11

Romney Marsh

Remote, but Not Entirely Forgotten

In the past, historians were inclined to believe that the diversity of Britain’s geology and geography played the major role in shaping the country’s landscape; the human response to these two natural factors resulted in the character of particular landscapes. This human response, they felt, was a largely predictable, almost mechanical process, which in turn served to heighten the perceived importance of the underlying natural factors in the landscape’s evolution. Ideas of this sort invariably acquire labels: this view of landscape formation was described as ‘environmental determinism’. I never really got to grips with the pros and cons of it, largely because I couldn’t face becoming embroiled in an academic debate, but also because, as somebody who also had a life in a real landscape outside the groves of academe, I could see the arguments were largely irrelevant: of course people adapted to their surroundings. They had to. But they did so in very different and often unpredictable ways. You can see this when you look more closely at two geographically widely separated, but superficially similar, flat, wetland landscapes: the Fens (where we have just been) and Romney Marsh, on the south coast, in Kent.

I have spent most of my life in the Fens, and I was astonished at the differences I found when I began to look into the history of Romney Marsh. The region is very much smaller than both the Fens and the Somerset Levels, England’s largest and second largest wetlands. Of course there are obvious similarities in all three, which are mostly to do with the control of water. All flood-prone landscapes would be uninhabitable if water was not removed as quickly as possible; in the past, this was done using wide, straightened rivers and drainage channels. Similarly, tidal floods and storms originating out at sea have to be prevented by banks, walls and other coastal defences.

Romney Marsh occupies about a hundred square miles on the coast of south-eastern Kent, about ten miles south of Ashford. It is bounded to the north by the Royal Military Canal, which is twenty-eight miles long and follows the line of a low escarpment that forms the edge of the Marsh between Seabrook, near Folkestone (in the east) and Winchelsea (in the west). It was built between 1805 and 1809 at first by civil, then by military engineers, as a defensive measure against an expected invasion by Napoleon’s forces. That invasion never materialized, but the canal survived, to be used as a barrier against smugglers from the Marsh (of whom Russell Thorndike’s smuggler Dr Syn is the most famous fictional example). By 1877 the canal had been partly abandoned, but at the start of the Second World War it again came into use as a line of defence against German invasion. This involved the construction of numerous concrete pillboxes, which still survive. Today a footpath runs along the entire length of the canal, which has become a major nature reserve and visitor attraction.1

So did the landscape of Romney Marsh somehow predetermine the existence of the Military Canal? When I first learned about it I was immediately reminded of two broadly similar features in the Fens: the Car Dyke and the Ouse Relief Channel. The Car Dyke runs north–south along the edge of the Fens in south Lincolnshire and in Cambridgeshire, especially around Peterborough.² This great ditch and bank was dug and maintained in Roman times, when it probably formed part of a larger canal system linking the Fens with the Humber. There is also evidence to suggest that in places it would not have worked as a practical canal and was dug instead as a drain to catch floodwater running off higher ground. In the southern Fens, around the River Ouse, flooding incidents in the late 1930s, followed by disastrous inundations in 1947 and 1953, led to the construction of a cut-off channel to catch water from higher ground and take it directly towards the Ouse outfall.³ From the air, the Military Canal, the Car Dyke and the recent Ouse Relief Channel all look very similar, but their histories could not be more different. So did the landscape ‘determine’ how people behaved? My answer is a firm No. The form of the landscape may have affected the shape and positioning of the various canals, dykes, banks and ditches, but their creation was the result of human will and inclination alone – which in turn was shaped by the entirely unpredictable course of history. It is also worth noting that there are many places, along, for example, the Norfolk fen-edge or the Witham valley in the Lincolnshire Fens, where catch water drains would have worked well, but were never constructed.

The coast of Romney Marsh forms an open V-shape, with the promontory of Dungeness at its centre. To the north and east it runs through Dymchurch to Hythe. This stretch of beach includes four Martello towers, which were built at the same time as the canal, to house artillery – a first line of defence against a seaborne invasion. The coastline from Dungeness to Rye, in the west, is more low-lying and forms the edge of Walland Marsh to the north. Walland Marsh was drained and reclaimed in the later Middle Ages, slightly later than Romney Marsh alongside it, to the north and east. The two marshes (which I treat here as one) are separated by the thirteenth-century Rhee Wall, a bank that was part of early attempts to drain silts from out of New Romney harbour.

