The sequence of early land-claims on the Walland and Romney Marshes, southern Britain: a preliminary hypothesis and some implications

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Altitudinal, stratigraphic and documentary evidence combines to suggest that the earliest artificial defence against marine flooding in the area is the structure herein called the Rumensea Wall, which strikes across the marshland from the rear of the coastal barrier (including the Dungeness foreland) apparently to the degraded cliff line at the Wealden scarp. The available evidence is interpreted to suggest that the Rumensea Wall could have been built in late pre-Conquest times, after the Lympne tidal inlet in the northeast had become closed. Approximately one-half of the marshland area was thereby at a stroke protected from marine flooding. Furthermore, the Rumensea Wall provided the springboard for a comparatively simple sequence of substantial land-claims on the salt marshes to the southwest that ranged in date into the early medieval period. The later Flandrian (Holocene) stratigraphy in this part of the marshland is variably abbreviated on account of these enclosures. For the same reason, the thick late mid-Flandrian peat which ranges beneath most of the area displays a significant, differential consolidation between enclosures, although remaining thickest near the margins of the wetland. The absolute thickness of the peat varies laterally with a number of sedimentological factors, including, in places, erosion of the top. but its degree of consolidation is largely controlled by the amount of overlying silt that could be accumulated prior to enclosure.