HERNE BAY--RECULVER--WANTSUM--SARRE
Herne Bay is a place of entirely modern creation, and does not stand
upon a bay. The coastline, in fact, runs remarkably straight between
Whitstable and Margate, and anything in the nature of a bay is not to
be seen. But, as old writers speak of a point here, it seems likely
that a bay of some sort existed and has disappeared in the great
wastage of the land that has certainly taken place all along this coast
and around Sheppey. The “Street Stones” at Whitstable, pointing to a
Roman road into a vanished country, the shallowness of the sea, and the
many sands out there, and the vague legends that “Herne the Hunter”
once chased the deer where the sea now rolls, all support the idea of
great encroachments upon the land.
The town of Herne Bay is built upon a foreshore rising gradually from
the water. Where the houses end this line of coast is known as “The
Downs”; a rough upland stretch of common or commonable land which forms
a peculiar feature of the place, and is an unconventional playground
for the children, Herne Bay being above all else a seaside resort of
unsophisticated ways, and favoured by parents with large families.
Herne Bay was one of the earlier created seaside resorts, and rose from
out the azure main--or rather, the somewhat mud-streaked sea that
does duty for such--at the command of speculators, about 1830. It was
actually created, for until that time there were but a few cottages by
the shore, or anywhere in the neighbourhood, with a tiny green as the
only cultivated ground. The first pier at Herne Bay was the Royal Pier,
opened in 1831, the enterprise of a company which spent £50,000 on the
building of it. This was a wooden structure, 3,000 feet long, and had
a set of rails along its entire length. Carriages fitted with sails
were made to run along the tramway when the wind served. At those times
when it did not, I suppose one got out and shoved! Such were the simple
pleasures of Herne Bay when William the Fourth was King. Passengers
from the steamers landed at the pier-head. At the entrance were a
number of stone balusters, part of the parapet of old London Bridge,
demolished in 1832. They may still be noticed at the entrance to the
present pier.
But Herne Bay did not prosper. In vain was a parade installed in 1837,
and with it a Clock Tower. The Clock Tower is still with us at Herne
Bay; it forms indeed the one architectural, or decorative, feature of
the place. True, it is not greatly decorative, unless we adopt the
poet’s maxim in its favour, “the useful and the beautiful are one.” Of
the utility of a Clock Tower, with a prominent clock in good working
order, there can be, I take it, no doubt whatever; if only in that it
prevents children numerously and continually asking testy old gentlemen
what time it is.
Railways ruined the original pier financially, and neglect and the
teredo worm wrecked it materially. A second pier was built in 1873, and
a third, the present, in 1878, considerably longer than the original
and totalling a length of 3,920 feet. Electric cars run along it.
The fortunes of Herne Bay have of late years recovered, and bid fair
to continue so long as the site of it exists. There, however, is the
problem. The sea is in a destructively encroaching humour, and thus
the most elaborate defensive works have been necessary, to arrest the
scour of the shingle. No fewer than ninety-one stout timber groynes
project from the beach fronting the town, and do succeed in keeping the
foreshore intact.
Herne, the parent village of Herne Bay, is a quiet place, a good mile
and a half from the shore. It was originally subject to Reculver, the
mother-church of this district, to which the lesser churches paid dues.
In the end, Herne grew important enough, and bold enough, to refuse
tribute, and was threatened by Reculver in 1335 with excommunication;
to no purpose. But the parish still pays five shillings a year for the
repair of Reculver church, although that building is now nothing but a
ruin, and its twin towers existent only as land and sea marks.
A kind of poetic justice, a manner of retribution, befell Herne in
1833, when the newly planned town of Herne Bay, less than two miles
distant, obtained an Act of Parliament making it independent of Herne.
In the fine church are some interesting brasses, notably the remarkable
example to Christian, wife of Matthew Phelip. He was that hard warlike
Mayor of London who led the citizens to the battle of Barnet. She
“departed from this vale of misery” in 1471. The brass to Peter Halle
and his wife Elizabeth, 1420, show them lovingly, hand in hand.
“Here lies a piece of Christ, a star in dust,
A vein of gold, a china dish that must
Be used in Heaven, when God shall feed the just.”
Nicholas Ridley, who, as Bishop of London, suffered martyrdom in 1555
at Oxford, was appointed vicar here in 1538. Leaving, he exclaimed,
“Farewell, Herne, thou worshipful and wealthy parish, the first cure
whereunto I was called to minister God’s word. Thou hast heard of my
mouth ofttime the word of God preached, not after the Popish trade, but
after God’s gospel. Oh that the fruit had answered to the seed! But I
bless God for all that godly virtue and zeal of God’s word which the
Lord by preaching of His word did kindle manifestly both in the heart
and the life of that godly woman, my Lady Fiennes.” A brass to that
excellent lady, dated 1539, is among those to be seen here.
