Belonging to a global network of wetlands listed under the Ramsar Convention, the levels on which Northeye is located once existed as a series of islands. A thousand years ago this landscape was under the sea and navigated by water. Natural and human forces have created an ephemeral marsh environment. In a period defined by increasing awareness of the effects of climate change, this historic site becomes a contemporary vessel for anticipatory landscapes. With a global rise in sea level, will these wetlands return to what they once? Perhaps the former island is ancient and prophetic. Alongside physical traces of disruption in the landscape, the historic documentation of Northeye is fragmented. Now an anonymous rise in the landscape, little has been left behind to reveal its previous status as a thriving settlement. Northeye is an anti-spectacle.

Early on in my research to uncover Northeye, I make contact with the curator of Bexhill Museum. The museum specialises in natural history and ethnography and has a collection of artefacts uncovered from a 1952 dig of Northeye Chapel. The report itself was mysteriously lost. A flinthead and ox shoe lie alongside other dark rust coloured fragments in a glass vitrine. Underneath, a large piece of Cairn stone, possibly from a chapel that once stood on Northeye, sits on a square of beige carpet on the wooden floorboards. Despite the loss of the excavation report, the curator tells me that they have a significant amount of material in the back office unseen by the public. Apparently few people ask about Northeye and because they are a small museum, it is hard to find the time and resources to digitise and catalogue everything. I offer to bring in my Canon A4 flatbed scanner to scan the material for him.

A week later, sifting through dusty boxes and files piled high on a red veneer table in the education room, I come across a collection of maps, an elaborate system of lines attempting to piece together the story of the deserted medieval village. The marks of an office blue biro, careful, deliberate and precise, sit alongside broken graphite dashes following the gradual reshaping of the coastline over centuries. Invented legends and speculative annotations, the result of hours and days of investigation and painstaking research. The reappropriation of the maps through tracing, photocopying, redrawing and scanning create strata similar to the geology of the earth itself, making visible the layers of historic narrative present in this landscape. I take a collection of maps with me on a field trip, to experience some of these annotated details firsthand, locating key features; a well and the outline of a chapel.  


Following my first visit to the deserted medieval village, I am invited to join a public walk with the museum, an opportunity to learn more about the site. I offer to help the curator with any preparation needed and we spend an afternoon selecting material from the archive to photocopy and laminate in defense of ever-possible rain and wind (the curator describes this as ‘marsh proofing’). One of the key documents we choose is a 772 King Offa charter of Bexhill, containing the first recording of the site, a meeting of pathways across the landscape named the Fiveways. In traditional English law, perambulations were used to determine the bounds of a legal area by walking a line around it and recording the route in writing. The Fiveways are now marked by a cluster of footpath association badges on a livestock gate – tourist yellow cutting through the marshes. On the day of the walk, we make our way, a group of twenty, through the overgrown grass in search of the lost village. Lines thread out behind us until we reach a rise in the marsh. The landscape is green-brown, faded by the sun and cracks appear in the dry earth. We needn’t have laminated after all.

The remnants of the deserted medieval village of Northeye are made visible by a series of earthworks, appearing as shallow undulations in the landscape caused by previous human-made structures. Clearly visualised through remote sensing technologies, such as Lidar, which uses light detection and ranging to examine the surface of the earth, the lines viewed at ground level are challenging to identify. Using a small concertina sketchbook and graphite and charcoal, I track the lines from east to west in Chapel Field over the course of the day. I attempt to describe the shape and depth of the earthworks to provide a sense of their topography alongside making a note to revisit throughout the year to document changes in appearance resulting from water levels and vegetation growth.

Observing Northeye from above elicits a very different reading of the landscape. Through my involvement with the museum, I am introduced to two local police officers - they have access to a drone and we arrange to meet one afternoon onsite. Operating the drone in a large circle, we move clockwise starting north. From this perspective, the formation and management of the landscape can be more easily understood and the outline and layout of Chapel Field is near identical to an aerial photograph in the archive at Bexhill Museum, taken in the fifties. The sun hits the waterways, reflecting a bright white light. They look like silvery eels writhing across the photograph and the herd appears as white and reddish pinheads scattered across a green surface. Strange constellations appear of small, light brown circles. We speculate on what they might be. Shallows, perhaps, resulting from resting cows. Molehills, even, (though when we later arrive back at the museum, the curator comments that they would have to be very large moles). 

