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Archaeologia Cantiana Vol. 55 - 1942 page xxxvi
                 
ANNUAL REPORT FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31st DECEMBER, 1941 Continued

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, 

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.

Page  xxxvi   (This page was prepared for the website by Ted Connell)      

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