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the hands of a local contractor, who has afforded
every facility for visits and has reserved any material of interest for
the Dartford Public Museum. The mill was built c. 1780 by William
Loader at a cost of £2,000. It was a rectangular building with the
south-west angle splayed off to allow the passage of a footpath leading
from the town to Brooklands and beyond, thus making the plan an
irregular pentagon. It was built entirely of wood, on a brick
foundation, was of five storeys and was covered by a roof framed on the
Mansard principle, with five hips. The whole building was a fine example
of carpentry construction. Before a flour mill stood here, the site was
occupied by a fulling mill, of which a record exists in an Arbitration
Award (in Dartford Museum) on the rights of the Lord of the Manor of
Charles, in 1511. A valuation of the Manor of Charles, probably of the
late fourteenth century (see Arch. Cant., IX, 302) mentions the
fulling-mill and speaks of a field called "Tentis," a name
still in use as Tenter’s Field, the land lying to the south of the
mill.
While laying an electric cable on Temple Hill, Dartford, Mr. R. Clark
reports, at the north-western entrance to St. Vincent’s Boys’ Homes
(O.S. Kent, sheet IX, N.W.) traces of Roman foundations were found of
which he has placed a drawing with the local Antiquarian Society (for
previous finds, north of this site, see Arch. Cant., XXII,
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lii.).
Mr. Clark has also obtained worked flints, including points shouldered
on one edge and arrow or spear heads, from a pit in Thames ballast, at
Marsh Street, about three-quarters of a mile south of the river bank
(O.S. Kent, sheet IX, N.E.). The pit is below O.D. and the workings are
filled with water, so that it is not possible to give the exact level
from which the artefacts were dredged they all show similarities with a
Mesolithic culture.
In the course of widening work on the W. side of the road running N.E.
from Aylesford to the Lower Bell inn, about 450 yards S. of Kit’s
Coty, 150 yards N. of the "Countless Stones," and immediately
S. of the Pilgrims’ Way, five or six large sarsens were removed from
the roadside bank by a mechanical excavator. Sir Edward Harrison
visited, the site, but the stones were in process of being buried under
road tip and close examination was impracticable. No shaping or squaring
of the stones was observed. As they were found in the bank of the road,
fairly close together, it is possible that they were originally dug up
and placed by the roadside when the present road was made. On the other
hand their positions may indicate that they were ranged along the side
of a long barrow lying in a N.E.-S.W. direction. No opinion of value can
be expressed on the meagre evidence but excavation or probing in the
immediate neighbourhood might be fruitful. |