The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

Hard by Sandgate Castle stands the centenary monument on the modest parade to Sir John Moore, the hero of Coruña, unveiled November 19th, 1909. The spot is appropriate because, at the back of Sandgate, up away out of sight, is Shorncliffe Camp, closely associated with that distinguished soldier. The military works in these parts, along a coast so peculiarly exposed to foreign invasion, are many and important. Henry the Eighth, as we have seen, was diligent in fortifying these low-lying shores, and there came a time, two hundred and sixty-five years later, when the Government of that day was equally concerned about a possible French attack. Then, in 1805, was constructed the famous “Royal Military Canal,” which extends a distance of about twenty miles from Rye to Hythe, with its sluices here at Seabrook, adjoining Sandgate railway-station. The canal is thirty feet wide and nine feet deep in the middle. Its function was, in connection with a regular line of martello towers on the beach, to hamper and impede a landing-force.

“Mr. Pitt’s Military Canal,” as it was in those days styled, formed the target for many shafts of ridicule. “The French,” said Ingoldsby, “managed indeed to scramble over the Rhine and the Rhone, and other insignificant currents, but they never did, or could, pass Mr. Pitt’s ‘Military Canal.’”

Here, where the Canal’s sluices pour their waters into the sea, are remains of military works, intended to defend this vital spot, with Shorncliffe Camp above. The world wags still with an amiable slowness here, the old horse-tramway through Sandgate to Hythe, belonging to the South-Eastern Railway, leaving the main road and progressing along the beach. The only trouble is the constant succession of motor-cars, generally racing at illegal speeds along these flat roads and producing clouds of dust.

HYTHE.

Seabrook melts insensibly into Hythe, that quaint old place whose name, signifying “the harbour,” proves how changed are the local conditions from those remote times when the little town first arose. Then ships came up to it. To-day the sea is distant across a mile-long waste of shingle, and, of all the four parishes in it, but one now remains; with but one church. This, the noble Early English church of St. Leonard, is of much architectural interest; but it is sadly to be supposed that the average holiday-maker is more attracted by the gruesome collection of ancient skulls, exhibited in the crypt, or undercroft. You may see these poor relics, if you have a mind to it, for the fee of threepence, and the curiously morbid taste widely distributed among sightseers brings in a plentiful harvest of pennies and threepenny-bits, all through the summer. The collection at present consists of some six hundred skulls and a neatly arranged stack of bones that once formed the framework of about seven thousand men. They are supposed to be the remains of men of some distant age who fell in battle by the seashore; and, whether they died in the hour of victory or of defeat, we may perhaps assume, now that their bones, so many centuries later, bring a modest income to the church of Hythe, that they did not die in vain. But whether they would have chosen to be a show for the curious and the vulgar is another matter. For myself, I think it a scandal and an indignity, and consider that the clergy of Hythe, past and present, deserve the greatest censure for holding and continuing the exhibition.

Were it not that scientific men, examining the skulls, have declared them all to be those of men, we might most fittingly assume that this undercroft was merely a charnel-house, like those seen in Brittany, to which the bones of the older occupants of the churchyard are from time to time removed; but since the remains are only those of men, and as many of the skulls exhibit gashes, the vague ancient legends of some great battle appear to be not without foundation. But at what period that great fight was fought, and between what opposing races, is uncertain. Hasted, in his “History of Kent,” tells us that the battle was fought A.D. 456, between the Britons and the Saxons, and that the Saxons were utterly defeated: “Vortimer still followed the retreating Saxons, and, coming up with them again on the seashore near Folkestone in the year 456, fought a third battle with them between that place and Hythe, gaining a complete victory. Nennius and others say it was fought in a field on the shores of the Gallic Sea, where stood the Lapis Populi.”

Another historian places the date of the battle three hundred and eighty-seven years later. “A.D. 843,” he says, “in the reign of Ethelwolf, the Danes landed on the coast of Kent, near to the town of Hyta, and proceeded as far as Canterbury, great part of which they burnt. At length Gustavus (then Governor of Kent) raised a considerable force, with which he opposed their progress; and, after an engagement in which the Danes were defeated, pursued them to their shipping on the sea-coast, where they made a most obstinate resistance. The Britons, however, were victorious, but the slaughter was prodigious, there being not less than thirty thousand left dead. After the battle the Britons, wearied with fatigue, returned to their homes, leaving the slain on the field of battle, where, being exposed to the different changes of the weather, the flesh rotted from the bones, which were afterwards collected and piled in heaps by the inhabitants, who in time removed them into a vault in one of the churches of Hyta, now called Hythe.”

Hythe owes a great deal to the memory of William Pitt, whose Military Canal has, in the more than a hundred years since it was made, become one of the loveliest of waterways, on which splendid boating, under the shade of century-old trees, may be had. Leaving the town, the road comes at once, past the bridge over the Canal and by the “Duke’s Head” inn, into the romantic region of Romney Marsh.

Romney Marsh was in merry Tom Ingoldsby’s time so out of the way that he could find it possible to say, with that humorous exaggeration which enshrines some little truth, “the world, according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Romney Marsh. In this last-named, and fifth, quarter of the globe a witch may still be occasionally discovered in favourable, i.e. stormy seasons, weathering Dungeness Point in an eggshell, or careering on her broomstick over Dymchurch Wall.”