Isle of Sheppey

Isle of Sheppey
Sheppey as seen by the Operational Land Imager
Isle of Sheppey  Isle of Sheppey shown within Kent
Area	93 km2 (36 sq mi)
Population	40,300 (2011 Census)
– density	433/km2 (1,120/sq mi)
OS grid reference	TQ970695
District	Swale
Shire county	Kent
Region	South East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	SHEERNESS
Postcode district	ME11/ME12
Dialling code	01795
Police	Kent
Fire	Kent
Ambulance	South East Coast
EU Parliament	South East England
UK Parliament	Sittingbourne and Sheppey
List of places UK England Kent

Coordinates: 51°23′28″N 0°49′52″E / 51.391°N 0.831°E / 51.391; 0.831

The Isle of Sheppey is an island off the northern coast of Kent, England in the Thames Estuary, some 46 miles (74 km) to the east of London. It has an area of 36 square miles (93 km²). The island forms part of the local government district of Swale. Sheppey is derived from the ancient Saxon "Sceapige", meaning isle of sheep, and even today the extensive marshes which make up a considerable proportion of the island provide grazing for large flocks of sheep.

Today's island was historically known as the "Isles of Sheppey" which were Sheppey itself, the Isle of Harty to the south east and the Isle of Elmley to the south west. Over time the channels between the isles have silted up to make one continuous island. Sheppey, like much of north Kent, is largely formed from London Clay and is a plentiful source of fossils. The Mount near Minster rises to 250 feet (76 metres) above sea level and is the highest point on the island. The rest of Sheppey is low-lying and the southern part of the island is marshy land criss-crossed by inlets and drains.

Some Sheppey inhabitants like to call themselves Swampies, a term that began as, and for some people remains, an insult; for others it has become a term of endearment or a phrase for reinforcing identity.

The Swale

Sheppey is separated from the mainland by a channel called the Swale. Like the Wantsum Channel separating the Isle of Thanet from the mainland to the east, and Yantlet Creek at the Isle of Grain, it was used in ancient times by shipping to and from ports such as Chatham and London to reduce exposure to bad weather in the Thames Estuary or North Sea.

Ferries

Three ferries have operated between the mainland and the isle: one to the west, called the King's Ferry; one at Elmley; and another, giving access from Faversham, the Harty Ferry. All had long histories: particularly the last (see external link below). None operate today: the Harty Ferry ceased operation at the start of the First World War, but the slipways at Harty and Elmley can still be seen today. That at Harty is below the Ferry House Inn (the landlord owns the ferry rights), while seeing the one at Elmley requires a walk of about a mile and a half from the RSPB car park. Additionally the South Eastern Railway operated a connecting passenger ferry to Sheerness from Port Victoria railway terminus on the Grain Peninsula for some years. Several ferry services to Southend have also been tried but proved short-lived. An attempt to start a small hovercraft service between the Harty Ferry Inn and Oare Creek near Faversham in 1970 by the then landlord, Ben Fowler, failed after a few days.

A number of continental ferry services have operated from the Isle of Sheppey.

A large ferry terminal was built by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway at Queenborough Pier in 1876 and operated a nightly service to Flushing (Vlissingen) in the Netherlands, as well as a German mail service. These services ceased during the First World War but it was then used for military traffic. The port there was closed and dismantled in the 1930s. A passenger, car and lorry ferry (the Olau Line) operated to Vlissingen from Sheerness through the 1980s and 1990s, but there has been no ferry service of any kind in recent years.

Bridges

The Kingsferry Bridge was first built in 1860, thus eliminating the need for ferries. Over time, there have been four bridges built over the Swale at this point. All bridges had to allow sufficient clearance for shipping heading to the commercial docks at Ridham:

• 19 July 1860: The London, Chatham and Dover Railway built the first bridge to an Admiralty design. It had a central span raised between two towers. Trains and road traffic were able to use it, as with the next two bridges.
• 6 November 1906: The South Eastern and Chatham Railway replaced the first bridge with one having a "rolling lift" design. It was originally worked by hand, but later by electricity.
• October 1959: Kingsferry Bridge, a lifting bridge was installed, able to lift both the road and the railway line to allow ships to pass beneath.^[1]
• May 2006: The Sheppey Crossing was completed and opened on 3 July. This four-lane road bridge rises to a height of 95 feet (29m) at mean high water springs above the Swale, and carries the A249 trunk road. Pedestrian, animal and bicycle traffic, as well as the railway, are still obliged to use the lifting bridge, which still provides the most direct link between the island and the Iwade/Lower Halstow area.^[2]

