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Three marshes spread across the triangle made by the Royal Military
Canal and the coasts of Sussex and Kent. The Military Canal runs from
Hythe to Rye, beside the Military Road; between it and the flat, white
beaches of the Channel lie Romney Marsh, Dunge Marsh and Walland Marsh,
from east to west. Walland Marsh is sectored by the Kent Ditch, which
draws huge, straggling diagrams here, to preserve ancient rights of
parishes and the monks of Canterbury. Dunge Marsh runs up into the apex
of the triangle at Dunge Ness, and adds to itself twenty feet of shingle
every year. Romney Marsh is the sixth continent and the eighth wonder of
the world.

The three marshes are much alike; indeed to the foreigner they are all a
single spread of green, slatted with watercourses. No river crosses
them, for the Rother curves close under Rye Hill, though these marshes
were made by its ancient mouth, when it was the River Limine and ran
into the Channel at Old Romney. There are a few big watercourses--the
New Sewer, the Yokes Sewer, the White Kemp Sewer--there are a few white
roads, and a great many marsh villages--Brenzett, Ivychurch, Fairfield,
Snargate, Snave--each little more than a church with a farmhouse or two.
Here and there little deserted chapels lie out on the marsh, officeless
since the days of the monks of Canterbury; and everywhere there are
farms, with hundreds of sheep grazing on the thick pastures.

Little Ansdore Farm was on Walland Marsh, three miles from Rye, and
about midway between the villages of Brodnyx and Pedlinge. It was a sea
farm. There were no hop-gardens, as on the farms inland, no white-cowled
oasts, and scarcely more than twelve acres under the plough. Three
hundred acres of pasture spread round Ansdore, dappled over with the big