From macro to micro, a shift in perspective unearths a forensic account of Northeye’s terrain. A 2009 Geoarchaeological report, carried out by Oxford Archaeology, presents the results of a series of borehole transects collected from Northeye. Vertical soil strata diagrams, dense with marks and lines to describe a coded colour, run through the PDF to reveal the deserted village’s geological story. The deposits evidence transformations in the landscape and the gradual reclamation of Northeye, alongside traces of salt workings suggesting the village’s industrial significance.


In the 11th Century, salt production is mentioned at a hundred sites across the marsh. These were vital to the areas industrial development. The 2009 report suggests the desertion of the village could have been catalysed by a failing economy, the spread of disease and the infilling of waterways following major storms. Areas surrounding the island contain deposits that could provide more information on salt working and wider medieval activity, but lying less than a metre below the ground’s surface, they are particularly susceptible to damage. Sleeching is most likely to have been carried out to extract salt from waterlogged silt. After being washed to filter the silt, the leftover brine would have been boiled to extract the salt and the remnants of the silt dumped, leading to the formation of large mounds. These low rising deposits line the edges of Northeye, indicating the once prosperous site. I decide to make my own salt. It seems important to reenact an activity so essential to the life, and death, of Northeye. As the site is no longer a salt marsh, I collect seawater from the nearest source, Normans Bay beach, lying a mile to the south and bake the liquid at home for thirty minutes at gas mark 6. I am left with bands of blistered salty residue in a shallow tray that look like sea foam and I make sure to photograph them before carefully scraping off the crystals. The process is an entirely different one to the original, yet evoking this material memory feels like a worthwhile pursuit and I carefully store the results in an airtight container.

I continue with this line of enquiry and consider other ways of materialising the lost village through medieval forms of production. After taking part in a manuscript workshop at the annual symposium for The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) at Kent University, I begin researching medieval ink making recipes and find that, alongside oak galls, hawthorn, which is often abundant in wetlands, was commonly used to form dark pigments suitable for writing. Following a twelfth century translated recipe from the Preservation Department of Yale University Library, I visit Northeye in spring to collect hawthorn branches (this must happen before they develop leaves or blossom, according to the instructions) and sluice water. After drying out the branches in my shed for a month, I scorch them over a flame and boil the blackened remains in sluice water for an hour or so, reducing the liquid down by two thirds. This pigmented liquid is then mixed with iron salts, prepared by steeping iron in water or vinegar for a couple of weeks, and left in open trays to evaporate over the next month. I visit my shed once a day to stir the contents and, by summer, I fill two small inkwells with the results and decide to use one of them on a field trip to document the marshland panorama seen from the highest point of the deserted village. Sitting on top of the site of the chapel, I rotate 360 degrees over the course of an afternoon, detailing the far distance with my ink, which, with some thinning using sluice water, lasts the duration.  

At this high point of the reclaimed island, the earthworks become visible as wide empty shallows. An anonymous painting found in 1986 depicts a dilapidated building, with an exposed ribcage roof, lying in a tumultuous sea of fields. The title reads ‘Northeye Chapel, perhaps’. By 1859 the ruins have disappeared but parch marks are noted by a local resident. The lines, caused by thinner crop growth over solid features such as masonry show up in aerial photographs as outlines of preexisting structures and in the summer of 2018, unusually hot and dry weather conditions led to the uncovering of many new important archaeological sites through new parch marks showing up in aerial photography. They are examples of ichnography, a term translated historically as ‘a marking of the building’s weight delving into the virgin earth’.

In the 1960’s, an industrial competitor to these earthworks arrived and Northeye was used as a commercial turf-growing site, with the deserted village repeatedly ploughed before being scheduled under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act in 1979. Stones were sighted during this period, perhaps remnants of the ruined chapel. There are older records of the collapsed ruins being reused for local infrastructure and architecture. The carcasses of commercial turfing machinery still line the ‘Trade’, an ancient route connecting Northeye to the higher area of Barnhorn. These roads and pathways form a vital part of the marshes, providing lifelines for those living and working in and around the area.


