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Archaeologia Cantiana -  Vol. 5  1863  page 305

Account of the Society's Researches at Sarr (Sarre) Part 1 by John Brent Esq., F.S.A. 

The ville or hamlet of Sarr, anciently Sarra, Saerre, or Serre, possessed an importance some centuries since which its present appearance, and now inland situation, do not at first sight confirm. In Roman and Anglo-Saxon times, the waters of the Wantsume, the estuary which then divided Thanet from Kent, approached it from the south and west. Its northern mouth, called the Yenladt, was just east of Reculver a little south of which, and nearly opposite Sarr, it was joined by the fresh waters of the Nethergone and the Stour. The other mouth opened into the British Channel, at Pegwell Bay. Sarr possessed then an important haven between Richborough and

Reculver, admirably situated under the chalk cliffs facing the west and south. Below these are still to be seen, overgrown by a luxuriant vegetation, the shoals and sand-banks which the retiring sea has left, and which, down to the present day, retain all their characteristic forms and water-washed appearance. In a charter of Edbert, dated the thirty-sixth year of his reign (726), and reported in Annals of St. Augustine’s Monastery, ships are mentioned as navigating to Sarr. At a later period, 1052, the Danish fleet, having plundered the eastern coast of Kent, sailed

 

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