Broomhill 1988

(Fieldwork by kind permission of the farmers, A.H. Cooke & Sons and Mr. Baker)

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The fourth season of excavation at Broomhill continued the work of examining the structure of the church, and placing the building in the broader con text of the landscape.

On the church itself, this year 's work was intended to clarify some of the problems of the structural history, particularly of the first and second phases of the building. The study of the surrounding area was continued with resistivity survey and aw section was cut through Churchland Wall to record its structure and the sediments hich underlie it. As in 1987 the study of the sedimentary deposits at Broomhill was carried out with Dr. Michael Tooley.

This year's excavation was supported. by grant from the Romney Marsh Research Trust and other funds were provided by the Royal Archaeological Institute, I. D. Margary Fund of the Institute of Archaeology and the Kent Archaeological Society. These allowed a machine to be used to remove the plough soil on the north part of the nave and subsequently to back-fill the site.

On the north side of the church was an aisle belonging to the building, similar to, though less substantial than, the main building, but clearly built against it.

The excavations in 1988 produced evidence of occupation preceding the building. Beyond the west end of the church, below a layer presumed to be of sediment, a burnt surface was found with considerable quantities of pottery. Underneath the chancel a thin band of carbonized grain and chaff was recorded and samples were taken for identification. The previous year's work had found a midden with shell, fish bones and other carbonized material beneath the churchyard wall.

The resistivity survey intended to identify other buildings nearby was unsuccessful due to the extreme dryness of the soil. These conditions also made the examination of Churchlands Wall difficult. No evidence was found for a brushwood core to the wall as suggested by some medieval accounts. The wall appears to be of dump construction, partly built out of soil from a coarsely laminated sediment which it immediately overlay. Finer laminated sediments and traces of a marsh which it immediately overlay were recorded underneath.

Mark Gardiner

STRATIGRAPHIC INVESTIGATIONS AT BROOMHILL

The most remarkable revelation of Dr. Tooley's work in 1987 concerned the relative rates of accumulation of sediment in the area. Whereas only a few centimetres of sediment had accumulated above the buried shingle in the 2,500 years before the church was built in about 1300 A.D., over a metre has accumulated in less than 500 years since it was lost.

The investigations at Broomhill continued in 1988, in collaboration with Mark Gardiner. 22 borings were put down across the Level and 9 borings were put down at right angles to and across the Churchland Wall south-west of the church.

The maximum depth reached by the borings was 7 m from the surface, at about 5 m O.D. (5 metres above Ordnance Datum, Newlyn). South-east of borehole B-15, from B-15 to B-5, the depth to which boring was possible was restricted by the buried shingle, the subcrop of which varies from c.+2 to c.-15 m O.D., and indicates very clearly a buried morphology of shingle ridges and valleys. The trend north-east/south-west and have been infilled by different types of sediments.

The resistivity survey intended to identify other buildings nearby was unsuccessful due to the extreme dryness of the soil. These conditions also made the examination of Churchlands Wall difficult. No evidence was found for a brushwood core to the wall as suggested by some medieval accounts. The wall appeared instead to be of dump construction, partly built out of soil from a coarsely laminated sediment which it immediately overlay. Finer laminated sediments and traces of a marsh which it immediately overlay were recorded underneath.

Mark Gardiner

The high-level, surface shingle at B-12 and B-13, on which Beach Banks Cottage stands, is part of a different, later, formation than the buried shingle. It was laid down during the storms of the thirteenth century.

North-west of B-15, it was not possible to reach the bottom of the marine sediments, which included occasional layers of mollusc shells, edible cockle and Scrobicularia. It is thought that these sediments represent a possible creek channel which was connected to the Rother, heading north-westwards at this point.

The results of the stratigraphic analysis show that a great variety of sedimentary environments existed on Broomhill Level, and that the complexity of soil types is mirrored by a complex of buried sediments. This complex is controlled in part by the orientation and altitudes of the buried shingle, and in part by the course of what is probably the buried channel of the Rother estuary.

Many questions remain unanswered. What, for instance, was the date of the deposition of the high-level shingle on which Beach Banks Cottage stands? Was the buried channel an early course of the Rother, or was it a lagoon opening directly onto the sea? What is the significance of the various accumulations of peat, organic silts, and laminated clays which are found at different levels across the site? Some of these questions will be addressed in field and laboratory work in 1989.

Michael Tooley

DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE BROOMHILL AREA

Broomhill Church lies interred in a metre of marine sediments, which are post-medieval in date. One of the objects of this project is to discover when and from which direction those sediments arrived. Information has been found in the records of the Commissioners of Sewers for Walland Marsh and for Guldeford Level, in leases of All Souls College in Oxford, and in Depositions in the Public Record Office in London.

When the present coastline is compared to that on Symondson's map of 1596 (above), it is apparent that a major tidal inlet (the Wainway, or Weyneway, Creek) has silted up and disappeared, and that at Broomhill the coast has retreated some 600 m in a northward direction. The story so far is as follows:

In 1620 witnesses said that in their memory, in about 1570, flat-bottomed vessels of 5-6 feet draught had brought goods up the Wainway to unload them at Wainway Gutt, two miles from Lydd, but by 1620 this was quite silted up. It had also been possible in 1570 for 40 to 60 ships of 80-100 tons to lie at road, anchored in the Wainway, but in 1620 not one could do so.

On the north side of the Wainway one large block of salt-marsh was inned by Sir Norton Knatchbull in 1598, and another by Sir John Guldeford at about the same time. The Wainway Channel was walled in, block by block, until by 1700 it had been entirely reclaimed.

Broomhill lay between the Wainway and the south shore, which consisted at Broomhill and Camber of a long low shingle bank, vulnerable to breaches and over-washing by the sea. During the 16th century there were at least three long-lived breaches through which the tides flowed in and out. In behind this precarious barrier there was no reclaimed land south of the Kent Wall immediately prior to 1563 (or in living memory which stretched back to about 1540: leases of All Souls show it was salt marsh in 1541). Therefore the site of the church must have been lost sometime previous to that. In 1563 800 acres of salt marsh (which included Sir William Ffinches Salts 'lying to the church') were enclosed by walls. But this was lost again in 1570, when the sea broke the walls down and drowned (so we are told) 1,162 sheep belonging to the farmer, John Berry. In about 1585, 600 acres was reclaimed again, but this did not include the church site. The Churchland Wall was built at that time.

By the 18th century the coastline was held by a sea wall built of earth carted from local fields, reinforced by large quantities of wood brought in by boat from Sussex. But this wall too was liable to breaching. In December 1734 a major breach occurred at Camber, but that was too far away to affect Broomhill. By 1749 the wall at Broomhill itself was ruinous, and until a new wall, commissioned in 1761, was completed in 1764, Broomhill was once again open on the south to the tides, for a period of some fifteen years.

This project continues, and the main aims at the moment are to pursue the history of the site of the church in the decades before 1563, the state of the Broomhill coast in the 17th century, and the reclamation of the Wainway.

Jill Eddison