‘The Flats’ are an interzone of reclaimed land where the sea once separated the Isle of Thanet from the ‘mainland’. It is an expansive landscape, open to the sky. Exposed and exposing, it is a place to be alone. There are few trees to break the plane; only occasional outcrops of sloe, elder, and hawthorn, and the rows of black poplars that mark farm boundaries. Distances are exaggerated by the linear geometry of pylons trailing their cables in desire lines across the fields, their current crackling softly as it flows to other places.
For over a thousand years, the Wantsum Channel was an important coastal shipping route, but the last ship sailed through it in 1672. A surreal reminder of this is the information board in the hamlet of West Stourmouth, five miles from the nearest coast, marking the spot where a ninth-century naval battle took place. Over time, the channel silted up and, after a long and piecemeal programme of land reclamation, it vanished almost completely. All that remains of it now is the River Wantsum, and the title ‘river’ seems a little overblown for what is effectively a large, barely moving, drainage ditch.
The drowsing farmland in this nowhere between the two coasts is a mood amplifier. On a bright, warm day, it is uplifting and full of light, but get caught after dusk on a winter’s afternoon, when the shadows build under the hedgerows and spill out of ditches and hollows, and it feels very different.
Each end of the corridor of low land where the old sea channel lay, is haunted by a vanished settlement. At its southern end, where the River Wantsum is subsumed by the larger River Stour, is the lost town of Stonar. Destroyed by a French attack 600 years ago, the town was never rebuilt, and no sign of it remains. Any imprint that might have lingered has been hidden beneath industrial units and overspill estates from the nearby town of Sandwich. At the other end of the departed channel, the clifftop towers at Reculver are all that remains of a monastery, which in turn was built on the ruins of a Roman fort and town that was abandoned to the sea long ago. Roman artefacts are occasionally found on the beach below the towers, coughed back into the sunlight by coastal erosion.
Between these vanished towns, along the course of the ancient channel, the flats spread from coast to coast. This reclaimed land and its lost shorelines have remained an uncertain seam between the island and mainland. Despite the drainage and reclamation, there is a gap that never quite closed, lingering on in administrative boundaries and in the subconscious layers of shared history and imagination. Apocryphal stories and jokes are still told about locals who have never left the island and for whom the city of Canterbury, fifteen miles away, is a foreign and magical place.
A more tangible, physical barrier lives on in the topography. The map is laced with the blue lines marking rivers and gutters, and the near absence of roads hints at the comparatively recent drainage of the marshes and their transformation into productive arable land.
In the dry summers of our altered climate, the fields are left parched, cracks going deep into the dry soil. The ground has been drained, reclaimed, divided, planted, but still it seems to have a memory of the water that was here, as though the ghost of a shallow sea still lies on the land: in winter, mist pools on the flats; in summer, windblown barley moves in waves that sound, if you close your eyes, like the swell of the ocean on a sand beach. The thirsty land seems to be longing for the sea to reclaim it.
Despite the annual summer-long droughts, you sense the threat of floods and rising sea levels. You can see the anxiety in the attempts to control the river system with sluices, pumping stations, and the dredging of waterways, and in the concrete walls and movable barriers that have sprung up in the coastal towns and shoreline villages. Like siege preparations, new ‘bulkhead’ gates have appeared on slipways and seafront aprons.
Over recent years, totalitarian agriculture has regularised — monetised — the landscape. I’ve heard rumours that, in some places, farmers are becoming guardians of the landscape, but they’re still tearing out the hedgerows here. Lost field boundaries are still traceable in the dark grass of the fields. Fertilisers and insecticides have left the waterways polluted by run-off and sterilised the local environment. Insects, mammals and wild flowers have been greatly reduced as the homogenised landscape has swallowed habitats.
Despite the depletion of the natural environment, the aural landscape is still full of birdsong: skylarks in summer, crows in winter. In the damp of late summer, the sweet, earthy smell of Himalayan Balsam chokes the zigzagging ditches. It’s also known as ‘Kiss-Me-On-The-Mountain’, but there are no mountains here. The closest thing to hills are the mounds left behind by salt production, and these reduce every year as farmers’ ploughs dissolve them back into the surrounding fields.
The stillness is broken by the flow of traffic on the dual-carriageway; a river of noise and colour, joined by tributaries that spill out of the coastal towns. It is one of only three roads that cross The Flats. Walk down the track that bumps alongside it, and you’ll find the stumps of paths and farm-roads —some official, some not — severed by the carriageway and going nowhere, cut off by the unstoppable flow of traffic and fallen into disuse. Before they were overlaid by the modern road network, these paths traced the most direct routes between the villages and churches, desire lines worn into the land by generations. New roads like this are no respecters of old barriers or thoroughfares.
A signpost, all but lost in the foliage, suggests that the path continues across the river of cars, but the far bank seems unreachable across the many coloured current sweeping past. The truncated paths afford a different perspective of the dual-carriageway than the usual driver’s-eye view. It is possible to stand, hidden by the trees along the bank, close enough to feel the percussive beats of air as traffic passes. The hard-shoulder and embankment below you are dirty beaches beside the torrent of noise – inaccessible except by stranded motorists, or the determined, and who, apart from you, would be determined to visit this strange, forgotten strip of tangled vegetation?
The banks are studded with jetsam swept here by the current, and the tide has left the dandelions, docks, and grasses black with oily mud and exhaust soot. Among the birch and ash that line the road, scraps of windblown plastic tangle in branches, and food wrappers flutter. Amongst them, tipped sideways, as though it has stumbled there drunkenly, is a white leather armchair. Perhaps it was transported there by a morbid spectator in order to view one of the many accident blackspots along the road.
Speed and convenience exact their fee on travellers. In the trees, close by, there are flowers, long dead, but still tied with ribbon, and in the brambles, small fragments of shattered car bodywork catch the sunlight. Watch the passing cars from your vantage point, and you might glimpse, behind tinted windscreens, drivers glance at the roadside memento mori and look away, disinterested in the slow catastrophe of road casualties. We choose not to think too closely about it as we rush past, taking our own chances, ignoring the gouged turf, broken branches, and the fluttering police tape.
Like historic upheavals of the landscape, erased towns and vanished seas, we feel instinctively that these smaller, personal traumas should leave something behind — that some trace or echo should cling. And, for a while, before the bleached photographs and scattered mementos of these roadside shrines are dispersed by the wind, something of the incident lingers in the landscape. But, after blue lights have gone and the clean-up team have done their work, it’s surprising how little remains.