On 5 September 2013, fog caused a 130 vehicle pile-up on the Sheppey Crossing bridge and its northern approach. With eight people seriously hurt, another 30 hospitalised and a further 120 classified as "walking wounded", the incident was the county's worst road accident in twenty years.^[3]

Sheppey history

The complex of causewayed enclosures at Kingsborough Manor attests to the importance of the island's high ground during the neolithic while later prehistoric, Roman and medieval occupation has been found by archaeologists in advance of development at Neat's Court and St Clements CofE Primary School in Leysdown.^[4]

Vikings

In 855, Sheppey as part of the kingdom of Wessex, became the winter camp of an occupying Viking force.^[5]

Shurland Hall

Shurland Hall, near Eastchurch, is named after its first owners, the De Shurland family. In 1188 Adam de Shurland possessed a mill with more than 1,000 acres (405 ha) of mixed land, mostly marsh with a small meadow: he also let a number of cottages thereabouts.

A curious tale surrounds a 14th-century member of the family, Sir Robert de Shurland. According to legend, Sir Robert killed a monk and resolved to ask the king for a pardon. In 1327 he rode to where the king's ship was anchored, off the Isle of Sheppey, and gained forgiveness. Returning, he met a witch who said that de Shurland's horse, Grey Dolphin, which had borne him so bravely to the ship, would be the death of him. Sir Robert immediately killed the horse and cut off its head. A year later Sir Robert was walking along the shore when a shard of the horse's bone pierced his foot. Blood poisoning set in and Sir Robert died.

Sir Robert de Shurland also possessed the Manor of Ufton in the parish of Tunstall, Kent, in the reign of Edward I. After he attended the prince in Scotland, to the siege of Carlaverock, where he was knighted, and in 1300, he then obtained a charter of free warren for his manor of Ufton.^[6]

Shurland died in 1327 leaving as his heir a daughter Margery who married William the son of Alexander Cheyne of Patrixborne, Kent. To William passed the manor of Shurland. It remained in possession of the Cheyne family until the sixteenth century when it was sold by Sir Henry Cheyne. During the First World War troops were billeted at the Great Hall, and it suffered considerable damage as a result.

Shurland Hall is a Grade II listed building. In 2006 a grant of £300,000 was made by English Heritage to restore the hall's façade. The Spitafields Trust carried out the restoration work which was completed in 2011.^[7] The house was put on the open market for £1.8 million.^[8]

Dutch occupation of 1667

Sheppey enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of few parts of what is now the United Kingdom to be (temporarily) lost to a foreign power since William the Conqueror's invasion in 1066. This was in June 1667, when a Dutch fleet sailing up the Thames Estuary for the Medway captured the fort at Sheerness. The fort at the time was incomplete and the garrison underfed and unpaid, so resistance to the heavily armed Dutch Navy (which, according to Samuel Pepys' diary, was also to a large extent manned by deserters from the English Royal Navy) was hardly enthusiastic. Pepys, then secretary of the Navy Board, described Sheerness as lost "after two or three hours' dispute". The Dutch quickly overran and occupied the whole island for several days before withdrawing. Prior to leaving, the Dutch took supplies, ammunition and guns, then burned everything that was combustible.^[9][10]

Capture of James II

Three miles (5 km) across the Swale lies Whitstable. The Swale channel was the point of departure selected by James II, when departing in some haste "from the Protestant deliverance of the nation" by William of Orange in December, 1688.

A hoy having been chartered, the fugitive king landed at Elmley, only to be mobbed by local fishermen. They thought such a noble on such a humble vessel was the locally hated Jesuit Edward Petre and so took his money, watch and coronation ring. At length he was recognised by one of the assailants and the group took him in custody to Faversham, where he was detained.

