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"There is no Ebbsfleet."1
Not now, perhaps, but long
ago two Teuton brothers
sailed the Kentish coast along
and landed there. Horsa2
and Hengest3, legends marked
by Middleton4 and Beowulf5,
first there in England6 disembarked.
Whether they were Kentish kings
or, as claimed, were Jutes or Danes,
their wayward channel silted in,
and now their ways are those of trains.7
London's orbit8 takes it in,
a link of continent to car,
a parking lot, a place to land,
as brothers did once, long before.9
1 A headline from today's BBC Online.
2 Fought against Vortigern; killed in the Battle of Aylesford. (More here.)
3 One of several possible people, thus his semi-legendary status. (More here.)
4 Thomas Middleton's play is entitlted Hengist, King of Kent, or The Mayor of Quinborough.
5 Actually, only Hengest shows up, as follower of Finn. Both show up in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Bede's writings.
6 More precisely, on the isle of Thanet.
7 Ebbsfleet International Station officially opened yesterday, January 29th, part of Eurostar links to mainland Europe.
8 i.e. the M25, the London Orbital, in addition to it being near Greater London.
9 At least one site say they actually landed at Aylesford. That seems improbable to me, looking at a map, given how much further inland Aylesford is.
Not now, perhaps, but long
ago two Teuton brothers
sailed the Kentish coast along
and landed there. Horsa2
and Hengest3, legends marked
by Middleton4 and Beowulf5,
first there in England6 disembarked.
Whether they were Kentish kings
or, as claimed, were Jutes or Danes,
their wayward channel silted in,
and now their ways are those of trains.7
London's orbit8 takes it in,
a link of continent to car,
a parking lot, a place to land,
as brothers did once, long before.9
1 A headline from today's BBC Online.
2 Fought against Vortigern; killed in the Battle of Aylesford. (More here.)
3 One of several possible people, thus his semi-legendary status. (More here.)
4 Thomas Middleton's play is entitlted Hengist, King of Kent, or The Mayor of Quinborough.
5 Actually, only Hengest shows up, as follower of Finn. Both show up in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Bede's writings.
6 More precisely, on the isle of Thanet.
7 Ebbsfleet International Station officially opened yesterday, January 29th, part of Eurostar links to mainland Europe.
8 i.e. the M25, the London Orbital, in addition to it being near Greater London.
9 At least one site say they actually landed at Aylesford. That seems improbable to me, looking at a map, given how much further inland Aylesford is.
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Do you like Heaney?
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Better still, get the CD of him reading it. It's magic.
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(And actual compliment, of course.)
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*bows extravagantly*
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Looking at the map as is, I would agree, but given the whole Isle of Thanet bit, I would like to take a much closer look at an OS map, etc and also see what the river might have been doing a thousand-odd years ago. I could see an argument for huge shallow creeks extending up towards Aylesford, before the Isle of Thanet was drained.
And it's a great poem.
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The only historical OS map I have is the one for York. I'd love to have the rest of their medieval collection - and they'd be useful to have in general. I have a decent collection of books of historical maps, but they're less helpful as they are of maps made in the Middle Ages, and I doubt I have any detailed enough to encompass what was a fairly rural location then. (Now it's greater Gravesend and a London commuter town, from what little I've seen of it.)
(I considered pursuing the Aylesford argument further before posting and then thought it wasn't urgent - after all, it undermines the whole point of the poem! The Wikipedia article on the Bishopric of Ebbsfleet, established in 1994, also notes that Ebbsfleet was decided *by vote* in the '90s as the location where St. Augustine landed when he arrived in England. Contemporary record only has him arriving somewhere along the Kentish coastline, so who knows.)
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I didn't really think much more about my time at St John's until a year or so ago when our old curate turned up again, quoted in a BBC news item about the possibility of female bishops in the Church of England. It turns out he's now Bishop of Ebbsfleet. He's one of (I think) three 'Provincial Episcopal Visitors', who provide support for traditionalist clergy and parishioners who disagree with the ordination of women.
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But the main reason I'm writing is not that. No, it is this: NEEEEEEEEW PLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!
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(And about time too! So exciting!)
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