The “Rose,” once “the most superb,” is a thing of the past, for we cannot affect to believe that the small house which now bears that sign is its modern representative. No: what was once the real “Rose” stands adjoining, and is parcelled into four shops. A tablet on the frontage bears the date 1708, with a rose sculptured in full bloom. The elevation is a handsome two-storied one, with projecting eaves supported by richly carved consoles. A tall window at the side, apparently that of an old assembly-room, runs through two floors.
[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL, MILTON REGIS.]
Opposite is the old “George,” red brick, about 1720, with nine windows in a row. The building is in two parts, with two coach-entrances, and must once have been an important inn. Up one entrance is the Liberal Club, and up the other, oddly enough, is the Conservative Club. Along this last, looking back, you see a picturesque tile-hung front, hung with wistaria.
Finally, just past the Wesleyan Chapel is the old “Crown,” now a shop. The old coach-yard, very picturesque, has five old postboys’ dwellings in timber, now much dilapidated, with broken windows.
But Sittingbourne is not, on the whole, an engaging town, and the bubbling brook, the “seething burn,” as the Anglo-Saxons styled it, which gave the place its name, has since 1830 been hidden away from view in a pipe beneath the road. It used to flow across the highway at the east end of the church. The industrial modern circumstances of Sittingbourne, the making of paper and bricks, are the very denial of beauty. Lloyd’s paper-mills will be found at Milton. There, on the banks of the muddy Milton Creek, you see mountainous stacks of wood-pulp, for the making of paper. The scene, with the greasy mud-banks and the squalid pieces of wrapping-paper, is inexpressibly ugly. If there is any choice, Milton Creek is even more beastly than the brickmaking village of Murston, below Sittingbourne; and even that is a horror.
But, although Milton is so ill a place, full of lodgings for tramps, and all such mean circumstances, there are yet in its narrow streets some fine old houses, of good architectural character, which hint, not obscurely, that this was, two hundred years ago, a place of charm and gentility. On an old house, now the “Waterman’s Arms,” in Flushing Street, may be seen a quaintly sculptured stone sign dated 1662, representing Adam and Eve standing on either side of that fatal apple-tree: Eve about to pluck the fruit which caused all the trouble. The sign is the arms of the Fruiterers’ Company; but the reason of it being here is not known.