Herne Bay is a place of entirely modern creation, and does not stand upon a bay. The coastline, in fact, runs remarkably straight between Whitstable and Margate, and anything in the nature of a bay is not to be seen. But, as old writers speak of a point here, it seems likely that a bay of some sort existed and has disappeared in the great wastage of the land that has certainly taken place all along this coast and around Sheppey. The “Street Stones” at Whitstable, pointing to a Roman road into a vanished country, the shallowness of the sea, and the many sands out there, and the vague legends that “Herne the Hunter” once chased the deer where the sea now rolls, all support the idea of great encroachments upon the land.

The town of Herne Bay is built upon a foreshore rising gradually from the water. Where the houses end this line of coast is known as “The Downs”; a rough upland stretch of common or commonable land which forms a peculiar feature of the place, and is an unconventional playground for the children, Herne Bay being above all else a seaside resort of unsophisticated ways, and favoured by parents with large families.

Herne Bay was one of the earlier created seaside resorts, and rose from out the azure main—or rather, the somewhat mud-streaked sea that does duty for such—at the command of speculators, about 1830. It was actually created, for until that time there were but a few cottages by the shore, or anywhere in the neighbourhood, with a tiny green as the only cultivated ground. The first pier at Herne Bay was the Royal Pier, opened in 1831, the enterprise of a company which spent £50,000 on the building of it. This was a wooden structure, 3,000 feet long, and had a set of rails along its entire length. Carriages fitted with sails were made to run along the tramway when the wind served. At those times when it did not, I suppose one got out and shoved! Such were the simple pleasures of Herne Bay when William the Fourth was King. Passengers from the steamers landed at the pier-head. At the entrance were a number of stone balusters, part of the parapet of old London Bridge, demolished in 1832. They may still be noticed at the entrance to the present pier.

But Herne Bay did not prosper. In vain was a parade installed in 1837, and with it a Clock Tower. The Clock Tower is still with us at Herne Bay; it forms indeed the one architectural, or decorative, feature of the place. True, it is not greatly decorative, unless we adopt the poet’s maxim in its favour, “the useful and the beautiful are one.” Of the utility of a Clock Tower, with a prominent clock in good working order, there can be, I take it, no doubt whatever; if only in that it prevents children numerously and continually asking testy old gentlemen what time it is.

Railways ruined the original pier financially, and neglect and the teredo worm wrecked it materially. A second pier was built in 1873, and a third, the present, in 1878, considerably longer than the original and totalling a length of 3,920 feet. Electric cars run along it.

The fortunes of Herne Bay have of late years recovered, and bid fair to continue so long as the site of it exists. There, however, is the problem. The sea is in a destructively encroaching humour, and thus the most elaborate defensive works have been necessary, to arrest the scour of the shingle. No fewer than ninety-one stout timber groynes project from the beach fronting the town, and do succeed in keeping the foreshore intact.

Herne, the parent village of Herne Bay, is a quiet place, a good mile and a half from the shore. It was originally subject to Reculver, the mother-church of this district, to which the lesser churches paid dues. In the end, Herne grew important enough, and bold enough, to refuse tribute, and was threatened by Reculver in 1335 with excommunication; to no purpose. But the parish still pays five shillings a year for the repair of Reculver church, although that building is now nothing but a ruin, and its twin towers existent only as land and sea marks.

A kind of poetic justice, a manner of retribution, befell Herne in 1833, when the newly planned town of Herne Bay, less than two miles distant, obtained an Act of Parliament making it independent of Herne.

In the fine church are some interesting brasses, notably the remarkable example to Christian, wife of Matthew Phelip. He was that hard warlike Mayor of London who led the citizens to the battle of Barnet. She “departed from this vale of misery” in 1471. The brass to Peter Halle and his wife Elizabeth, 1420, show them lovingly, hand in hand.

Nicholas Ridley, who, as Bishop of London, suffered martyrdom in 1555 at Oxford, was appointed vicar here in 1538. Leaving, he exclaimed, “Farewell, Herne, thou worshipful and wealthy parish, the first cure whereunto I was called to minister God’s word. Thou hast heard of my mouth ofttime the word of God preached, not after the Popish trade, but after God’s gospel. Oh that the fruit had answered to the seed! But I bless God for all that godly virtue and zeal of God’s word which the Lord by preaching of His word did kindle manifestly both in the heart and the life of that godly woman, my Lady Fiennes.” A brass to that excellent lady, dated 1539, is among those to be seen here.

