Plucks Gutter
| Plucks Gutter | |
|---|---|
 The Dog and Duck pub, Plucks Gutter |
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 Plucks Gutter
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| Plucks Gutter shown within Kent | |
| OS grid reference | TR2663 |
| District | |
| Shire county | |
| Region | |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | Canterbury |
| Postcode district | CT3 |
| Police | Kent |
| Fire | Kent |
| Ambulance | South East Coast |
| EU Parliament | South East England |
Plucks Gutter is a hamlet in the civil parish of Stourmouth, Kent, England. The hamlet is situated where the Little Stour and Great Stour rivers meet.
The hamlet is named after a Dutch Drainage Engineer called Ploeg, whose grave is in All Saints Church, West Stourmouth. Ploeg, being the Dutch for a plough, the hamlet takes its origins from the Dutch Protestant tradition of draining marshland by creating a ploughed ditch.
A mile upstream from the Dog and Duck Inn public house is 'Blood Point', where King Alfred's defeated a Viking invasion force and often taken to be the Royal Navy's first successful engagement of an enemy.
During the Middle Ages, the two rivers met the Wantsum Channel at Stourmouth, but the combined rivers now (called the River Stour downstream from Plucks Gutter) flow onward to the sea via Sandwich to Pegwell Bay near Ramsgate, leaving Plucks Gutter six miles in a straight line and ten by river from the English Channel.
In 1821-23, a North Kent Gang of smugglers used Pluck's Gutter. One account from a Revenue Officer stated they travelled fourteen miles on foot, through Trenleypark Wood to Stodmarsh, then via Grove Corner to Pluck's Gutter, where they crossed the river by the ferry, and onward north-east to Mount Pleasant near Acol, then to Marsh Bay – the former name for what is modern-day Westgate-on-Sea.
In the hamlet is a riverside inn with a holiday caravan and lodge park, and facilities for non-residential riverside moorings.
The old ferry cottage (an earlier public house), is the eponymous 'House at Plucks Gutter' and was the inspiration for the book of the same name by Manning Coles. The freeholder of the cottage has an obligation to provide services to any officer of one of 'His Majesty's Ships of War' lying in the Wantsum Channel as payment to the Crown for the rights to operate the ferry.
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Wikipedia