It’s just over an hour from London by high-speed train, but the isle of Thanet in East Kent feels very distant from the capital. This is marginal country: a flat and watery Saxon landscape so visually distinct from the Kentish hills and orchards it borders that it might be a part of East Anglia, or Jutland, eroded and washed ashore, far from home. Though the Wantsum Channel, the narrow waterway which once separated the isle from the British mainland, has long since silted up, the sense of apartness — of a “Planet Thanet” somehow removed from the affairs of the rest of the country — endures.
Viewed on a clear day from the chalk cliffs of Ramsgate, the matching white cliffs of France’s Cap Blanc Nez, our isle’s separated geological twin, shimmer on the horizon. In 1940 newsreels, Goering was famously shown peering at a defiant Britain from over there, no doubt picking out the town’s landmarks — the tall church spires that guided ships into harbour, the gaps and folds between the dazzling cliffs — through his binoculars. Heavily bombed in World War Two, and the marshalling point for the Little Ships of the Dunkirk evacuation, Ramsgate and Thanet’s proximity to continental Europe, source of both threat and promise, has shaped the region from the beginning of Britain’s recorded history. Perched on the edge of England, surrounded on three sides by the North Sea, the Isle of Thanet is simultaneously both marginal and central to our island’s story. Wherever it was finished, the first draft of the nation’s history was always written here.
Joined to Ramsgate by the village of Pegwell — a series of flint-walled cottages perched precariously on chalk cliffs concealing tunnels that lead to long-disused smugglers’ caves — sweeps the broad expanse of Pegwell Bay. For thousands of years the bay’s sombre mudflats, quaking bogs and salt marshes, patrolled by long-legged wading birds and basking seals, have served as the first beachhead for migrants and adventurers, missionaries and invaders making their way to this island.
It was here, in 2017, that archaeologists discovered the expeditionary fort built by Julius Caesar in 54 BC to defend his newly-landed legions from the hostile Celtic tribesmen, and here that the legions of Claudius returned in 43 AD, this time to stay. Here, too, were the great oyster beds of Ritupiae, singled out by Roman gourmets like the poet Juvenal for special praise, part of the network of trade and empire linking this lonely shoreline to the great hub of Mediterranean civilisation.
On the other side of the bay, the great flint fort of Richborough, built half a millennium of Roman rule after Caesar splashed ashore, failed to dissuade Saxon raiders from seizing the island for their own.
According to legend, the Jutish brothers Hengist and Horsa, summoned by the Romano-British king Vortigern as mercenaries, first came ashore right here, beginning the process that carved out Saxon England from Celtic Britain. A wooden longship, a gift of the Danish government, commemorates this turning point, its dragon-headed prow looking fiercely out across the North Sea towards its distant homeland.
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