The Fifth Quarter of the Globe or Romney Marsh part 1

In an earlier blog — Flint and Dungeness — I described the connnection between a/ the (naturally occurring) flints embedded in chalk landscapes, and b/ the shingle promontory of Dungeness — one of the largest accumulations of shingle in the world. I said that the erosion of the chalk cliffs, from the Isle of White to Beachey Head, had released the flints into the sea; and that the flint nodules had then been rounded into pebbles (shingle) by the action of the sea. And that, concurrent with this process, the pebbles had been driven inexorably eastward by the geological phenomenon known as longshore drift — the lateral movement of the pebbles caused by the prevailing winds driving the waves obliquely against the shoreline.

Direction of waves breaking onto shoreline /////////////////////////////////////

Movement of shingle along the shoreline →●→●→●→●

Well, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with my description. However, I now discover — from Jill Eddison’s admirably clear Romney Marsh ~ Survival on a Frontier. The History Press, 2009 — that the process was infinitely more interesting, and that we have to go back to the ice age for a fuller understanding. It is true that south east England was not glaciated. Nonetheless, while it was (not unnaturally) extremely cold and snow–covered during the winters, it thawed during the summers. As a result the chalk fractured and fell as amorphous blocks into the sea, or was carried to the same source by the rivers. The chalk then rapidly disolved, so that, as Jill Eddison says (p31), ‘What is now the floor of the English Channel was littered by a vast array of flints.’ And it was these flints — periodically subject also to storm surges from the Atlantic into the ‘bottleneck’ of the Channel — which came to form the south west ‘arm’ of ‘The Marsh’. I also learn, from S P B Mais’ forthright and highly readable The Land of the Cinque Ports. Christopher Johnson, 1949 (O/P) that the Atlantic waters also make their way down the east coast of the British Isles where they clash with their Channel–running cousins. Hence, great quantities of silt are thrown up from the sea bed — which have choked the harbours of Winchelsea and Rye over the centuries (in addition to turning the faces of many ferry–travellers green (!) ... And if you think I refer only to recent and contemporary times, there used to be a regular packet service from Rye to Boulogne…)

The history and formation of Romney Marsh — the generic name for Romney, Walland, and Denge Marshes — is very complex, rich, and many–faceted. I will return to the subject in future blogs, but for the moment the main points to grasp are 1/ that Shingle is ‘The Queen of the Marsh’, and 2/ without the build up of the shingle barriers the region would today in all liklihood be like the salt marshes at Stiffkey, north Norfolk.

There are many things that are now questioned as to the accuracy of the map reproduced below. In my next blog on the subject I shall refer to these.