shipping interests? They seemed reluctant because that harbour didn't produce much profits and the cost would wipe out twenty years' revenue. The Town Council didn't have enough money and were considering an appeal to the government although past experience had shown that the government was unwilling to invest in minor ports without an assured income.

The next day I set out with Jason on horseback to visit the local town. I decided to leave the carriage behind. It might not survive too many journeys on the appalling roads. I had a valise with a change of clothes. I needed them when we stayed at the main hotel. I was mud-spattered to the waist. One of the hotel staff took my muddy clothes away to try to make them look cleaner.

I was in luck. The Dutch engineer was still at the hotel, intending to leave tomorrow. I sent him a note asking him to join me at dinner, before I went to the Post Office to pay my account and collect a few more letters.

The Dutch engineer, a Mr Van Der See, had been disappointed by the town council's response to his proposed improvements to the navigation. They considered that his solutions were too radical and beyond their means without government money which they had little hope of getting, having tried many times over the past fifty years. The town's port just wasn't important enough for the nation.

But Mr Van Der See agreed, for a fee in cash, to return with me to Roman Hill tomorrow and advise what, if anything, could be done about my silted-up harbour. He warned me that it might be expensive and require skilled Dutch labour but the outline estimate was within my means unless the harbour was much worse than I had described.

The next day he accompanied me and Jason, riding a hired horse. He was startled at the bad state of the roads and appreciated that making a harbour might be preferable to get goods in and out.

After luncheon he went with me, Mr Stokes and the Vicar to see the harbour. He spent a long time around what I thought were ruinous stonework on the landward side, around the stream. When he had finished and taken copious notes we returned to Roman Hill. He had to take a bath and change, because unlike the rest of us who had stayed on harder ground, he had been deep into the muddy banks of the stream and had even measured the depth of mud in the harbour and the estuary.

I had asked Mr Stokes and the Vicar to join me and Mr Van Der See for dinner.

Mr Van Der See was almost excited. He explained that the ruined masonry had been a dam across the stream to hold back water until a low tide, when it could have been released suddenly to scour the harbour. The work was at least two hundred years old, probably designed by an earlier Dutch engineer, had been neglected and not used properly but could be restored to working order fairly easily. The holding pond would need to be dug out again and the masonry repaired but little new work would be necessary except new sluice gates. The work would be much cheaper than he had thought. Under the mud there was a sound gravel surface that would be exposed when the sluice gates had been used a few times. After the mud had been scoured away there would be sufficient depth of water for a ship to be alongside the harbor wall at almost any state of the tide, or the ship could ground without damage.

The muddy path to the harbour would need to be changed to a sound road, and the harbour wall would need repair, but they were minor works compared with building a new dam which wasn't necessary. He undertook to present me with a formal, costed, assessment sometime tomorrow, ignoring the road and harbour wall which could probably done using the estate's own resources. The work would take most of next summer but the harbour, if a road was in place, could be used within a year.

Mr Stokes and the Vicar were concerned that I would be spending so much money, and were also worried that rebuilding the causeway with a road and the harbour wall were beyond the estate's capacity. The first need was a cart capable of moving gravel and stone. Maintaining the estate's road had been done with farmers' carts but they couldn't carry much without damage. A few hundredweight had been possible but we would need to move many tons.

I asked Mr Stokes to order a stone-carrying cart with large, wide tread wheels and where to source the trees for the necessary wood. We discussed how wide the harbour road should be. Mr Stokes suggested eighteen feet. I thought thirty would be better. We compromised on twenty-four feet, the maximum without drastically widening the causeway. Even that much would require a considerable effort because the causeway had been eroded in places where tributaries of the stream had cut through it. Each tributary and ditch would need a masonry culvert to avoid future damage during winter flooding.

The next day Mr Van Der See's formal proposal was for much less than I had originally thought. I agreed it. Apart from the cost of the work we would need to provide accommodation for the Dutch workers. That couldn't be adjacent to the harbour. There wasn't enough dry flat land, so I arranged for houses to be built at the landward end of the causeway, well above any floods. After the work had been completed, those houses could be changed into warehouses for goods coming in and out of the harbour.

I paid formerly unemployed farm labourers to reopen the quarry and make bricks for the new houses. I had sixteen built in four rows of four. The corners of the walls, the doorways and window openings were faced with ragstone with the rest being brick.

Over the next few months the tenants on the Roman Hill estate were startled at the amount of work in progress and that I was paying so many people to work on it. The good side was that with so much money being spent by me, a lot of it came back as rent, improving the cash flow. The poor rates were in funds because so few people were without work. Of course I was spending capital that wouldn't produce a substantial increase in the estate's income until the harbour was operational but I saw it as a worthwhile long term investment.

