Richborough & The Drill Hall
Sunday 31 May 2026 · 09:08 · Sandwich, Kent
A small group this time — just Charlotte, Caroline and me — meeting at the car park on The Quay in Sandwich at nine o'clock on the last day of May. The Drill Hall, the pizza restaurant we were aiming for at the end of the walk, doesn't open until noon on Sundays, so we had the morning to cover eight kilometres before it did. The route takes in the medieval town wall circuit first, then heads north on Richborough Road towards the Roman fort, loops around the site, and returns via the Stour riverside path. It is a flat walk — barely 32 metres of ascent across the whole circuit — but the conditions made it harder than it looks on paper. The temperature reached 24°C and the air was thick with humidity throughout, the dew point climbing to 14°C by mid-morning: not oppressive by the standards of a hot continental summer, but for a bank holiday weekend in Kent it was enough to sap the pace and keep the conversation mostly short of breath. The sky stayed largely overcast through the morning — a WNW wind pushing cloud across without clearing it.
We started by following The Bulwark, the path that runs along the top of Sandwich's medieval earth ramparts. Sandwich is one of the original Cinque Ports, the confederation of five Kent and Sussex coastal towns that provided ships and men for the Crown's naval requirements from the 11th century, and its walls reflect the strategic importance — and the repeated vulnerability — of the town throughout the medieval period. The earthwork defences were raised and maintained in response to French raids that periodically devastated the town: Sandwich was attacked in 1217, 1314 and again in 1457, when a French fleet under Pierre de Brézé landed several thousand soldiers who spent three days destroying buildings and carrying off goods and people before withdrawing. After that raid the earthworks were substantially reinforced. The circuit of The Bulwark, Mill Wall, The Ropewalk and The Butts follows the original line of the wall, raised paths lined with mature plane and lime trees and dotted with Victorian lamp posts, now given over entirely to walkers and making for a pleasant and shaded start to any route through the town.
Leaving the town wall circuit, the route follows New Street and then Ash Road before turning right onto Richborough Road, which runs roughly north across flat arable and pasture land towards the fort. The houses thin out quickly and the road becomes a lane between hedgerows, the kind of thing that could be anywhere in rural east Kent except that the destination ahead gives everything around it a particular weight. It was on this stretch that we passed a garden wall covered in roses — white and cream, fully open, blowsy with the humid warmth — and stopped briefly to photograph them. Late May roses on Richborough Road, with the fields of what was once the most intensively Romanised site in Britain stretching away in every direction: the contrast between the domesticity of the garden and the scale of what surrounded it seemed worth a moment.
Richborough Castle — to use its English Heritage designation — was where Roman Britain began. The Claudian invasion of AD 43 landed here, at what was then a broad natural harbour at the northern mouth of the Wantsum Channel, the waterway that separated the Isle of Thanet from the mainland and made this the shortest crossing point from Gaul. The beachhead fortifications — twin V-shaped ditches running for at least 650 metres along the former coastline — are the earliest military works of the Roman occupation, dug within days or weeks of Claudius's legions coming ashore. From this point, Watling Street began its run to London and then north to Wroxeter and Chester. For most of the period of Roman rule, Rutupiae was the principal port of entry to the province: the place where officials arrived, goods were landed, and the Roman Empire's most distant possession received its news from home.
The path across the fields opens out onto a wide, flat grassland before the fort comes into view. This stretch of the walk is some of the emptiest ground in east Kent — the drained Stonar levels, the reclaimed land that now lies where the Wantsum once ran — and looking north from the track there is almost nothing between you and the horizon except grass and sky.
The cattle we encountered before reaching the fort were not on the map but were enthusiastic about making themselves known. Three of them — two Holstein-Friesians and what appeared to be a darker Hereford cross — came directly towards us on the path and stood at a range of about two metres, regarding us with more curiosity than concern. The path runs through a working field here, and walkers are a known quantity; the cows were not threatening, merely interested, and after a brief standoff during which nobody was quite sure whose move it was, they stepped aside and let us through. Cows on footpaths are a feature of the Kent countryside that most regular walkers have accommodated into their calculations; these ones were accommodating in return.
Beyond the cattle field, Castle Road bends around the exterior of the fort's north and west walls. The scale of the surviving Roman masonry is the thing that stops most people the first time they see it. The walls of the Saxon Shore fort — built around AD 277, most likely under the rebel emperor Carausius, using stone and tile and the rubble of the demolished triumphal arch that had previously stood here — survive to a height of several metres across much of their circuit. That arch had been a quadrifrons, a four-faced gateway straddling the beginning of Watling Street, comparable in scale with the arches of the Roman Forum and visible from far out to sea. When Carausius ordered it demolished to build his coastal fort, the material was reused as fill and facing for walls that have outlasted almost everything else the Romans built in Britain.
In 2023, English Heritage built a replica wooden gateway at the centre of the fort, on the precise location of the original Claudian gatehouse of AD 43, giving visitors a platform from which the full sweep of the fort walls is visible. From the exterior path we were walking, the wooden structure is visible above the surviving stone, a modern interruption in an otherwise ancient skyline. The fort sits 2.5 miles from the present coastline — the Wantsum Channel silted progressively through the medieval period and was effectively closed by the 17th century — and what was once a busy working harbour is now quiet pastoral land. The River Stour still runs along the eastern edge of the site, and it was the Stourside path that we followed back south to Sandwich, a pleasant if humid stretch of waterside walking to complete the circuit. Charlotte’s pithy but accurate Strava description summed it up rather well: “Sweaty, Humid, Pollen-Filled Walk”.
We arrived back at The Quay a little before noon, which left twenty minutes to sit in the car park with ice-cold drinks — Monsters, in the interest of full accuracy — before The Drill Hall opened its doors. The restaurant occupies a former Victorian drill hall right on the quayside, and the pizza is wood-fired and seriously good. Charlotte and Caroline both had the Ananas — which is the Drill Hall's version of ham and pineapple, upgraded considerably from the pub standard — while I had the Luna Rosso: pepperoni and a little goat's cheese, charred blistered crust, exactly what eight kilometres of sticky heat had created an appetite for. A small group, a flat walk made unexpectedly demanding by the weather, and an excellent lunch: not a bad way to begin the last day of May.
8.02 km · 32 m elevation · 2:02:07 moving time · 11,004 steps
Thanks to Caroline and Charlotte for joining the walk today.
The Quay, Sandwich
Postcode: CT13 9EW
The Quay car park is on the west bank of the River Stour in Sandwich town centre, adjacent to the quayside and within a minutes' walk of the Drill Hall. Sandwich railway station is approximately 600 metres — walk north along Station Road and then west through the town to the quay.
