History of Thanet Villages

Visitors to the Isle of Thanet may often associate it principally with its three lively and characterful main seaside resorts, Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate, all so different and yet all so interesting. However, back a little way from the sea in the low -lying green hinterlands of the Island are many other historic sites to be seen. The villages of Minster, St Peter's and St Nicholas-at-Wade, for example, have both grown up round splendid medieval churches, that at Minster, St Mary's, containing in its outer walls Roman fragments. You can also see at Minster the ancient buildings of Minster Abbey, founded by Saint Domneva in 670 AD, and later owned by the monks of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury. After various problems an order of Bavarian Benedictine nuns acquired the site in 1937, which became known as St Mildred's Priory. The Community continues there to this day.

At Birchington, the church of All Saints, basically also of an early date, is home to some fine sixteenth and seventeenth century monuments and, in particular, has a stained glass window to the memory of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who died at Birchington in 1882 and who is buried in the churchyard there. Not far from Birchington is Quex Park, the home of the redoubtable Major Powell-Cotton (1866-1940), who created the remarkable Powell-Cotton museum in and adjacent to the house at Quex, containing his unique natural history displays and collections of porcelain and ethnic artefacts. This museum is a fascinating reflection of its times, and should not be missed, nor should the interiors and contents of the Regency period house itself.

The very names of some of the villages in Thanet, Garlinge and Acol (meaning ‘oak wood') for example, are somehow redolent of ancient settlements. At Acol is the delightful small Victorian church of St Mildred, built in 1879 by C.N. Beazley, and at Garlinge, near Margate, in an unlikely urban setting, is what is known as the Dent-de-Lyon gatehouse. This is an imposing fifteenth-century building, all that is left of what must have been a grand dwelling place indeed for the locally important Daundelyon family.
At Sarre, in days gone by, Islanders could be ferried across the narrowest point of the Wantsum (the channel at one time making Thanet an actual island) to the mainland. Today, you can, perhaps less perilously, visit the beautifully restored and working windmill there. 

Another diverting place to wander in is the rather more urban Westgate-on-Sea, whose inhabitants are still debating whether Westgate should be termed a town or a village. Either way, since it was developed as an exclusive resort from the 1860s through to the Edwardian period, it is full of attractive buildings, from Victorian Gothic through to the cheerful red-brick-and-white-woodwork houses that are characteristic of the 1890s and early1900s.

Taken altogether, the rural areas of Thanet still retain, in their unassuming way, a strong feel of the past, a rugged and enduring quality which makes them most rewarding, in different ways, to visit. There are lost villages too, a haunting thought.... In most cases the terrain is perfect for walking, cycling or riding. And then, of course, there's always the car!