The Reverend Roger Andrews' sister, Amelie, had returned. Several times a week my evening meal was much more sociable. Mr Stokes, Mr Van Der See, Roger and Amelie joined me and we discussed the current progress. Amelie was still unable to find a suitable position as governess but I had started paying her as a temporary school mistress for the staff and tenants' children of the Roman Hill estate. At first Amelie seemed very shy and as frightened of me as the maidservants had been but as she became more used to the male company she relaxed. She wanted me to build a schoolroom but we hadn't got enough people not already committed to the harbour works.

One of the elderly parents of one of the tenant farmers had been a potter. Mr Stokes had persuaded him to start a scheme to train potters because we needed roofing tiles and land drains. The roofing tiles kept pace with the work on the new houses but it took six months before the first ceramic pipes were produced and a year before we had enough to drain just one field.

Amelie was costing me money, not just for her pay, but for books and school materials. My poor Jason had to ride the appalling local roads two or three times a week with a pack horse to bring those and letters for me. Jason was worried that I was asking too much of the horses. I stalled, hoping that the harbour would provide an easier route soon.

I had asked the Reverend Roger Andrews to visit the clergy in the villages between us and the town to try to get agreement on improving the roads but, as always, it was a lack of money in the impoverished parishes that were the real obstacle.

I was writing to Cecilia, her father, and my father about once a week detailing the progress being made. They all wrote back. Cecilia was now staying in London with an aunt and enjoying 'the season'. I found her descriptions very entertaining but they would have not been events I would have enjoyed, unlike Cecilia who found then exciting. All three of them, and the wider family, seemed interested in the work at Roman Hill and sometimes offered useful advice, particularly from my father and Cecilia's.

What I didn't know was that because I had mentioned the Reverend Roger and his sister Amelie in my letters that Cecilia and her father were in correspondence with both of them getting another set of accounts of what I was doing. Amelie and Cecilia's correspondence was much more about me than I would have thought likely even between sisters. The two of them were plotting my future. The family, and Cecilia, wanted to visit when the harbour was usable, but not until then because their carriages would not survive the bad roads.

I was shocked when Cecilia and Amelie eventually met. They rushed into each other's arms like old friends who had been long parted. Cecilia, still holding Amelie in a fierce hug, turned to face me.

"William, this is Amelie..."

"I know she is," I objected.

"But Amelie thinks you are wonderful. Why haven't you done anything about it?"

"Perhaps because I didn't know..."

"I'm telling you now. She thinks you are as wonderful as I think you are. You and I aren't suitable but Amelie, is, for you."

Amelie was blushing and struggling to get out of Cecilia's hug

.

"Is that true?" I asked.

Amelie blushed more but nodded.

"She wants you to build a schoolroom and although she's too shy to say it - she wants you. William."

That conversation didn't happen until I had been at Roman Hill for eighteen months and Cecilia and her father came to visit, but I should have known long before then Amelie saw me as a possible life partner. I was just too busy to notice how much Amelie liked me.

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The spring and summer that the work was in progress was exceptionally dry and warm. The Dutch workmen were able to work faster than they had anticipated but Mr Van Der See was concerned that the stream's flow would be insufficient to provide enough water to scour the harbour. He proposed, and I agreed, that the pond should be substantially increased beyond its original size and made tidal. A high tide could be held back by the sluice gates and released at low tide. Beyond the tidal pool he added another dam with sluice gates that could hold back fresh water for agriculture and watering the livestock in a future dry season.

In winter the sluices could be left open so fresh water could flow freely into the tidal pool but be held back in the spring and summer with any surplus flowing over a relief channel.

The spoil from the increased and new ponds was used to build up low-lying land behind a retaining wall. That land, previously muddy freshwater marsh, could now be used for crops.

By early autumn the work was complete. The causeway had been repaired and widened with a usable road on its top. The harbour wall had been rebuilt with Kentish Ragstone and faced with timber baulks. The dams and sluice gates were finished and installed but the freshwater pond was only about one quarter full because of low flow in the stream.

Almost everyone on the whole estate watched as the first high tide filled the tidal pond. It was a normal high tide, not a Spring tide, and there was at least six feet of masonry above the water. A few hours' later, when the tide was at its lowest, the sluice gates were suddenly opened by the Dutch workmen. The rush of water was noisy and impressive, yet when it had gone the harbour still seemed clogged with mud although we had seen a muddy brown stain rushing out into the estuary.

Mr Van Der See seemed satisfied with the result. He and his workmen repeated the exercise at every high tide, day or night, for a week. At the end of that time we could see a clear gravel bottom to the harbour and a channel cut through the mud out to the deepest part of the estuary. Even the old hard was clean and mud free. At low tide we could walk dry shod along it almost to the deep water channel. A medium sized vessel could discharge cargo on to the hard without entering the harbour. As for the harbour? It could take between four to six vessels that were large enough to navigate the estuary and each could moor alongside the harbour wall, staying there safely whatever the state of the tides. The hard would protect ships in the harbour from any storms entering the estuary.