Wantsum Channel

The Wantsum Channel was a strait separating the Isle of Thanet from the north-eastern extremity of the English county of Kent and connecting the English Channel and the Thames Estuary. It was a major shipping route when Britain was part of the Roman Empire, and continued in use until it was closed by silting in the late Middle Ages. Its course is now represented by the River Stour and the River Wantsum, which is little more than a drainage ditch lying between Reculver and St Nicholas-at-Wade and joins the Stour about 1.7 miles (2.7 km) south-east of Sarre.

Eilert Ekwall, a 20th-century authority on English place-names, wrote that the name "Wantsum" derives from an Old English word "wandsum", meaning "winding".Bede, writing in or before 731, mentioned the Wantsum (Vantsumu) in describing the Isle of Thanet, but he also recorded an alternative name: he described the church at Reculver as being juxta ostium aquilonale fluminis Genladae, or "by the north mouth of the river Genlade". Ekwall compared this to the name of Yantlet Creek, which separates the Isle of Grain from mainland Kent. He suggested an origin in the Old English word gegnlad meaning "'backwater' or the like, [and] very likely the source of the word inlet [for] 'arm of the sea, [or] creek'."

From prehistory until the Middle Ages, the Wantsum Channel was joined by the River Stour, which entered it at Stourmouth close to its midpoint; it was a two-mile-wide (3 km) strait. The southern end of the channel met the sea at Richborough (Rutupiae), downstream of Sandwich, while the northern end met the Thames Estuary at Reculver (Regulbium). That the Romans chose both sites for forts indicates the significance of the route, which their shipping commonly used to travel between Britain and continental Europe. Vikings raided Canterbury via the Wantsum in 839.

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