The Smuggler’s Way
28 May 2018 · 16:51 · Coastal path, Reculver to Minnis Bay, Kent
The path between Reculver and Minnis Bay runs along the top of the sea wall, a narrow strip of tarmac separating the inter-tidal marsh on the right from the open sea on the left. It is part of the Viking Coastal Trail, a 32-mile circuit of the Isle of Thanet opened in 2001 and shared by walkers and cyclists, its western terminus anchored by the twin towers of Reculver on the skyline. Those towers are visible in the photograph, sitting at the vanishing point of the perspective line formed by the wooden groynes along the right-hand edge of the frame — small, distinct, and unmistakable to anyone who has seen them from this angle before.
The towers are what remains of the church of St Mary, built in the twelfth century on a site with a considerably longer history. The Romans established a fort here — Regulbium — in the early third century, one of the chain of Saxon Shore forts that ran from the Wash to Portsmouth, sited at the north-western end of the Wantsum Channel, the sea lane that then separated the Isle of Thanet from the mainland. The fort covered around three hectares, its flint walls backed with earth ramparts and surrounded by two ditches. When the Romans withdrew in the fifth century it fell into disuse, and in 669 King Ecgberht of Kent granted the land to a priest named Bassa for the foundation of a monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The church was built near the centre of the old Roman fort, largely from demolished Roman materials. The twin towers were added in the twelfth century; the rest of the church was demolished in 1805, its stone reused to build a replacement at Hillborough. Trinity House bought the towers the following year and underpinned them, recognising their value as a navigation marker for shipping. They have been acting in that capacity, on a coast that has lost a considerable amount of land to erosion in the intervening centuries, ever since.
The title of this photograph refers to the smuggling trade that worked this section of the north Kent coast through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reculver was, by several contemporary accounts, one of the North Kent gang's favoured landing places. In 1714 a group of 130 men landed a cargo on the isolated coast between Reculver and Birchington, splitting into two groups to carry it off inland; they were reported to the authorities by the vicar of Whitstable, who had been refused his customary tithe on goods landed along what he considered his coast — a detail that says something about the degree to which the trade had become embedded in the local economy. Later, in 1820, large and violent landings were again taking place here, carried out by men from Wingham and Canterbury. The Reverend Richard Barham, a clergyman and writer better known for his Ingoldsby Legends, used Reculver as the setting for his poem The Smuggler's Leap, drawing on the landscape that is visible in this photograph as his backdrop. The path along the sea wall, for all its current orderliness, was once a working route for contraband making its way from the beach to the inland villages.
In infrared, the coastal vegetation — the grasses and low shrubs along the margins of the marsh — renders white and slightly luminous, which has the effect of making the landscape look older and less certain than it does in colour. The sky, darkened by the 720nm conversion, presses down on the horizon. The wooden groynes in the right foreground, their timber darkened and weathered, lead the eye towards the towers with a precision that a straight-on composition would not have achieved. The cyclist on the far left is moving away from the camera, heading west towards the towers — towards, that is, the Roman fort, the Saxon monastery, the demolished medieval church and the 1,700 years of accumulated history that the twin towers mark on the skyline. It is a direction of travel with some precedent.
Fujifilm X-E1 (720nm infrared conversion) · XF 14mm f/2.8 R · f/8 · 1/220s · ISO 200
