Church building fabrics on Romney Marsh and the Marshland Fringe: a geological perspective

ABSTRACT

Romney Marsh is a region where few historic buildings now remain in the modern landscape. This paper examines the only group of historic monuments on the marsh in which stone was the principal medium, and where it was employed on a major scale—the parish church.

A fieldwork programme determined the types of stone present in eighteen churches on Romney and Walland Marsh, and a further eighteen in the immediate upland hinterland. The objectives of the study were to establish the types and provenance of the principal stones used in church building in the region, and using these data to examine the pattern of historic quarrying and supply from the Anglo-Saxon period to later medieval times.

Building stone supply was shown to vary according to several factors, including the geographical location of each building site, the date of construction, and the relation to known or surmised communication routes. The study pointed to an increasingly sophisticated quarrying industry, relying initially mainly on opportunist collection of beach boulders up to the thirteenth century, before sources of hewn stone for ashlar began to be increasingly exploited. The coast was the major resource at all times, and it is tentatively suggested that the removal of foreshore stone contributed to long-shore drift, and thus indirectly to dramatic coastal changes in the region. Most material was of local origin, although rare, high quality imports were also utilised.

KEYWORDS:

• Churches
• Romney Marsh
• church building fabrics
• geological influences
• long-shore drift