From this viewpoint you can see the old moated manor house at Filston Hall.
You may want to pause here, perhaps take a seat on the bench, as this next section of the trail is a little longer than the others.
In 1878, Mary Colgate an American student from Vassar College in New York, wrote about Filston Hall in the Vassar Miscellany, the oldest student newspaper in the world.
In the article she describes her emotions on seeing Filston Hall for the first and only time, and how the experience stayed with her for many years.
"I saw the old house only once; yet even now it is as distinctly before me as in that midsummer day, years ago."
Mary had family connections to the house. Her grandfather had owned it but left Britain to go to America to escape what Mary describes as ‘political troubles’.
She gives a vivid description of the area:
"Filston Hall is in the midst of a picturesque and interesting country. A mile or two away is Shoreham, a quaint little village, which looks as if it had been napping for a century. About, five miles toward the south is the town of Seven Oaks, whose chief attraction is the Knowle House, a grand specimen of architecture, famous for its antiquity."
She describes seeing the hops, which she at first mistakes for lima beans, and the oddly shaped oast houses. She doesn’t appear too impressed with the Darent, but was enchanted by the moat at Filston.
"At the foot of a meadow lying behind the old house runs the Darrent, a picturesque little stream, which the English dignify by the name of river….But it was the moat which chiefly interested me. It is no grass-grown trench, but a real moat, filled with water by a tiny tributary of the Darrent. I lost myself in revery, and woke with a start to find that I was living in the nineteenth instead of the thirteenth century"
Further descriptions of the house lead into an account of her grandfather’s story:
"He was a radical, with views too liberal to suit the Government of his day, and at the time of the Revolutionary war he illuminated his house when the Americans gained a victory. This so enraged his neighbours that one night they marched to Filston with sticks and stones, and broke in his windows. But the resolute old gentleman, nothing daunted, persisted again and again in his illuminations, until finally he was met by the alternative of leaving the country or losing his life."
The room at Filston she describes in most detail is the kitchen, which she viewed as having quite backward cooking facilities:
"The kitchen was the queerest place imaginable. Opposite the door was a huge fireplace, with a crane hanging over the logs. Everything was picturesque, but very inconvenient. I wondered how long the most poverty-stricken family in America would endure, a crane as a substitute for a stove; yet the idea of changing in the slightest degree their mode of living seems never to cross the minds of these well-to-do English people."
She concludes her account with a description of her parting glimpse of her ancestral home:
"We walked up the grassy lane leading from the gate to the train road. As we turned a corner we caught one last glimpse of the old place. The trunks of the over-arching trees made a perfect frame for the picture."
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