Bluetown Heritage Centre

Bluetown hosts the history and Heritage Centre for the Isle of Sheppey. The Heritage Centre contains memorabilia and artefacts pertinent to the Sheppey's history, including displays on aviation, maritime, war time activities, and island history and offers guided walks of Sheppey Isle and Bluetown.^[11]

The present Heritage Centre is on the site of two earlier establishments. Originally called the "New Inn", in 1868 the site became "The Royal Oxford Music Hall". The following year the building, which is situated a few doors down from the Bluetown court house, became the Criterion Public House, with a music hall called the "palace of varieties" situated immediately to its rear. In 1879 the building was replaced with a brick structure.^[12]

On the 5th of June 1917 the Criterion was badly damaged by a German air raid. Shrapnel marks from the attack can still be seen in the dockyard wall opposite the building. After the air raid, the building was re-built in its present form retaining some of its original features. After a variety of other uses, the site became the Heritage Centre in January 2009. A special exhibition in 2014 commemorated the centenary of World War I.^[13]

Maritime history

Sheerness is a commercial port and main town of the Isle of Sheppey and owes much to its origins, as a Royal Naval dockyard town. Samuel Pepys established the Royal Navy Dockyard in the 17th century. Henry VIII, requiring the River Medway as an anchorage for his navy, ordered that the mouth of the river should be protected by a small fort. Garrison Fort was built in 1545.

Sheerness was the focus of an attack by the Dutch Navy in June 1667, when 72 hostile ships compelled the little "sandspit fort" there to surrender and landed a force which for a short while occupied the town. Samuel Pepys at Gravesend remarked in his diary "we do plainly at this time hear the guns play" and in fear departed to Brampton in Huntingdonshire.

The dockyard served the Royal Navy until 1960 and has since developed into one of the largest and fastest expanding ports in the UK. The Port of Sheerness contains at least one Grade II listed building, the Old Boat House. Built in 1866, it is the first multi-storey iron framed industrial building recorded in the UK. Decorated with ornate ironwork, it features operating rails extending the length of the building, for the movement of stores, much like a modern crane.

The dockyard and port at Sheerness today are a significant feature of the Isle of Sheppey's economy, which includes the extensive export/import of motor vehicles, and a large steel works, with extensive railway fixtures. The island is, however, suffering from an economic recession and these industries are not as extensive as they once were.

The area immediately outside the dockyard was occupied by dockyard workers, who built wooden houses and decorated them with Admiralty blue paint illegally acquired from the dockyard. This area was, and still is, known as Blue Town, though it is now mostly occupied by the Sheerness Steel complex.

Beyond Blue Town, an outlying residential area overlooking the sea was chiefly designed for various government officials. This area became known as Mile Town because it is one mile (1.6 km) from Sheerness.

About 200 shipwrecks are recorded around the coast of Sheppey, the most famous being the SS Richard Montgomery, a liberty ship loaded with bombs and explosives that grounded on sandbanks during the Second World War. As of 2004 plans were discussed with a view to removing the threat from the Montgomery. These include encasing the ship in concrete or removing the bombs; no firm decision has been made.

New research commissioned by the Government in 2005–06 has suggested that the threat has passed and that constant surveillance should ensure the safety of the immediate community.

Natural history

Edward Jacob (1710–1788) purchased the little Manor of Nutts, Isle of Sheppey, in 1752. There, he pursued his hobby as a naturalist. He discovered much of interest to the antiquarian, naturalist, geologist and zoologist, although there was little prior knowledge. In 1777, Jacob published a book about his various fossil finds, including what he called "the remains of an elephant".^[14]

The isle is noted as the northern-most place to have an established scorpion population. Euscorpius flavicaudis has been resident since the 1860s, believed to have been imported on a ship.^[15] They have been found to be highly adaptable and hence have survived the relative cold by conserving energy and only acting for nutrition and reproduction.^[16]

In 2008 palaeontologists published details of the fossil skull, found on the island, of a large flying bird from the Eocene period called Dasornis in the deposits of the London Clay.^[17]

Local government

From 1894 to 1968, Sheppey comprised the Municipal Borough of Queenborough, Sheerness Urban District and Sheppey Rural District (consisting of the civil parishes of Eastchurch, Elmley, Harty, Leysdown-on-Sea, Minster in Sheppey and Warden). 1968 saw all these merged to form a single Municipal Borough of Queenborough-in-Sheppey, covering the entire island.^[18] In 1974 the area was merged with districts on the mainland to form the Swale district.

In parliamentary terms, Sheppey has been in the Sittingbourne and Sheppey constituency since 1997, a Conservative-Labour marginal seat; prior to this it was in the Faversham constituency, also a marginal but held by the Conservatives for the last 27 years of its existence.

Early aviation

The isle has a long history of aviation development in England. It was home to Lord Brabazon's Royal Aero Club which formed in Leysdown in the early 1900s to popularise ballooning. The club took to the aeroplane with relish, and in July 1909 the Short Brothers established Shellbeach Aerodrome on nearby marshland to accommodate six Wright Flyers, moving a few kilometres the next year to Eastchurch where a new more appropriate aerodrome had been built for the club.

