ROMNEY—The Mysterious Marsh

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30562, 3 October 1964, Page 5

ROMNEY —The Mysterious Marsh

IBy

F. PITT CLARK]

THEY told me all sorts of fanciful stories about Romney Marsh as we drank good Kentish beer in the cosy bar of the “Shepherd and Crook” at Burmarsh. T hey said fairies lived in the gorse bushes that grow on Dungeness beach, that witches can occasionally be seen by moonlight careering on broomsticks over the sea wall at Dymchurch and that ghost ships go sailing over the fields through the night mists. It was all good pub fun, of course. But these tales are actually based on the legends of this great tract of map-flat meadow, beach and sand, which stretches ten miles wide and 18 miles long down Kent’s southern seaboard. For this is the Mysterious Marsh—a land of infinite history, of romance and magic. It appeared—literally—from under the sea. And hence, of course, the figment of the ghost ships. The fairies? Well, I hold no particular brief for the little people, though I have to admit that I have talked to a Marshman who claimed actually to have spoken to them on the planchette. As for the witches, you can put them down to the bubbling fun of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham, author of the “Ingoldsby Legends” and sometime rector of the Marsh parish of Snargate. He loved, most unparsonically, to conjure up stories of . evil crones and warlocks.

But fact or fiction, once you go to the Marsh—or the “Mesh,” as the natives call it—you inevitably fall under its spell. What that spell is compounded of, I cannot tell. Of history, perhaps, or legend, or something to do with the

ethereal light that drenches the whole marshscape at sundown. You come upon the Marsh by way of cobble-streeted Rye, in Sussex. Or from Canterbury, where most visitors to Britain go to see the cathedral. Or you can come from Dover, with its noble castle, or from the sparkling seaside resorts of Folkestone and Hythe. It is within easy reach of any of these towns. There are train connexions with the Marsh towns of Lydd and New Romney. There’s a bus route right along the coast. And the “smallest railway in the world” will puff you in its miniature coaches across field and shingle waste all the way from Hythe to Dungeness Point, where the Marsh shelves down again into the sea from whence it came. Different World I drive out of Hythe, westward through the Kentish hills, to the village of Lympne, trudge across a field and look down on another world. It Is a world as different from the rest of Kent’s downs and woodlands as can be. For mile after mile, the Marsh stretches out to the distant shimmer of the sea, curving round in a beautiful arc to dimly-visible Dungeness Point. Here is the miracle, the magic of Romney Marsh. Two thousand years ago, when the Romans were here, the place on which I now stand was not a soft, tree-clad hilltop. It was the summit of a cliff. The land below me was a vast bay of the sea. Roman ships rode upon the waters. What is now the village of Lympne was a thriving seaport, protected by a castle, the remains of which I can see still in great, scattered stones on the hillside. Now the nearest waves are three miles distant.

But it wasn’t the Marsh witches, nor yet the fairies, who waved the sea back with a magic wand, even if they did tell me so in the “Shep-

herd and Crook.” It happened in the ordinary course of nature and, if I may summarise the story of many centuries in a few sentences, like this:

The harbour silted up. The Romans began to reclaim the land. The Saxons followed the Romans’ example. And, gradually, the “Mysterious Marsh” rose above sea level. I take in the web of winding roads and dykes, the farms and villages and cottages and the thousands of white blobs which are sheep grazing 300 feet below me, and drop down Lympne Hill to Dymchurch.

I turn to trace the course of the Royal Military Canal, which William Pitt built between Hythe and Rye to keep another enemy at bayone Napoleon Bonaparte. In Dymchurch itself I find the New Hall (it was really new in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I) where the Marshmen’s ruling body, the Lords, Bailiff and Jurats, hold their meetings, wear cocked hats, and goldbraided dress and read ancient documents.

But Romney Marsh is like that. Its roots are deep down in the past And there they stay.