Frontispiece: The Barbican, Sandwichdetails

There is only one main gateway standing, and that is where the town is entered by a bridge across the river carrying the road from Thanet. This is known as the Barbican and provides the most fitting entrance to the town for a visitor who proposes to soak himself for a while in its ancient spirit. It is not, however, mediaeval but Tudor, the original gates having all, unhappily, vanished. This one originated in the scare of invasion with which Henry the Eighth was seized, reasonably or unreasonably, and that resulted in the building of so many well-known coast fortresses, such as Walmer, Deal and Camber.

But one mediaeval gate, though of secondary importance, does in fact remain to Sandwich. It opens out of the old wall on to the little used wharves, which here line the river and is known as Fisher’s Gate, its two-storied gatehouse over the pointed arch being lighted by thirteenth-century, double-light lancet windows. This other Barbican gate, however, timber-capped and with two timber-capped drmn towers, opens into the High Street, which, characteristically edging away from the busier part of the town, leads nowhere particular and does apparently no business of its own worth mentioning. It mainly consists of quiet and rather humble old dwellings with the exception of a fine old panelled Tudor house faced in Georgian style and with flint which serves unofficially as the Rectory to St. Clements.

Some of the Sandwich streets run extraordinarily brief careers. Chain Street, for instance, in which High Street casually terminates, is just twenty-two yards, long—hence its name.

(p. 167)