Romney Marsh: the debatable ground
“..... the whole country was a debatable ground between land and sea, and when one prevailed peat grew, and when the other had the mastery, silts were deposited." (Skertchly, writing about the Fens in 1877).
Romney Marsh is one of the three largest coastal lowlands in England, after the Fenlands and the Somerset Levels, with which it has both similarities and differences. Its distinctive landscape of embanked and reclaimed tidal flats and salt marshes, rare nucleated villages, a peppering of churches, the great ness of shingle and the hemispheric sky have been an inspiration for artists and others. John Piper noted that, "the most frequent and most characteristic views in the Marsh have foregrounds of pale warmth, distances of misted trees and low hills, and and intervening low levels of pale light". It is the subtitles of the landscape of the topography noticed by the artist that became the question marks for the historian, geographer and natural scientist.
Changes in topography bear witness to distinctive sedimentary environments of the present and recent past: marshes, shingle banks, dunes, tidal flats and creeks, salt freshwater lagoons, reed swamps and fens. The intermingling of landforms and plant communities determined the type of livelihood, the location of settlements and the route ways within and across the marsh.
The unconsolidated sediments of the marsh attain thicknesses of 25 metres and more attenuating landwards and up the valleys, and contain a record of changes during the past 10, ODO years. What is not known is the nature of the sedimentary environments for the first 5000 years. Prehistoric occupation and land use may have occurred, but now lies deeply buried, though shallow excavations and surface scatters reveal unequivocal evidence of occupation from the Bronze Age onwards.
The inlets and havens of Hythe, New Romney and Rye provided safe and secure anchorage at different times, and are recognised by the locations of two of the Cinque Ports here. Two of these havens are now closed, and may contain the remains of harbour works and vessels from the Roman Period to the eighteenth century, sealed beneath silts and sands.
Parish boundaries and church sites on the marsh, many established from the eleventh century, owe their location to the physical features of the marsh or the stages of reclamation. Boundaries follow water courses or sea-embankments, and churches sit on raised mounds which may be the relics of habitation sites comparable to the worten of the marshes of Lower Saxony.
The response of the settlers on the marsh to the debate between land and sea was reclamation, enclosure and engineering works to keep out the sea and clear harbours of sediment. The institutional framework and the techniques used were probably developed initially here, and applied later to the other coastal lowlands. Before the use of concrete and steel sheets pilings to keep out the sea, clay embankments and groynes of faggots were characteristic.
The debate was sometimes wild and acrimonious, to which the great storms of the late medieval warm period bear witness. There were extensive inundations, and vast volumes of shingle and fine grained sediments were moved around. The debate continues to the present day and will continue into the future: the impact of the enhanced greenhouse effect and sea-level change needs to be assessed.
The Romney Marsh Research Trust, since its inception in 1987, has been a focus for· interdisciplinary research: much of the research has been innovatory and is being published. Much more research requires to be done on data collection and analysis, on improving our present techniques, and in evolving new ones.