DENEHOLE AT GRAVESEND.
93
crosses the southward continuation of Windmill Street, which
proceeds towards Shinglewell. New houses are being built south
of the Old London Road, and on the eastern side of that to
Shinglewell, and the denehole is in the back premises of one of
them, about thirty yards south of the junction of the two roads,
a mile from the Thames at the Pier, and two-thirds of a mile
from Gravesend Railway Station, the routes from both being via
Windmill Street.
The town of Gravesend stands mainly on the Chalk, large
quarries in which may be seen near the Thames between
Gravesend and Northfleet. Near the town are some Tertiary
outliers, the largest and most prominent forming Windmill Hill.
In considering the intentions of the makers of this Gravesend pit
the local geology and physical geography afford by far the most
fundamentally important evidence. Bare Chalk abounds on
every side of Windmill Hill, and might have been worked some
three hundred yards away by those needing that material. Yet
the excavators of this pit preferred to have it where Chalk is
more than fifty feet beneath the surface.
On the other hand, Gravesend from the earliest times offered
an eligible site for a town or village on the Kentish bank of the
Thames, such sites being by no means numerous, owing to the
large areas of marshland bordering the river. But early settlers
on the lower Thames were especially liable to suffer from piratical
raids, a fact which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle abundantly- illus-
trates.1 Hence, secret storehouses a little inland, and having their
positions hidden from the raider coming up the Thames by an
intervening hill—as in the case of the pit now being considered
—would be not merely desirable, but necessary.
And, whereas the quarrying of Chalk at such a spot would
have involved the most monstrous waste of time and labour on
the part of men quite as competent to see where there was bare
chalk as any at the present day, the position of this pit for a
secret storehouse is the best the outskirts of Gravesend afford.
The depth too would be not a disadvantage, but an immense
advantage for a secret storehouse. For a shallow store, if
discovered, would be easily ransacked, while the plunder of one
forty or fifty feet beneath the surface would imply both a com-
parative loss of time and an increase of difficulty and danger
likely to deter raiders from attempting it. 
1 Gravesend was destroyed by French and Spanish raiders in the reign of Richard 2nd
(1380. It- was then of much more importance-than it had been previous to the Norman
Conquest. Consequently the event is chronicled.