The Village of Minster in Sheppey
In writing about some parts of the Isle of Sheppey there is an underlying sense of a need to get the words down quickly because tomorrow may be too late. The seaward coastline can change quite dramatically and very suddenly whenever another bit of the clay cliffs crumbles and falls into the sea.
The Isle of Sheppey is highest east of Sheerness and it slopes away to flat marshy grazing and mud levels on the southern Swale side. It was on the heights (though that is perhaps too grandiose a word for the reluctant eminence that serves as high land on the island) that the first settlers built their homes. There, too, a widowed Kentish queen, Sexburga, built a monastery in about 670 AD on the spot where an angel told her that before many more years had passed a heathen people would conquer the nation.
The abbey claimed to be the first in Kent and was specially a place to which royal or noble widows or spinsters could retire from the stresses and strains of the man's world in which they lived. The ex-queen, fittingly enough, became it's abbess.
This was the part of the island which became known as Minster and the angel was quite right: two hundred years later the heathen Vikings did descend on the Saxon nation and, eventually, conquered it.
They came not to conquer at first but to plunder and one of the more accessible places in which to do that was Sheppey. The great Minster there offered worthwhile prizes for any raider and in fact so hospitable did they find the 'island of sheep' that when they came in force, bent on conquest rather than mere plunder at last, it was on Sheppey that they made their first headquarters and where they established a beach-head for their advance towards the west.
They remained masters of Sheppey until the Normans came and took it over from them yet, oddly, they left no recognisable traces of their occupation that have yet to be discovered at any rate.
The old abbey gatehouse has been restored and made into a local history centre which, incidentally, is well worth a visit for anyone who wants to know more about the Isle of Sheppey.
At least one miracle is credited to Minster. At some time (the date seems to have been lost in the telling and re-telling of the story) a year-old child called Ann Plott who lived in a cottage nearby was run over by a loaded dung-cart and crushed 'flat as a pancake'. A passing woman led prayers for the child, who miraculously returned to life and actually spoke her mother's name for the first time as she did so. Before night fell the same day, the child was dancing in the street again, evidently tempting fate to send another dung-cart to do the same thing all over again.
When an inventory of the Abbey's possessions was taken for Henry VIII in 1536 when he was dissolving the monasteries, among the items listed was 'a chamber hanging of painted paper'. As far as is known, this was the earliest use of wallpaper in England.
In the early 20th century, Sheppey was seen by speculative developers as a kind of blank cheque on which to write their own fortunes. One of these was a man called Frederick Ramus who, after doing quite nicely out of buying and selling land elsewhere, including Herne Bay, turned his attention to the wide open spaces of the island. He bought about a thousand acres of farmland on which he laid out roads and drains and then offered for sale small plots of land on which buyers could build their own homes.
It probably sounded lovely, and in fact, he sold some three thousand of these plots to about one thousand Londoners, many of whom had no doubt read the Daily Express comment in August 1903 which wondered why no-one had thought of converting 'this semi-circle of grassy cliffs, swept by the breezes of the German Ocean' into a Health Resort.
The paper predicted confidently: 'Minster-on-Sea, as the unknown paradise is called, will find it's way into popular favour in a remarkably short space of time. It is the nearest Kentish resort to London.'
Well, after WW2, the population of Minster had swollen from about two hundred and fifty people in a hundred homes to about five thousand five hundred in eighteen hundred homes, but there was a large number of vacant sites, still. Many of the people who had bought land and built houses there as a business investment rather than with any intention of settling there themselves were doing their best to sell again, and finding it difficult.
Today, Minster still has an unfinished look about it. The coast, from Minster east to Leysdown, is pretty well one continuous holiday camp of caravan sites and chalets.