THANET AS AN ISLAND, SHOWING THE WANTSUM, FROM AN ANCIENT MAP.
The four miles onward to Sandwich are a dead level. In the dawn of history, when Thanet was still an island, and when ships bound to and from London sailed round the Wantsum channel, by Minster and Sarre, the sea rolled where now this road runs. It is an impressive thought, and renders this scenery more than a little romantic. As you proceed, with the reedy dykes on the right, towards the red, clustered roofs of Sandwich, ahead, there rise away across the marshes to the right the grey, solitary walls of Richborough, the place that was once the Roman port and fortress of Rutupiæ, guarding this entrance of that ancient channel, just as Regulbium kept watch and ward at the other. The river Stour, which here flows in an extraordinary looped course, prevents access to Richborough this way, and one must come to it through Sandwich. No one, once arrived on that spot, can be insensible to its peculiar charm; the hoary walls, still in places some thirty feet high and ten feet eighteen inches thick, displaying the Roman construction of rubble and stone, alternating with courses of red brick. The walls form three sides of a square, the fourth side originally giving upon the water in those days when the Roman vessels anchored here at the quays. The area enclosed by these walls is ten acres, now under corn. A singular puzzle for archæologists, who have not yet explained the meaning of it, is the extraordinary subterranean passage, discovered in 1866, which runs beneath this enclosed area and is, in effect, a tunnel some five feet high, made of flints embedded in concrete. It has a right-hand elbow and ends abruptly. There is usually some one at hand with candle and matches, who is prepared, for a modest consideration, to conduct the visitor along this passage. Above this, in the centre of the station, is a concrete platform in the form of a cross. This, also, is a prime enigma to the inquiring mind. Some archæologists consider it to have been the base on which was built a pharos, or lighthouse.
The mind of the contemplative visitor to this solitary spot dwells upon the contrast between the busy Roman port of sixteen hundred years ago and the remoteness of life from it now. Ivy of great age mantles the walls, and wheat grows ripe to harvest in the great field that was once a populous camp. All is changed, except the cliffs of Thanet, shining whitely in the distance; and they, too, bear the burden of Ramsgate’s sprawling streets, dimly made out against the skyline.
Hundreds of thousands of Roman coins have been dug up here, turned up by the plough, or just picked up from the wet earth, after rain. They were for the most part common copper denarii, but a great many silver coins, and some gold, have been found, not a few among them of great rarity. I have been fired by the story of these finds to seek for myself. Even a denarius would be something to have retrieved by one’s own personal efforts from this site of an ancient civilisation. But nothing rewarded half a day’s grubbing among the clods. ’Twas ever thus—yesterday, to-morrow, some one else, not to-day—not to ourselves. Oh the hard luck of it!
CHAPTER XV
SANDWICH
Approaching Sandwich, whose towers and roof-tops rise picturesquely ahead from the level marshes, mingled with the masts and spars of a few vessels lying at the town quays, a belt of spindly trees is passed, stretching away to the left. They are trees of a considerable height and size, but they wear an ill-nourished appearance, as they cannot fail to do when we consider how poor the soil on which they grow. It is, in fact, nothing but sand and pebbles. One solitary residence, Stonar House, stands amid these weird woods. The spot keeps an air of reticence and melancholy, appropriate enough, for it is the site of a vanished town: the empty space where once stood and flourished the town and port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an old, and at one time a greater and more prosperous, rival of Sandwich. Rarely ever has a town vanished so utterly as this. We first hear of it in A.D. 456, when the Britons routed the invading Saxons at a spot fixed by the old annalist “in a field close to the Inscribed Stone [Lapis Tituli, in the original Latin] on the shores of the Gallic sea.” What was that stone? No one can say. Here again was fought a battle: when Edmund Ironside defeated the Danes, in 1019.
FISHERGATE, SANDWICH.