United States or Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
You must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight in geographical features, and the Wantsum as the equivalent of the Solent Sea. In the very earliest period of our history, before ever the existing names had been given at all to the towns or villages nay, when the towns and villages themselves were not Ruim was already a noteworthy island.
Off the old and obliterated south-eastern promontory of our island, where the land of Kent shelved almost imperceptibly into the Wantsum Strait, Ruim Island the Holm of the Headland stood out with its white wall of broken cliffs into the German Sea.
Its relations have all been with Rutupiæ, Sandwich, Canterbury, and the mainland. But the silting up of the Wantsum turned the new Thanet seaward, by the chalky cliffs; and the gaps or gates in that natural sea-wall now began to be of comparative importance as fishing stations and small havens. Ebb's Fleet was no longer the port of Ruim.
Nicholas, and Birchington villages, all of them, on the flat western slope. The growth in importance of the seaward escarpment dates only from the days when Thanet became practically a London suburb. With the Roman invasion Ruim saw a new epoch begin. A great organization took hold of Britain. Roads were made and colonies established.
But in earlier days Ruim Isle was not joined as now by flats and marshes to the adjacent mainland; the chalk dipped under the open Wantsum Strait, much as the chalk of Hampshire dips to-day under the Solent Sea, and reappeared again on the other side in the Thanet Downs, as it reappears in the Isle of Wight at the ridge of St. Boniface and the central hills about Newport and Carisbrooke.
Thanet is now all sea-front it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts, towards the open German Ocean. Ruim had then no sea-front at all, save the bare and inaccessible white cliffs; it turned, such as it was, not toward the sea, but toward the navigable Wantsum. Even until late in the middle ages Minster was the most important place in the whole island; and after it ranked Monkton, St.
Ruim at that time must have consisted almost entirely of open down, sloping upward from the tidal Wantsum, and extending a little farther out to sea than at the present moment. Pegwell Bay was then a wide sea-mouth; Sandwich flats did not yet exist; and the Stour itself fell into the Wantsum Strait at the place which still bears the historic name of Stourmouth.
The ruim, or forward cabin, occupying the greater part of the space, is appropriated to the common people, while the roef, or after-cabin, is for the better class; but as genteel people seldom patronize the trekschuit, this apartment is very small. It was drawn by horses, attached to a long rope made fast to the pole or mast, near the bow.
Still, the Wantsum was all this while gradually silting up, a grain at a time, and the Isle of Ruim was slowly becoming joined to the opposite mainland. When Leland visited it, in Henry VIII.'s reign, the change was almost complete.
There is reason, we know, in the roasting of eggs, and, if I have gone out of my way to introduce the ancient isle to you by its title of Ruim, it is in order that we might start clear of the odour of tea and shrimps, the artificial niggers, and cheap excursionists, that the name of Thanet brings up most prominently at the present day before the travelled mind of the modern Londoner.
Word Of The Day