St Mary, Higham

[poliphilo]

St Mary's, Higham was Dickens's parish church. One of his daughters was married there. It sits at the end of a road that peters out into the North Kent marshes-  so isolated that the villagers built a second church in the 1860s, about a mile away on higher ground. It is now redundant and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

This is the landscape of Great Expectations. One can imagine Magwitch shivering among the graves.

The south door dates from c.1400 and is studded with quaint little carved faces.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Oh so do I!

I suppose I was brought up with them and Dickens's descriptions of them as th' meshes.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Croydon, so I had no contact with the marshes until adulthood.

I love Romney Marsh too.

Marshes are liminal.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Romney Marsh is a magical and infinitely strange place.