22/10/2026
For most of history, if you wanted to get to Margate, you needed a boat 🏖️
Thanet, the corner of Kent with Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate on it, really was an island. A strait about two miles wide, the Wantsum Channel, ran between it and the rest of Kent, from the Thames estuary at Reculver down to the sea near Sandwich. Ships used it for centuries, and the Romans thought it mattered enough to build a fort at each end: one at Reculver, and one at Richborough, where many historians think their invasion came ashore in AD 43.
Then it slowly silted up through the Middle Ages, and by the 1500s it had dried out. What's left of it today is little more than a drainage ditch. It's still called the Isle of Thanet, but you can drive straight onto it.
The sea did make one comeback. In the great North Sea flood of 1953 the water poured back in, and for a short while Thanet was an island again 🌊
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