The name of Herne, which really derives from the Anglo-Saxon hierne, a corner, has by some been thought to derive from the herons that once abounded in this marshy district; and the modern town of Herne Bay has boldly taken a heron into the arms it has assumed. The village still keeps some curious old houses; among them a white-painted corner house opposite the church, with a tiny triangular window under the eaves, said to have been a smuggler’s look-out and signalling station. A still more remarkable building is that on the hill above the church, called, from its ground-plan, the “Box Iron.” Extensive cellars exist beneath it, and under the road, with a trap-door on the adjacent green. This building, now very dilapidated, is supposed to have been a smugglers’ warehouse.

To Reculver from Herne Bay is a pleasant three miles’ walk, with pastures on the right and the open sea on left. The cyclist and the road-user in general must, however, go inland, by Beltinge and Hillborough. Reculver stands at a dead-end. Having seen the historic place, you cannot go forward, but must retrace a part of the way. It is a strange, uncanny-looking corner, both by reason of its end-of-the-world appearance and on account of those twin towers of Reculver church which, crested as they are by skeleton iron steeples and vast weather-vanes, have possibly given rise to the vulgar error of the plural form, “Reculvers.” The place-name, a corruption of the Roman Regulbium, no doubt seemed so strange that the ignorant thought it was a description of these towers. Here in ancient times the Wantsum channel, dividing the Isle of Thanet from the mainland, opened to the sea, and here the Romans had a fortified port, corresponding with RutupiÆ, at the southern extremity of the channel, hard by Sandwich. Encroachment of the sea has left but little of the Roman station here, and the church-towers, now the peculiar care of the Trinity House, stand on the very edge of the tide, instead of half a mile from the shore. This spot, traditionally that to which the converted King Ethelbert retired and died, has always been a prominent sea-mark to mariners, who must keep well inshore here if they would avoid the shoal called Margate Hook. An old legend tells how the Abbess of Davington, near Faversham, being narrowly saved from shipwreck here, while her sister was drowned, built the twin-towered church alike in gratitude for her own safety, to her sister’s memory, and for the welfare of all who should in future voyage past. Ingoldsby tells the story, with a vast difference, in his own peculiar vein, in “The Brothers of Birchington,” Robert and Richard, whom he names as the none-too-pious founders.

Reculver church, as its remaining towers show, was a fine example of Early English or Late Norman architecture, and could easily have been preserved; but the wanton hands and material minds of 1809 decreed its destruction, lest the sea should do it instead! It would not have passed the wit of man to preserve it, as the towers themselves have been preserved. Substantial stone-and-cement aprons have been constructed here by the Trinity House, and long protective wooden groynes run out to defend the towers against further assault. Grim and minatory they look in certain lights, as impressive in their way as the giant statue of Memnon in Egypt.

The pilgrim of the coast must now turn inland, a good three miles, to Chislett, a village in the marshes, whose name derives from “Cheselea,” i.e. “shingle isle.” From thence, in less than a mile, he comes to the main Canterbury and Margate road, at Grove Ferry.

The road leading across these marshy levels is really an ancient causeway, marked on old maps “Sarre Wall.” This old history of it is still very plainly manifest in its straight course, in its level, raised above the surrounding fields, and in the deep dykes, brimming with water and filled with rushes, on either side. The tall, delicate poplars that line Sarre Wall and confer upon it a distinctive grace, like that of some country road in Picardy, give a gentle sighing voice to every breeze. It requires stronger winds to set the sword-blades of the clustered rushes rustling sharply in the dykes.