The Eastchurch airfield played a significant role in the history of British aviation from 1909 when Frank McClean acquired Stonepits Farm, on the marshes across from Leysdown, converting the land into an airfield for members of the Aero Club of Great Britain.

The Short brothers, Horace, Eustace and Oswald, built aircraft at Battersea to be tested at the site; later Moore-Brabazon, Professor Huntington, Charles S. Rolls and Cecil Grace all visited and used the flying club's services. Wilbur Wright and his brother Orville came to the Isle of Sheppey to visit the new flying grounds of the Aero Club. In 1909, Moore-Brabazon made the first live cargo flight by fixed-wing aircraft, by tying a waste-paper basket to a wing strut of his Shorts-built Wright aircraft. Then, using it as a "cargo hold", he airlifted one small pig.

The Eastchurch airfield was also the site, in July 1911, of the competition for the Gordon Bennett Cup for powered air racing, attended by flyers from all over the world, and won that year by the American pilot C. T. Weymann.

A stained glass window in the south side of All Saints' Church, Eastchurch (built in 1432), was dedicated to Rolls and Grace, who were killed in July and December 1910 respectively.

In July 2009, Eastchurch celebrated 100 years of aviation history associated with the island. SkySheppey brought together a number of associations and joined with many visitors to recognise the importance of British aviation history that started at Eastchurch.

Sheppey today

The largest town on the island is Sheerness. Other villages include Minster, which has a pebble beach, and Leysdown-on-Sea, which has a coarse sandy one. The whole north coast is dotted with caravan parks and holiday homes; there is also a naturist beach beyond Leysdown, towards Shellness. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds managed a portion of Elmley National Nature Reserve known as Elmley Marshes up until 2013, at which point it reverted to management by Elmley Conservation Trust, owners of the site.

There are three prisons on the island, all located to the south of the village of Eastchurch: HMP Elmley, HMP Standford Hill and HMP Swaleside. The total inmate population is in the region of 2,800.

In the 2001 census, the island had a resident population of 37,852, many of whom commute to the mainland via the Sheerness-Sittingbourne rail link and the new Sheppey Crossing Bridge.

Education

Secondary education on the island is provided by Oasis Academy Isle of Sheppey.^[19] The school moved into new buildings in February 2013 and is split between two sites: East and West. The academy is split horizontally into five mini-schools.

There are a number of primary schools on the island, including Richmond Academy and Early Birds Nirsery in Sheerness and Thistle Hill Academy in Minster on Sea. Thistle Hill Academy opened in brand new buildings on its campus in Aspen Drive in September 2016. Both Richmond and Thistle Hill academies are sponsored by LSSAT Academies Trust.

Sport and leisure

The island has a non-league football club, Sheppey & Sheerness United F.C., which plays at Holm Park.

The island's largest cricket club is Minster Cricket Club, who compete in the Kent Cricket League.

Local radio

Three radio stations broadcast from the Isle of Sheppey. Bridge Radio (BRFM 95.6 FM) broadcasts 24 hours a day from studios on the Minster Cliffs. BRFM has been broadcasting since 2006 and is the UK's longest running community radio station.^[20] Sheppey FM, a community internet radio station, based in the Heritage Pavilion, Sheerness.^[21] Hospital Radio Swale which broadcasts from the Sheppey Community Hospital in Minster to six hospitals across Swale.^[22]

Airport

On 21 September 2008, Mayor of London, Boris Johnson said that an airport off the coast of the Isle of Sheppey would be a viable alternative to creating a new third runway at Heathrow.^[23]

See also

• Sheppey Light Railway
• Islands in the River Thames

References

External links

• The Sheppey Website
• Swale Borough Council's Sheppey Tourism Page
• Sheppey Access
• History of Harty Ferry
• BRFM Community Radio for The Isle of Sheppey
• Minster Gatehouse Museum
• Bluetown Heritage Centre
• History of Kingsferry Bridge and Sheppey Crossing
• Film trailer of A Dream of Flight a documentary that celebrates the centenary of the first powered flight by a Briton in Britain, JTC Moore Brabazon, in 1909 on The Isle of Sheppey.
• Sheppey Wildlife
• SS Richard Montgomery wartime Explosives carrier Liberty ship wreck

Next island upstream	River Thames	Next island downstream
Two Tree Island	Isle of Sheppey	Nore (Sandbank)