Ways of navigating the, sometimes unpassable, conditions of the marshes have been developed without the use of permanent infrastructure. In early spring, before the cows are put out to pasture, a sheep farmer renting the land uses a quad bike to cover the area quickly during lambing season. Scores of lines appear over the course of a few days. I think back to the lines that would have been cut by ploughs, historically pulled by oxen, and later the commercial turfing machinery.  The landowner of Northeye is a cattle farmer and has 250 cows, spending four mornings a week counting his animals on a round trip across Hooe and Pevensey. I get in contact via the local working men’s club and am invited to join him one morning. I arrive at 6.00am and park at the farm. He decides on using the tractor as the cows need feeding, so I climb in and perch on the narrow passengers seat, with a jack russell on my lap. It’s very cold, but sunny, and as we make our way towards Northeye through the lanes of Hooe, low-lying mist sits in the landscape. By the time we reach Chapel Field, the mist has gone but frost is still clinging to the grass on the shady sides of the earthworks, giving them more definition than usual. The landowner asks me if I would like to drive the tractor, or to feed the cows, so I stand on the back of the trailer, attempting to tear large clumps from the hay bales to throw on the grass below. Once the hay is gone, (it takes a long time), I am asked if I would like to drive the tractor and count the herd, so we swap seats and I put it in low gear, creeping slowly over the land. We drive to the right side of the cows and I am given tips on how to count them - the trick is to stay parallel, not to go too far ahead and lose track. The first time I count 43. He shakes his head and tells me to try again. I go more slowly this time. By the end I have counted 48, the correct number. We stop to walk amongst the animals and get a closer look, checking for any signs of illness. A small notebook is pulled from the landowner s pocket, filled with lines of data recordings – he calls it his ‘office’ – tracking the cycle of each animal from birth to death. It’s a simple but rigorous system, relying on the old practice of 'lookering', where a farmer or shepherd follows old paths across the landscape to count and monitor livestock.

There used to be looker huts dotted across the exposed landscape – a place of shelter for drovers and shepherds moving livestock across the marshes.  Alongside this pastoral function, the huts played a part in the smuggling runs that ghosted across the marsh, where contraband from the coast crossed by routes only known to locals. This has played a lively part in local history, with the nearby Star Inn at Norman’s Bay, home to many tales of historic illegal activity since it’s opening in 1402. The building was even used as a film location in 1951 for The Quiet Woman in which it is taken over by a new owner who becomes unwittingly involved with a part time smuggler.

Despite the romanticism of myths and legends surrounding the marshes, it is easy to appreciate how the deceptive nature of this landscape functioned perfectly as a location for stealth and secrecy. The marshes are challenging to navigate by day to unfamiliar visitors, the flatness of the landscape misleading. You imagine that everything can be seen in the wide, empty expanse but understanding the topography of the marshes changes according to distance and perspective. What appears as a flat field ahead may well lie several meters above sea level. You approach the next field but are abruptly cut off by a sluice lying in wait. Mounds and hollows dimple the land’s surface and intermittent scrubby hawthorns provide little distinction from one part of the marsh to the next. There are no landmarks here to navigate and without the aid of a map detailing the network of waterways of the landscape, a deceptively simple walk can take twice, three times as long as planned.

Having become well acquainted with a small area of Pevensey Levels after many visits to Northeye, I found myself completely disorientated on a nighttime walk, the purpose of which was to use infrared cameras to capture movement and heat sources at night. We failed to plan for the sea mist, often creeping inland during twilight, transforming the landscape into a version of the previous archipelago. Low-lying ground is obscured and islands appear as they once were, as ‘eyes’, eye being the historic suffix for island, rising up over the marshes and punctuating the otherwise flat horizon line. On the walk back, we encountered a different type of eye, with dozens of small silver disks, belonging to the watchful herd, appearing as we slowly and carefully make our way along the edge of the field. Approaching low ground, the mist becomes thick and obscures anything lying further than a few feet in front of us. We try to stay on track but quickly veer off course without the visual aid of the fence. By using GPS, we manage to correct our direction and reach the next stile, wondering at the skill and knowledge of previous inhabitants that would have navigated this landscape in similar conditions with ease.  

Mist, rain, storms and ice, weather transforms this landscape. In the thirteenth century, a series of bad storms tear through the levels. In 1755, the Lisbon Earthquake transforms the levels once again, creating a tsunami wave taking four hours to reach the coast of England. Tree stumps, smashed by the storms were dredged at a local farm several years ago. The fragments now decorate the owner’s garden lawn as ornaments, gradually disintegrating in the open air.