This road into Sarre is your only entrance this way into the Isle of Thanet, now an island only by courtesy, but still to be entered or departed from by but two roads, one at either extremity; the one now under discussion, the other at Sandwich. The marshy character of the land still renders roads into Thanet scarce. The Wantsum, the channel that formerly divided the Isle of Thanet from the mainland of Kent, flowed past here in a salt-water estuary half a mile broad in the times of the Romans, who were so concerned to defend each of its two mouths, that they built the strong maritime fortresses of Regulbium and Rutupium where ruined Reculver and Richborough now stand. The direct way into Thanet was then, as now, by this road, but it was by ferry that travellers then crossed, and continued for many centuries to cross. The Wantsum had already somewhat shrunk in the time of Bede, who died in 735. It was then three furlongs wide. But that it was readily navigable for ships for another couple of centuries is proved by Earl Godwin’s fleet sailing through. That the channel must, however, have been known from the earliest times as a dwindling passage seems evident from the very name given to it by the Saxons; an adjectival form of the verb wansian, to diminish, or to wane.1

Yet this Wantsum appears to have been practicable for small vessels until 1460, and it was not until 1485 that it had narrowed sufficiently for the original bridge, dating from that year, to be built. That bridge was of course a work of piety, owing its origin to the monastery of the Abbey of SS. Peter and Paul, at Minster, which had from ancient times owned the ferry and had derived from it a handsome revenue. In a curious map of Thanet, the work of one of the monks of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, and now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is to be found a representation of the ferry-boat, with a boatman and a nun, while a man is observed wading from the shore to the boat, carrying a monk as passenger on his back. He is evidently one of those employed at the ferry by the Abbey, for he wears a cross-badge on his right arm.

The lands on either side of the now ineffectual Wantsum are known still as “The Salts.”

The days when Sarre was a port are long since done and forgotten, except by industrious delvers into old and musty records. At the same time, it may be not entirely out of place, while lingering here by the parapet of the little bridge, to recall those old circumstances of this “ville of Sarre,” as it is still called. That it is so becomes evident to all who pass through it, from the small notice-board displayed at either end. Going eastward, you read “Town of Sarre,” and coming west, “Ville of Sarre”; and greatly do these inscriptions puzzle those wayfarers who have not read into the history of the place, and therefore do not know that it is still technically a “ville,” that is to say, one of the smaller members of the Cinque Port of Sandwich.

Standing here, on the insignificant little bridge that now spans the shrunken Wantsum which in times gone by spread where the grass now grows and the cows graze, it is difficult to realise those mediÆval days when Sarre was a favourite port of embarkation for France.

It is quite obvious that the name of the Wantsum and the fact of there being nowadays but little water in it must be productive, year by year, of many jocular remarks. I have heard cyclists and others, halting on the bridge, and looking upon the narrow thread of water, say, “Wantsum? yes, wants a good deal I should say. Well, I suppose it’ll have to want.”

This is always fondly considered to be new and original; but a census of wayside remarks overheard in the tourist season would doubtless reveal it to be said, in one form or another, many times a day. The people of Sarre probably got tired of hearing it centuries ago, when the early travellers from Canterbury exercised their wits upon it. Only, in those days, you know, before the Wantsum had shrunk, and when it was yet a broad channel, with a ferry-boat plying across, the joke took another form; such as “H’m, Wantsum, call ye it, fellow? Beshrew me, i’ fakins, but it seems, methinks, to want little.” The ferryman must before long have grown quite misanthropical, at hearing the like.

Sir F.C. Burnand, sometime editor of Punch, and supposed to be a wit, wrote and published in 1897 what he called the “ZZ Guide to the Bold and Beautiful Kentish Coast.” “ZZ” was a new and original way of writing “zigzag”! How did he think of it? He, of course, fell a ready victim to the Wantsum’s name. “The river,” he writes, “was called the ‘Wantsum,’ and the low marshy land was named the ‘Wantsum Moor.’ But ’twas the fate of the Wantsum to be swallowed up by the bigger river Stour. ‘Nobody Wantsum,’ and so the stream disappeared.”

Really, now!

You will search in vain for the parish church of Sarre. That ancient building fell into decay when the port itself ceased to be a seaport and dwindled to its present condition of a small village; and the ruined walls of it became, in the usual manner, a useful quarry for the local farmers engaged in building cowsheds and out-buildings, until all traces of them disappeared. This church stood on the hill-top between Sarre and Monkton. The church of St. Nicholas-at-Wade now serves for Sarre. It stands prominently ahead, on the hill-top, with tall black-flint tower, and opposite it is a group of picturesque seventeenth-century houses, of Dutch-like aspect. The dedication to St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors, marks the ancient maritime situation of the place, and the termination “at-Wade” is a corruption of the Latin “ad vadum”—that is to say, “at the ford”—an allusion to the passage of the Wantsum.