[Illustration: HERNE: THE “SMUGGLER’S LOOK-OUT.”]
The name of Herne, which really derives from the Anglo-Saxon _hierne_,
a corner, has by some been thought to derive from the herons that once
abounded in this marshy district; and the modern town of Herne Bay has
boldly taken a heron into the arms it has assumed. The village still
keeps some curious old houses; among them a white-painted corner house
opposite the church, with a tiny triangular window under the eaves,
said to have been a smuggler’s look-out and signalling station. A still
more remarkable building is that on the hill above the church, called,
from its ground-plan, the “Box Iron.” Extensive cellars exist beneath
it, and under the road, with a trap-door on the adjacent green. This
building, now very dilapidated, is supposed to have been a smugglers’
warehouse.
To Reculver from Herne Bay is a pleasant three miles’ walk, with
pastures on the right and the open sea on left. The cyclist and
the road-user in general must, however, go inland, by Beltinge and
Hillborough. Reculver stands at a dead-end. Having seen the historic
place, you cannot go forward, but must retrace a part of the way.
It is a strange, uncanny-looking corner, both by reason of its
end-of-the-world appearance and on account of those twin towers of
Reculver church which, crested as they are by skeleton iron steeples
and vast weather-vanes, have possibly given rise to the vulgar error of
the plural form, “Reculvers.” The place-name, a corruption of the Roman
_Regulbium_, no doubt seemed so strange that the ignorant thought it
was a description of these towers. Here in ancient times the Wantsum
channel, dividing the Isle of Thanet from the mainland, opened to the
sea, and here the Romans had a fortified port, corresponding with
_Rutupiæ_, at the southern extremity of the channel, hard by Sandwich.
Encroachment of the sea has left but little of the Roman station here,
and the church-towers, now the peculiar care of the Trinity House,
stand on the very edge of the tide, instead of half a mile from the
shore. This spot, traditionally that to which the converted King
Ethelbert retired and died, has always been a prominent sea-mark to
mariners, who must keep well inshore here if they would avoid the shoal
called Margate Hook. An old legend tells how the Abbess of Davington,
near Faversham, being narrowly saved from shipwreck here, while her
sister was drowned, built the twin-towered church alike in gratitude
for her own safety, to her sister’s memory, and for the welfare of
all who should in future voyage past. Ingoldsby tells the story, with
a vast difference, in his own peculiar vein, in “The Brothers of
Birchington,” Robert and Richard, whom he names as the none-too-pious
founders.
Reculver church, as its remaining towers show, was a fine example of
Early English or Late Norman architecture, and could easily have been
preserved; but the wanton hands and material minds of 1809 decreed
its destruction, lest the sea should do it instead! It would not
have passed the wit of man to preserve it, as the towers themselves
have been preserved. Substantial stone-and-cement aprons have been
constructed here by the Trinity House, and long protective wooden
groynes run out to defend the towers against further assault. Grim and
minatory they look in certain lights, as impressive in their way as the
giant statue of Memnon in Egypt.
[Illustration: RECULVER.]
The pilgrim of the coast must now turn inland, a good three miles, to
Chislett, a village in the marshes, whose name derives from “Cheselea,”
_i.e._ “shingle isle.” From thence, in less than a mile, he comes to
the main Canterbury and Margate road, at Grove Ferry.
The road leading across these marshy levels is really an ancient
causeway, marked on old maps “Sarre Wall.” This old history of it is
still very plainly manifest in its straight course, in its level,
raised above the surrounding fields, and in the deep dykes, brimming
with water and filled with rushes, on either side. The tall, delicate
poplars that line Sarre Wall and confer upon it a distinctive grace,
like that of some country road in Picardy, give a gentle sighing voice
to every breeze. It requires stronger winds to set the sword-blades of
the clustered rushes rustling sharply in the dykes.
This road into Sarre is your only entrance this way into the Isle of
Thanet, now an island only by courtesy, but still to be entered or
departed from by but two roads, one at either extremity; the one now
under discussion, the other at Sandwich. The marshy character of the
land still renders roads into Thanet scarce. The Wantsum, the channel
that formerly divided the Isle of Thanet from the mainland of Kent,
flowed past here in a salt-water estuary half a mile broad in the
times of the Romans, who were so concerned to defend each of its two
mouths, that they built the strong maritime fortresses of _Regulbium_
and _Rutupium_ where ruined Reculver and Richborough now stand. The
direct way into Thanet was then, as now, by this road, but it was by
ferry that travellers then crossed, and continued for many centuries to
cross. The Wantsum had already somewhat shrunk in the time of Bede, who
died in 735. It was then three furlongs wide. But that it was readily
navigable for ships for another couple of centuries is proved by Earl
Godwin’s fleet sailing through. That the channel must, however, have
been known from the earliest times as a dwindling passage seems evident
from the very name given to it by the Saxons; an adjectival form of the
verb _wansian_, to diminish, or to wane.[1]
[1] It is also said to have a common origin with the name of the
river Wensum, in Norfolk, and to signify a winding stream.