Short, violent episodes have changed the appearance of the marshes irrevocably, alongside slower and less dramatic variations in the landscape. In winter, Wallers Haven river is high after rainfall, relying on the nearby pumping station to regulate levels. Water collects in the irregularities in Northeye’s surface, turning Chapel Field into a series of reflective scars. The colour of the water is in constant transformation, from the cloudy milky appearance of clay disturbed by hard rainfall to the sharp white mirror of flat clouds. Using several cuts of oak, modelled into measuring devices by a local woodsman, I wade into the middle of these temporary pools to collect level readings from October to February. The woodsman suggests that the indentations are dew ponds, also known as mist or cloud ponds. Used on high ground where the land is quickly drained, this ancient technology provides a source of water to livestock. At the end of my experiment, I am left with several readings per shallow, marked off on my water level measures. 

Marshes are defined by the transient and fragile relationship between land and water, and Northeye’s existence has depended on a complex system of inning to reclaim and work the landscape. A Iimb of the Cinque Port of Hastings, I think about how Northeye would have been seen from the water and the predominant perspective of visitors and traders travelling to the former island by boat. One of the police officers I visited Northeye with previously suggests I could kayak along passages of the sluices surrounding Northeye. We set out on a still day, carrying a bright red inflated dinghy across the marsh and a set of oars and reach a sluice running along the east side of Northeye. We wait for a perturbed swan to pass by. They are common here on the marshes, often travelling in pairs. Once clear, we move the dingy down the bank into a clearing in the vegetation. I position myself in the vessel before sliding into the water and immediately realise that the dinghy is not fully inflated but manage to stabilise by shifting into the centre. After settling, I can concentrate on my surroundings. These levels are described as the ‘stronghold’ of one of Britain's largest and rarest spiders, the fen raft spider Dolomides plantarius I watch carefully. Set down in the waters, the landscape sounds different. I am shielded on both sides by a thick barrier of reeds and brambles and the distant rumblings of the A259 that travel across the flatness of the marshes disappear. From the ground, it can be hard to understand the topography of Northeye as an island. In the water, however, the land rises up dramatically and an alternative geography is revealed. A simple shift in perspective reveals the deserted village’s story. I float towards the historic island, using the oars to guide me, reenacting the arrival of many a thousand years earlier and wonder when the last time was that someone viewed Northeye from this perspective. After surveying the landscape above water, my attention turns to what lies below. Using a homemade waterproof camera attached to a long pole, I am able to immerse the camera underwater to capture hidden life in the sluices; a thick entanglement of lines lying beneath the surface. When I later watch the footage back, a new world is revealed. The scale of vegetation is exaggerated and flat green leaves obscure the view momentarily before the camera breaks free and weaves through a complex root system. Insects float by and small air bubbles swirl and disperse as the camera swims through the cloudy water. The closer we get to the bed the more opaque the images become, with large shadows moving across the screen and eventually enveloped by dark oranges and iron greys. It occurs to me that the view here will have remained largely the same for centuries, untouched by the world above.

Water-based processes write and rewrite the story of Northeye. Long periods of quiet are shattered by short-term events, and the anticipated future of this transformative landscape is disrupted. A linear unfolding of Northeye’s documented history is impossible. Its story is shaped by what we don't know; lost reports, ploughed ruins, inconclusive data and anonymous paintings – this place exists in the spaces between fact and fiction. It is as though the landscape doesn't want to be concluded. Instead, web of traces appear, disappear and reappear. Some exist for thousands of years, others for a minute, the residue of the past collides with the present, whilst stories are laid for the future.

A village may have existed on the edge of the marsh.




It is hoped to carry out excavations in the area.




Whether it is the site of Northeye I (see auth. 2, 6) is open to question but it is certainly a suitable site for scheduling.




Md settlement (? Northeye I) (site of), and U mound (prob. BA round barrow).




Mr Woodhouse arrived with his plans and report at the Barbican and, according to Mr Sargent, he saw a man whom he took to be a member of the Society. He said in effect to this man: 'I am Mr Woodhouse and here are the plans and the report of the excavations at Northeye.' Says Mr Sargent: 'The man did not say he was only a visitor. He took the plans and the report, and that was the last that anybody has seen of them.'