As a Fenman, used to vast open vistas with occasional glimpses of distant hills, I find the more intimate scale of the Romney Marshes immensely appealing.4 It used to be believed that ‘remote’ landscapes such as high moors and low-lying marshes had not been occupied in early times. Today we can appreciate that this was very rarely the case. And Romney Marsh is no exception. We now know the area was occupied in prehistoric times, and I suspect we have probably underestimated the size and permanence of those communities, just as we have done in the Fens. Hints of the region’s pre-Roman life can be found in the recent discovery of a sea-going vessel at Dover and a timber causeway that resembled Flag Fen, in marshes at Shinewater Park, near Eastbourne.⁵ In Roman times, the wet grasslands were grazed by sheep in summer, when ground conditions were suitable, while salt was extracted from seawater trapped in inland lagoons. But what most took me by surprise, on my first visit to Romney Marsh, was the form and appearance of the numerous fine churches. They were so varied and appealing, yet so unlike the towering stone buildings that the prosperous medieval wool trade had bequeathed to the Fens. There are many probable reasons for this: fewer larger abbeys, with their well-run estates, together with smaller parishes and landlords whose principal holdings lay outside the Marsh.

In Saxon times, areas of the marshes had become habitable and during the early Middle Ages many of the drained salt marshes had become permanent pasture. Farmers in the area had even developed their own breed of sheep – the Romney Marsh. They are quite large animals, with good fleeces and a natural resistance to foot problems caused by damp ground.

In the early Middle Ages, the population of the Marsh grew steadily. Mixed farming – crops and livestock – prospered, and the villages grew in size. Soon Romney Marsh became the most heavily populated district in Kent. Then in the 1230s the area was hit by some serious storms, which culminated in the great storm of 1287 which breached the shingle barrier, and the sea rushed in. Romney harbour was filled with silt and never fully recovered. To make matters worse, in the fourteenth century the region was ravaged by plague; by the end of the century its population had halved. As elsewhere in rural England, the smaller population led to labour shortages on the land. So farmers, and landowners (especially the larger ones), took to the raising of sheep in huge quantities. The raising of sheep requires far less labour than arable farming: fields do not have to be ploughed or harrowed and the cutting of hay for winter forage is far less arduous than reaping, storing and then threshing grain. The sheep trade continued to be the mainstay of the Marsh economy right through to the nineteenth century, when the Romney Marsh breed was exported to Australia in considerable numbers. But the sheep trade did not require a large labour force, and from being the most heavily settled part of Kent in the thirteenth century, by the mid-seventeenth century it had become the county’s least populated region – a situation that persisted into Victorian times.

Such sharply fluctuating fortunes have left their mark on the parish churches of the region, which are strikingly diverse in size, shape and date. Some interiors preserve unusual seventeenth- and eighteenth-century box-pews, which have survived because the parishes were never large nor prosperous enough to replace them with the heavy and rather characterless Victorian benches that are such a common feature in so many urban and rural churches elsewhere in Britain. I also have a particularly soft spot for the Romney Marsh churches because they are wonderful examples of modern conservation. In the 1980s it was realized that the churches of the Marsh were in poor condition and the small parishes often lacked the funds to maintain them. So in 1982 the Romney Marsh Historic Churches Trust was set up. Soon there were articles and appeals in the national press and a successful fund-raising campaign was mounted. Thanks to the Trust, and the people behind the individual parish churches, the churches of Romney Marsh are now recognized, collectively, as a unique national treasure. With their hanging tiles, quirky towers and higgledy-piggledy graveyards, the churches of Romney Marsh are such a contrast to the soaring magnificence of the great Decorated and Perpendicular churches that the later medieval wool trade bequeathed to the Fens and eastern England. Their interiors too are a delight: as rich and varied as their exteriors. My personal favourite is the smallest, loneliest, most remote church in the Marsh.

The church of St Thomas Becket, Fairfield sits isolated on a low man-made mound in a marshy field. When it was built in the late twelfth century it was surrounded by the houses of a small village, which has long since vanished, to be replaced by bare fields of sheep and grass. The steep roofs were originally thatched with the reeds that grow so luxuriantly in the surrounding landscape. I had expected this well-known church to be somehow lonely and forgotten. But to my surprise that wasn’t what I found when we visited. Far from it; the place felt loved.

I have to confess that I have never been a purist when it comes to buildings. It doesn’t concern me that large parts of St Thomas Becket have been rebuilt. It’s part of a natural process, a continuing tradition; timber buildings in wet areas are always more liable to decay and the restoration work, by the architect W. D. Caröe in 1913, was at pains to re-use fifteenth-century timbers and eighteenth-century bricks, which had themselves replaced the wattle-and-daub of the original, late twelfth-century walls. So, all in all it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast – but a perfect one. It represents what happens when people care about, when they love, a building. Inside, in stark contrast to the open, windswept landscape outside, a sense of warmth exudes from the timber roof and low, massive beams that frame a superb set of painted eighteenth-century box-pews in the nave. The village outside it may have vanished, but I don’t think I have ever come across a church building that has been more cherished.