I’m going to keep to a maritime theme this week. Firstly Dr Martin Watt’s one-day conference on ‘Richborough through the Ages’ has now sold over seventy-five tickets which is excellent. However there is still time and space for those who haven’t signed up yet. If you are interested in ports and coastal landscape, whether we are thinking about the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans and right up to the Great War and beyond, do check the webpages at www.canterbury.ac.uk/richborough

The second encounter with the sea, although not the real thing, took place yesterday when I went to hear Professor Bernhard Klein give a fascinating paper on ‘The Sea in Pericles’. This is not one of Shakespeare’s well-known plays as far as modern audiences are concerned, perhaps because it was a joint venture, but in the early 17^th century and again when the theatres reopened after the Restoration it was extremely popular. As Professor Klein explained, the eastern Mediterranean where the action in the play takes place can be understood in a number of different way. Yes, we are dealing with a classical and biblical landscape in places such as Tyre and Antioch, but equally these ports can be envisaged as part of the world of early 17^th century commerce, not least because this was a time when the Levant Trading Company had become established. Trade with the Ottoman Empire was an important part of England’s expanding mercantile reach across the oceans, and this play appears to foreground the sea as a means of trade, of travelling from place to place, of establishing diplomatic ties, and building family relations. As he said, there are three storms in the play but only the first leads to a shipwreck, and even though the sailors all drown off the north African coast, Pericles is saved and seems unconcerned about such losses. The second abates once Pericles agrees to cast his recently deceased wife over the side of the ship, the master explaining in no uncertain terms that having a dead person on board brings bad luck. However, as in all ‘good’ plays, somehow she isn’t actually dead and Pericles will be reunited with her near the end of the play, this in itself showing Neptune’s benevolence towards the hero. The third storm hardly happens at all, and Pericles is therefore able to travel in relative safety. Indeed it is his daughter who is captured by pirates not Pericles, and thus neither the natural element of the sea, nor the man-made dangers of pirates can stop him (or others) from trading. Consequently this Jacobean mercantile inter-relationship explored within the play was extremely interesting, and it was feasible to envisage how it would have resonated with London audiences, many of whom would have had a stake in such activities taking place at the city’s docks.

Turning to the talk I heard this evening, I’m moving from London to the Kent coast. Dr Andrew Richardson was at Canterbury Christ Church to give a lecture to the Friends of Canterbury Archaeological Trust. Although Andrew did not have a large audience, it was enthusiastic and asked numerous questions afterwards. The subject of his talk was the South Foreland Lighthouse, and, as he explained, the Trust is one of a number of partners in this Lottery-funded project, the others being the National Trust and the community-led project ‘Up on the Downs’. The National Trust took on guardianship of the lighthouse in 1988 after it had been decommissioned, and it was in 2014 that CAT actively became involved as the lead and facilitator to produce a conservation management plan, which involved a considerable amount of research into the history of the lighthouse and its setting. Andrew has been the primary Trust staff member and at the moment he is drawing together all the information gathered so far to try to produce both a detailed report and possibly at least one substantial book on the site’s history.

Before I give a brief summary of this history, it is worth noting the greatest threat to the lighthouse’s survival is damp. Not that this is rising damp but rather it was water coming in at the top over many years. Furthermore, the exterior paint had not allowed the building to ‘breathe’ because it had been an impermeable layer, but this at least has now been remedied and the whole outside of the building sand-blasted and repainted. As yet this has not totally solved the damp problem and more conservation work will be required in future, which will probably also include the removal of the historic interior wall paint that has a high concentration of lead in it.

But to return to the history of the place, due to a stroke of luck a small archaeological trench on the site picked up the corner of a late Roman building. This was identified by finds such as 3^rd century pottery, a belt buckle that suggests a military owner and the clinching pieces of evidence – four Roman coins dated to a very tight period: 293-297 AD. This would seem to place these finds at a time when those in Britain were led by Allectus, a Roman (rebel) ruler who was killed soon after by the main Roman authorities following a seabourne invasion. Consequently it seems most likely that the owner of the buckle and perhaps also of some of the coins was on look-out duty at South Foreland because from there he/they would have been able to see westwards to Dover harbour and eastwards to Thanet and also the Goodwin Sands.

It is the presence of the Goodwin Sands that probably explains the series of lighthouses on the site, perhaps beginning in the reign of Henry VIII. By then the Sands had been a danger to the unwary for many centuries because the Goodwin Sands as an island had probably ceased in the Anglo-Saxon period. So if the Tudors were the first to locate a light tower there, the 17^th century apparently saw the construction of a light house. Knowledge of this and the subsequent lighthouse, which also predates the current structure built in 1842, comes from documentary research rather than archaeological excavations at the moment. In particular several sketches by a Captain Durrant would seem to hold the key. These were done in 1808 and as well as showing the working lighthouse, also show its predecessor. Moreover the Captain also sketched the lower lighthouse as well as this the upper one, for mariners needed both to align their ships – south of this line they were safe, north of it and they were at risk due to the Goodwin Sands. The successor to this lower light still exists but is on private land, and, possibly even more problematic, it is only a relative short matter of time before it falls over the cliff.

As Andrew explained, the surviving lighthouse is full of fascinating objects, as well as being a place where history has been made. In addition to the turning mechanism for the light that involved a weight system, the lamp itself sat in a sea of mercury. Also now within the lighthouse’s collection are about a hundred discarded pieces of graphite that were needed for the carbon arc lamps. However this involved a considerable wastage because the graphite sticks wore down rapidly, indeed at a rate of three pieces per night. Such factors may have played a part for the hunt for better lighting systems and the South Foreland site seems to have appealed to Trinity House, not least because it is relatively close to London and offered a good location for experimentation. These included work, in 1884, comparing three experimental light towers that used electricity, gas and oil. Moreover Michael Faraday was not the only pioneer who worked at the South Foreland, and Marconi and Kemp were experimenting with wireless there in the late 1890s and again in 1923. I’ll leave the later history of the site but just to say the way the documentary and archaeology have come together is unusually good, thus providing a much fuller narrative of the South Foreland lighthouse, and if you haven’t visited the place, it is well worth doing so.