Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

I. BETWEEN RAMSGATE AND SANDOWN CASTLE

Thanet, as everybody knows, was an island in Caesar’s time; and Bede[2456] says that it was separated from the mainland by an estuary three furlongs broad: but the late George Dowker[2457] concluded from ‘an attentive examination of the estuary’ that it was ‘much shallower and narrower than is generally supposed’.

John Lewis,[2458] a well-known antiquary of the eighteenth century, and William Boys,[2459] the historian of Sandwich, maintained that an estuary, in which was included the harbour of Richborough, known to the Romans as Portus Ritupis, had extended from the cliffs of Ramsgate southward to Walmer, covering the sites of Stonar and Sandwich and indeed the whole of the low ground between Sandwich and Deal, and washing the shore of an island on which stood Richborough Castle. A recent writer, Mr. H. Sharpe,[2460] who endorses this opinion, argues that the Roman road from Canterbury to Richborough harbour (ad portum Ritupis[2461]) terminated at Each End. The road ‘cannot’, he insists, ‘have run to Sandwich in Roman times. Montagu Burrows ... Cinque Ports, 1888, p. 30,[2462] says—“Sandwich and Stonar are wholly English. No Roman remains have been found at either” ... there is good reason to suppose that the land upon which it [Sandwich] stands and the land over which the Sandwich end of the road runs were not formed when the Romans were here.’[2463] And again, ‘There is another reason for supposing that Each End was ... the place where the boats left the mainland for the island [of Richborough]. [The road running northward from Dover] is marked on the Ordnance map[2464] as a Roman road, and if complete would run to Each End, not to Richborough Castle or to Sandwich ... the last mile from [Woodnesborough] to Each End, is missing.’[2465]

Now, in regard to Stonar, Professor Burrows, as we shall presently see, is mistaken; and, granting that the Roman road from Dover would, if complete, run to Each End, how can Mr. Sharpe prove that it did not run further? The late George Dowker stated, in a paper which was published after his death, that he had himself ‘traced the Roman road to Woodnesborough, and thence by Each End to near the Richborough Island’;[2466] and the views of Lewis and Boys, which Mr. Sharpe endorses, as to the wide extent of the estuary at the time of the Roman conquest of Britain have been stultified by discoveries to which Mr. Sharpe does not allude. Roach Smith affirms that ‘Roman remains, indicative of habitations, have been discovered in the sand-hills considerably to the north of Sandown Castle’, and that ‘coins have been found at Stonar, opposite to Richborough’; and from these facts he infers that ‘the recession of the sea from the low land between Thanet and Walmer probably commenced at a period much earlier than has been commonly supposed’.[2467]

That the hill on which Richborough Castle stood was nearly if not quite insulated is generally admitted;[2468] but Mr. George E. Fox remarks that it ‘was probably not washed by the open sea, though a broad channel may have flowed close beside it, forming one of the southern mouths of the strait, while a narrow strip of salt-marsh and sand-bank lay between it and the open sea’. It would be more correct to say that the island, on its eastern side, was separated by a channel from Stonar Beach, the southern extremity of which lay east by north of the site of Sandwich: the sand-hills were on the south-eastern side of this beach, from which they were divided by a narrow channel. Mr. Fox goes on to say that ‘a large extent of what is now marshland, lying to the west of the hill, may then have ... formed the haven,[2469] making of the camp hill an island’. He argues, however, that, on the eastern side, the channel ‘could not have hugged the hill very closely, as at no great distance to the south of the station on this same side, and in the low ground presumably near the shore, fragments of a Roman house were discovered in 1846’.[2470]

In the year 1876 Dowker affirmed that ‘the low shore and sand hills’ which now extend from the Deal beach to the latitude of Sandwich ‘extended [in the time of Caesar] much less than at present’;[2471] and in a map which accompanied his paper[2472] he contrasted the low-water line between Walmer and Sandwich, as he believed it to have existed in 55 B.C., with the low-water line as it existed at the time when he wrote. In the latitude of Sandwich the modern low-water line is traced on this map a mile and a half east of the hypothetical ancient line, which distance gradually diminishes to three-quarters of a mile in the latitude of Worth and about one furlong in the latitude of Deal. I find a difficulty in reconciling this map with Dowker’s own statement that ‘Roman pottery, coins and traces of the Roman occupation have been found in the sand-hills—and indeed below the sand-hills considerably northward of Deal, beyond Sandown Castle’;[2473] and from the fact which this statement records it follows that, in the time of the Roman occupation of Britain, the shore-line at the place where the discoveries in question were made cannot have been widely different from what it is now.