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!
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.