Further thoughts on the Swalecliffe foreshore

Readers with local knowledge can add valuable additional information, suggest alternative interpretations or simply correct mistakes.

It is useful to add information to the Research and Discoveries report, in Archaeologia Cantiana CXLIV, on Peter Slaughter’s Bronze Age River and Pastoral Life on the Foreshore at Swalecliffe, pp. 315-320. It is a location that is not as pristine as it looks. Over more than fifty years, it has been repeatedly damaged [pg376]by human action, by the construction and removal of groynes, removal of lines of former fish weirs/traps, covered by barge loads of imported shingle as part of the beach maintenance process and the necessary occasional diversions of the natural flow of the brook at its mouth. Much archaeological study of it has, sadly, been compromised, though it is still a rich location.

Peter’s findings are most interesting. He refers to ‘... a shallow depression or channel in the surrounding brickearth’, adding that further work was required to clarify whether it represented a former course of the brook, or a flood channel, or flood deposits adjacent to the river, and located some 24 metres north of the withy-tie site (the W, on the plan – Fig. 1). It is probably none of those options but is most likely the backfilled trench containing the long sea sewage outfall pipe constructed in 1972.

It was a deep trench (Figs 1-2) cut on a line from the sewage works, across the marsh, through the sea bank and the hard shingle bank offshore to a point a good distance seaward. More to the point, the trench’s alignment matches exactly a line drawn through the three artefact locations P, C and W, on Peter’s map. Its alignment is shown on Canterbury City Council’s City Engineer’s Department map, reference CCC 477/2, used as Enclosure 3 of the City Council’s evidence at the Sea Wall Public Inquiry of 1980. Peter’s summary report makes no mention of the effect of the sea outfall trench across the research site, which must have been considerable and damaging, though perhaps further information will emerge with a final detailed report.

[fg]jpg|Fig. 1 Swalecliffe long sea outfall 1972.|Image[/fg]

[fg]jpg|Fig. 2 Swalecliffe foreshore long sea outfall 1972.|Image[/fg]

Mike Whitley[pg377]