According to legend, the Abbess of Dartford, Jane Fane, put a curse on Henry VIII and all of his male descendants as a punishment for confiscating the estate.

After Henry VIII's death, seven nuns, who had already been permitted by Queen Mary to return to Dartford, re-established the convent at King's Langley Priory, Hertfordshire, with Elizabeth Cressener as prioress.

The visitors then sold the goods of the convent at low prices, paid the debts of the house, divided what little remained among the sisters, and ordered them to leave within twenty-four hours.

The band of Dominican exiles, consisting of two priests, a prioress, four choir-nuns, four lay sisters, and a young girl not yet professed, joined the nuns of Syon House, Middlesex (now London), and crossed to the Netherlands.

Queen Elizabeth then granted the estate to Edward Darbyshire and John Bere, who purchased much of the lands of Dartford Priory made available by the dissolution of the monasteries.

It was sold in 1748 to William, Viscount Duncannon, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, who on his father's death succeeded him as Earl of Bessborough and Baron Ponsonby of Sysonby.

At that point, owing to the contemporary conflict with France, plans were drawn up for a large dockyard to be built from Northfleet to Greenhithe (which would have included the Ingress Estate).

[5] In 1831, a wealthy solicitor named James Harmer purchased the land, and in 1833 built his Elizabethan-style mansion, which he called Ingress Abbey, on the banks of the Thames.

[6][7] Harmer served as a model for Jaggers, the Charles Dickens character from Great Expectations,[8] and in the mid-1800s he also owned the Weekly Dispatch to which the poet Eliza Cook was a longterm contributor, living and writing some of her works at Ingress Abbey.

[1][9] In the 1880s, the Shah of Persia sailed up the Thames and noted that "the only thing worth mentioning at Greenhithe was a mansion standing amid trees on a green carpet extending down to the water's edge".

[citation needed] The Georgian Wall Tunnel, the entrance to which is bricked up for safety reasons, is set in the chalk cliffs overlooking the Ingress Estate.