(back to top)

(back to top)

The hamlet of West Hythe sits between Romney Marsh and the heights dominated by the fortified St. Stephen's Church and Lympne Castle.  It had been largely abandoned in favor of Hythe, two miles away on the Kentish coast, when Prout visited in August, 1815 and applied his particular skills to the shell of the local church.

At that moment in England "nearly every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruin, and of separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar interest-half sorrowful, half sublime."
-John Ruskin, 1851