I am told by Mr Sargent that Mr Woodhouse did not keep any copy of his notes, nor of his plans and therefore cannot now help. Mr Lucas is dead and Mr Sargent left all the note-work to Mr Woodhouse.




‘It would have been filed away in a special file of unpublished articles. It is not in this file! Sorry, I cannot throw any more light on the problem'




We have no Northeye Records here; they were lost before 1594.




Northeye again excavated: Notes again lost.




No dateable material has been found.




No local or documentary evidence to enable classification.




The tragic thing is that Northeye, having been at last excavated, all the important records and relics have been lost to posterity. I have even lost the negatives of the pictures I took of this excavation — lost somewhere in this house on the outbreak of war when I had hurriedly to store my own records.

To be continued




With regard to the site of this lost Town and Chapel, and any remains that might be discovered of them, Mr. Ross adds that, in the summer of 1857, he went in search of them; and having arrived at the spot at, or somewhere near which he had expected to find them, a labourer, with whom he accidentally met, replied to his enquiries after any evidences of its existence and position, that he had heard of such a place as Northeye, and that that was all he knew about it. Mr. Ross then enquired if he could tell him of any ruins or old stones which might be lying about, either in a heap or separately, in the neighbourhood. To which he replied that there used to be a power — a well-known Sussex expression for a considerable quantity or number— of stones in ‘The Old Town Field’ down by the edge of the Marsh; but that his master had taken them up whenever he wanted stone for any particular purpose, as others had done before him; and that he had carried a great many away to put into the drains - which he had made in his lands, and that they were now pretty near all gone.




An old looker named Pilbeam, as round, he was, as a tub, told me he was, when a youth of about 17, employed to pull down and destroy the last portion of Northeye chapel and scatter the boulders and freestone of which it was composed as flooring for marsh trackways.




South to the valley – up along the little heath feld – to the goblin well – south to cyllan mount – from the mount to the cyllan well – west along the stream to Thunor*s lair – along the western stream abutting the salt marsh to the fiveways – north along the moor to the place of slaughter and the northern foul water ford – up the old dyke – east along the dyke and thus to the moss well.




The surrounding works have been reduced by ploughing to amorphous banks and ditches.








It began. In the very dry summer of 1857, Mr Ross of Hastings came to Barnhorn with his sketch book looking for the ruins of Northeye Chapel, or the 'Lost Town of Northeye' which was then only name on a map.





now under coarse grass                                                 

                       

(?)




A marking of the building’s weight delving into the virgin earth.




Crossing the road to the north of this field I found the remains of some walling and was told' it was the 'ruins of Northeye Chapel,' which I sketched, and it, was a good thing I did because when I came back two  years later (in 1859) it had all gone:




So now I have a lump of Northeye in my garden -
a lump of stone, very hard and oddly shaped.




Sir, - I am taking the liberty of writing to ask you if it is possible to persuade the Bexhill Council to provide a proper road or footpath for inhabitants of the Sluice.                                                                         Trusting you will be able to help, as we feel entirely cut off from civilisation.
Yours truly, SLUICER




The Commissioners of the Levels of Pevensey and Hooe ordered and decreed that an expeditor of the said Levels should be appointed. The person appointed should possess the undermentioned qualifications viz. —-

Strict Integrity.
Experience in Tides and Winds of the Coast.
Experience in moving Earth, making and cleansing Ditches and Sewers.
On leaving home to state always where he may be found.




Turning south off the old road at the top of Barnhorn Hill I came to an old and very wide lane leading down to the marsh. It led to what is called Chapel Bridge. which crosses the East Stream, and there before me was a very large field, heaved up out of the marshland in prehistoric times. Running right across it to The Sluice I could see the remains of a very old road, cut deeply into the earth, and leading off of it were signs of streets. Walking round to the north-west side of this 'island' I found the remains of the village pond and then what I expected, a deeply cut V-shape. like an old creek long dried up. I had found all that is left or Northeye Harbour.




The moon turned red and the tide flowed twice without ebbing.




Trees fallen as a result of the great storm of October 1987 militated against the recovery of further evidence on the supposed chapel site.




being all the devouring sea have now left thereof




I am not an archaeologist, nor would I call myself an historian.