Squeezing the Limen

Countryside Column for 17 May 2013 under headline:

Shrinking river was ideal incentive for smugglers

I very nearly toppled out of a dinghy the other day.  And given the trouble Myrtle had scrabbling up the muddy bank after retrieving a stick, I might have been in the water for some time.

It was the river Limen, and my alter ego, 18^th century smuggler Gabriel Tomkins, complete with tricorn hat, sword and pistol, was at Newenden for a publicity shoot. It’s for a forthcoming Smuggler Tales event onboard the boat that chugs passengers up to Bodiam or down towards Rye.

Alert readers may be expostulating that the river there, separating Kent from East Sussex, is not the Limen but the Rother.  And so it is now. But up until about 1600 it was known by its Latin name.   And a very different river it was too.  Not the narrow ditch-like stream with stepped high banks of today,  but a vastly wide,  tidal waterway that was the artery of the Weald.

Its importance dates from a thousand years before the Romans, when the Belgae arrived from the Rhineland in search of industrial opportunity.  For them the Limen was the only route into the dark interior of the Wealden forest. They were seeking a strange mineral - iron ore - and they found it in abundance in the local sedimentary rock. They also found quantities of the two other requisites for smelting iron – clay for the kiln and wood for the charcoal to fire it.

Tony Cardwell’s excellent history “Limen” shows that extensive iron working in and around the valley continued right into the 18^th century.  Then, with the river silting up and the forest denuded, hammer mills at places like Wadhurst, Hawkhurst and, finally, Robertsbridge closed for good.

That contributed to the serious unemployment already created by the shifting river landlocking ports like Smallhythe and Rye. With the government levying swingeing import taxes on tea and tobacco and brandy, opportunity knocked for smugglers like Tomkins with his Mayfield and Hawkhurst gangs.

They would likely have used the Limen/Rother to move their tubs inland, while redundant watermen at Rye and Winchelsea would have leapt at the chance to earn the odd florin or crown helping bring the smuggled goods ashore.

Viewing the emasculated Rother today from an unstable rowing boat it’s hard to  imagine the mighty Limen spread out across the whole valley with a multitude of craft servicing our own local iron industry.

Read previous columns at: kentcountrymatters.blogspot.co.uk