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Updated: June 10, 2025
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.
The villas that must have covered the gentle slopes towards the Wantsum fell into decay; the fortresses were destroyed; the roads ran wild; and the sea and river began slowly to slit up the central part of the great navigable backwater. A hundred and fifty years after Hengest and Horsa, if those excellent gentlemen ever really existed, another famous landing took place in Thanet.
After the Reformation, however, things changed greatly. The silting up of the Wantsum and the decay of Sandwich Haven left Thanet quite out of the world, remote from all the main highroads of the new England. Ships now went past the North Foreland to London, and knew it only as a dangerous point, not without a sinister reputation for wrecking.
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.
Already in Bede's time the Wantsum was beginning to get silted up, mainly by the muddy deposits brought down by the Stour. It was then only three furlongs wide, and could be forded at two points, near Sarr and at Wade.
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