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that it was somewhere north of Oakleigh, that is
between Oakleigh and the River Thames. No such name or any variant of it
is now known, and Wallenberg's tentative suggestion that it may linger
on in the name of Redham Mead, a piece of marshland north of Cliffe, is
not at all likely on topographical grounds. Moreover in a grant of land
at Bromehege, Cooling, dated A.D. 778, that name already appears well
established as Hreodham.1
The ambit passes from the neighbourhood of Maedham
southward to Ac leage which as we have seen may be identified with the
later manor of Oakleigh, and so to Waeterlea which still existed as the
name of the field immediately west of Lillechurch as late as 1850, and
was possibly the name of the estate upon which Lillechurch Priory was
founded with the result that the place-name became degraded to a
field-name. Lee Green, a hamlet a quarter mile to the south-east,
doubtless took its name from the same source. The next name, Colling, is
not the present Cooling, as Wallenberg has pointed out, and although
after several suggestions he leaves its identification open, had he an
opportunity of knowing the countryside he would scarcely have failed to
discover Cooling Hill, the tree-covered knoll south-eastward of Oakleigh
which rising to a height of some 50 feet is easily conspicuous in this
flat landscape. It now serves as a trigonometrical station, and is a
point at which the present boundary of Higham parish changes its course
through a right-angle. The flat land |
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between Oakleigh and the Buckland road, part of it at
one time a golf course, may well have been included in the Waeterlea of
the charter, and to-day it is crossed by the parish boundary.
Wallenberg's suggestion of Lee Green seems to have been made merely on
the inspection of the map for a suitable name in the vicinity, and as we
have already noted, that name has a convincing explanation.
We have now arrived at the approximate eastern extent of
Offa's grant. Its further boundary on its way to Murston passes
southward along the road leading to Eohinga burh in an estate belonging
to the monks of Rochester. There seem to be four clues to the position
and nature of Eohinga burh. It is likely, by the evidence of its name,
to be some sort of earthwork, possibly a grave-mound, and to lie close
to a road which travelled somewhere to the south of Cooling Hill towards
a property owned by the monks. There are two sites, each of which
satisfies some but not all of the conditions, and it will be convenient
to discuss the least probable first. In 1889, Mr. George Payne, the
Secretary of the Society, excavated a large prehistoric barrow of
interesting form situated on the parish boundaries of Shorne and Chalk,
some three-quarters of a mile westward of the Crown Inn at Shorne.2
There would be no purpose in describing its archeological
1 Birch, op. cit., no. 227.
2 Arch. Cant., XXIV (1900),
86-90. |