The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

The old road from Sandwich to Deal ran across the sandy wastes through which the railway goes, but the sand-dunes that line the shore all the way between the towns, and stretch far inland, form a profound discouragement to those who would seek to trace the seashore. Maps rightly mark this space of coast “Blown Sand.” Blown it is, into hollows and heights, sometimes overgrown with a scanty herbage and thus anchored securely against being moved on again by the winds; but often mere loose sand-heaps that will be changed radically in shape by the next furious gale. It is distressing walking, and plaguy ill-favoured to boot; and where the sand at last dies away inland and gets mixed up with marshes, is about as easy and as awkward a place to get lost in as may well be imagined. The railway between Sandwich and Deal cuts midway through this swampy desolation.

UPPER DEAL.

The modern road to Deal lies open and unfenced for the most part, first across samples of these marshes, and then across chalk downs. It is a pleasant highway, where you get just as much of the dykes and waterlogged scenery as you want, without a depressing surfeit of it. By the time the turning for Worth is reached the shore is nearly three miles distant. Here a signpost directs on the left “To Word,” a spelling which reproduces the olden Saxon pronunciation of “Worth,” still current here; all one with the singular inability of the Kentish folk to enunciate “th”—a strange and widespread trick of the tongue which makes the rustics talk of “de wedder,” instead of the weather. The effect upon strangers is almost that of talking to foreigners. The word “shibboleth” itself would certainly bewray them; they would inevitably make it “shibboled.”

“Worth” is pure Anglo-Saxon: deriving from “Weorthig,” meaning an enclosure. The site of it was evidently a very early attempt at cultivation in these marshes.

We will not penetrate beyond Worth to the shore, the sands, and marshes, to the site of the old road, but will proceed along the present highway to Deal, through Shoulden.

The town of Deal is entered through what might at first be considered the inland modern suburb of Upper Deal, where the very striking red-brick seventeenth-century tower of St. Lawrence’s church confronts the wayfarer. But what is now “Upper” Deal is in fact the original place: the “Addelam” of Domesday, the “Dole” of earlier records. The place-name, which signifies a “dale,” is singularly appropriate for the spot where the rolling chalk hills descend to a long level, stretching to the sea. Before there was any town at all where Deal now faces the Channel, almost awash with the tides, “Upper” Deal was simply “Deal,” and what we now know as Deal was the upstart settlement called “Lower” Deal. Thus oddly is the situation reversed.

A curious piece of evidence as to the comparatively recent origin of the town is found in a Chancery case argued in 1663, when a witness seventy-two years of age declared that “he well knew the valley where Lower Deal is situated, and that he knew it before any house had been built there.”

The church of St. Lawrence is a singular mixture within, and has a singing gallery, quaintly painted with an East Indiaman in full sail, and bearing the date 1705; together with little pictures of pilots and terrestrial globes, and the inscription: “This Gallery was built by ye Pilots of Deal.” It will be noted that, in the construction of this road into Deal, the old Dutch-like houses here have suffered some mutilation.

It is a mile-long affair of incredibly mean streets from Upper Deal to the seashore. When the town arose from these levels in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it came into existence as a place of ship-chandlers and purveyors, and grubbed along in a kind of squalid, casual prosperity which apparently no one expected to last. Hence the little grey-brick houses, that seem to have been built with small confidence in the future. Here and there, however, you find some charmingly designed old shop-fronts and fanlights, in the nicest taste, unobtrusive but in just proportion.