Yet this Wantsum appears to have been practicable for small vessels
until 1460, and it was not until 1485 that it had narrowed sufficiently
for the original bridge, dating from that year, to be built. That
bridge was of course a work of piety, owing its origin to the monastery
of the Abbey of SS. Peter and Paul, at Minster, which had from ancient
times owned the ferry and had derived from it a handsome revenue. In a
curious map of Thanet, the work of one of the monks of St. Augustine’s,
Canterbury, and now in the library of Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, is to be found a representation of the ferry-boat, with a
boatman and a nun, while a man is observed wading from the shore to the
boat, carrying a monk as passenger on his back. He is evidently one of
those employed at the ferry by the Abbey, for he wears a cross-badge on
his right arm.
[Illustration: THE WANTSUM FERRY.
_From an ancient Map._
]
The lands on either side of the now ineffectual Wantsum are known still
as “The Salts.”
The days when Sarre was a port are long since done and forgotten,
except by industrious delvers into old and musty records. At the same
time, it may be not entirely out of place, while lingering here by the
parapet of the little bridge, to recall those old circumstances of this
“ville of Sarre,” as it is still called. That it is so becomes evident
to all who pass through it, from the small notice-board displayed
at either end. Going eastward, you read “Town of Sarre,” and coming
west, “Ville of Sarre”; and greatly do these inscriptions puzzle
those wayfarers who have not read into the history of the place, and
therefore do not know that it is still technically a “ville,” that is
to say, one of the smaller members of the Cinque Port of Sandwich.
Standing here, on the insignificant little bridge that now spans the
shrunken Wantsum which in times gone by spread where the grass now
grows and the cows graze, it is difficult to realise those mediæval
days when Sarre was a favourite port of embarkation for France.
It is quite obvious that the name of the Wantsum and the fact of there
being nowadays but little water in it must be productive, year by year,
of many jocular remarks. I have heard cyclists and others, halting on
the bridge, and looking upon the narrow thread of water, say, “Wantsum?
yes, wants a good deal I should say. Well, I suppose it’ll _have_ to
want.”
This is always fondly considered to be new and original; but a census
of wayside remarks overheard in the tourist season would doubtless
reveal it to be said, in one form or another, many times a day. The
people of Sarre probably got tired of hearing it centuries ago, when
the early travellers from Canterbury exercised their wits upon it.
Only, in those days, you know, before the Wantsum had shrunk, and when
it was yet a broad channel, with a ferry-boat plying across, the joke
took another form; such as “H’m, Wantsum, call ye it, fellow? Beshrew
me, i’ fakins, but it seems, methinks, to want little.” The ferryman
must before long have grown quite misanthropical, at hearing the like.
Sir F. C. Burnand, sometime editor of _Punch_, and supposed to be a
wit, wrote and published in 1897 what he called the “ZZ Guide to the
Bold and Beautiful Kentish Coast.” “ZZ” was a new and original way of
writing “zigzag”! How did he think of it? He, of course, fell a ready
victim to the Wantsum’s name. “The river,” he writes, “was called the
‘Wantsum,’ and the low marshy land was named the ‘Wantsum Moor.’ But
’twas the fate of the Wantsum to be swallowed up by the bigger river
Stour. ‘Nobody Wantsum,’ and so the stream disappeared.”
Really, now!
[Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS-AT-WADE.]
You will search in vain for the parish church of Sarre. That ancient
building fell into decay when the port itself ceased to be a seaport
and dwindled to its present condition of a small village; and the
ruined walls of it became, in the usual manner, a useful quarry for the
local farmers engaged in building cowsheds and out-buildings, until
all traces of them disappeared. This church stood on the hill-top
between Sarre and Monkton. The church of St. Nicholas-at-Wade now
serves for Sarre. It stands prominently ahead, on the hill-top, with
tall black-flint tower, and opposite it is a group of picturesque
seventeenth-century houses, of Dutch-like aspect. The dedication to St.
Nicholas, the patron of sailors, marks the ancient maritime situation
of the place, and the termination “at-Wade” is a corruption of the
Latin “ad vadum”--that is to say, “at the ford”--an allusion to the
passage of the Wantsum.