Cliffe by Cliffe & Cooling WI - Cliffe History

Cliffe, we believe takes it’s name from the rock or cliff   on which it stands, and is generally accepted as being the   Cloveshoe or Cloveshoe where, between the years AD 742 and   AD 825 no fewer than seven Anglo-Saxon Church Councils were   held and were attended by three kings of Mercia (Æchilbald   in AD 742, Cenulf in AD 800 and Bernulf in AD 822) and four   Archbishops of Canterbury. Undoubtedly in those days it was   a place of considerable size and importance, and probably   remained so until the year 1520 when a widespread fire is   said to have devastated Cliffe beyond recovery of its   mediaeval importance. With the exception of the church very   little appears to have survived the fire. To the south the   wooded height of Lodge Hill terminates the view of fertile   fields and orchards, and to the north there is the level   green expanse of the marshes about one & half miles long.   These marshes used to be the haunt of the dreaded ague which   seems to have persisted until the coming of the cement   industry in the middle of the nineteenth century. On the   marshes are to be found various marsh-loving birds such as   teal, widgeon, wild duck and plovers, and in severe winter   wild geese and wild swans. In the olden days the marshes   afforded great opportunity to the smugglers, and there is a   story of one who did a good bit of smuggling at Cliffe   Creek, and it was under a bench against a wall in the ‘Bull’   he lay while the exciseman was drinking smuggled gin on the   seat above him.

The   numerous finds of Roman pottery, many of them estimated to   be at least fifteen hundred years, provide much evidence of   life as it was in the locality then. Some of the pots, urns,   bottles, vases etc are all in remarkably good state of   preservation as may be seen from the photographs.    Quite a number have their way into museums, but many more,   in varying degrees of completeness, repose on dressers and   in cabinets in all parts of the village.

During excavations for chalk carried out in the early   1920’’s near West Court as many as twenty separate graves   were unearthed containing a number of bones and horns of   various animals. These were identified by the British

  Museum as belonging to domestic animals and the fact of them   been in separate graves indicated that they probably   belonged to cave dwellers. With these bones was found a   curious knife which was identified as a ‘girdle hanger’ of   early Saxon or Jutish make of the sixth century. Also at the   same time a curious bronze implement was found and this was   pronounced by the British Museum as a ‘bronze palstave’   dating about 1000BC which had evidently been interred with a   British chieftain.

There are many who believe that at one time the shallow   waters of the Thames came right up to the foot of the cliff   on top of which the village stands and such names such as   ‘Wharf Farm’ and ‘Wharf Lane’ support the idea.

It is however, more probable that these names arose from   the fact that in mediaeval times ships and barges may well   have sailed along the tidal creeks or inlets up to the   wharves at the foot of the cliff.