Romney Marshes from the air
30th July 2009, ThursdayYesterday I had the opportunity to fly over the marsh in a light aircraft. From above, the level landscape springs into a jigsaw puzzle of irregular fields divided by wriggling ditches.
It’s not easy to get good quality photos through plastic windows, but some I took show up historic features very clearly.
Two resources are invaluable in interpreting these pictures: Ordnance Survey Explorer 125 and “Romney Marsh - Survival on a Frontier” by Jill Eddison.
In the right foreground is Snargate and beyond it, Brenzett. Between the two the road runs straight and is shadowed by a parallel hedgerow as it traces the course of the Rhee Wall, actually an artificial watercourse excavated in the 11th century to scour silt from the mouth of the Rother - at that time by New Romney. The diagonal straight line to the right is the railway that carries nuclear waste from Dungeness Power Station, seen in the distance. The grid of lanes and ditches to the right are the eastern end of Brookland’s 12th century planned landscape.
Another massive civil engineering project from the past: the Napoleonic-era Royal Military Canal 1804-9, at Ruckinge. the regular kinks would permit a gun to fire along the straight at invaders attempting to cross. Pre-existing field boundaries can be seen, cut through by the canal to the dismay of land-owners then.
Walland Marsh, looking east over the new wind farm to the reservoir at Little Cheyne Court, New Romney beyond. Through the bottom right corner runs the course of the Wainway Fleet, a major mediaeval waterway now repesented by a narrow ditch. Up to the left of it can be seen a series of curves which mark successive innings as the Wainway shrank.
Hythe, clinging to the hill’s foot. A Cinque Port once set on an inlet protected by fans of shingle, seen beyond on Palmarsh Ranges, partly excavated and terminating abruptly in the straight line of the Canal Cut of 1878. In the far distance is Cliff End.
Flint pebble beaches and 20th century concrete architecture. In the foreground, the Denge Sound Mirrors, built 1916-30 as a mechanical precursor of radar, a system to provide early warning of the approach of aircraft or airships. Beyond them, Dungeness Nuclear Power Stations A (1965) & B (1983).