So long ago as 1780 the sea had begun to threaten it, and the great north wall of the castle fell one night into the advancing tide, leaving the monument to Christianity in a very exposed condition, while the bones of the forgotten inhabitants were washed away out of the churchyard, just as those of Warden, in Sheppey, are at this day. Instead of making any attempt to save the church, the authorities began in 1809 to demolish it, only halting when they reached the twin towers. The surrounding farmers found the building-stones very useful for pig-sties and cow-sheds, and cared not a rap whether they were Norman or Early English. There were, indeed, some Roman columns in the church. They had come from the pagan basilica within the castle, but that did not hinder their being cast aside with the rest. In 1860 one was discovered, one of its stones doing duty as a garden-roller. It was, with another column, rescued from further desecration, and the two have been set up in the Cathedral Close at Canterbury. [Illustration: RECULVER.] The vicarage was also abandoned in 1809, but not pulled down. It was converted into a public-house, which long stood here under the sign of the "Hoy." The existing inn is the "King Ethelbert." The twin towers of Reculver church form a portion of the former west front. They are of Norman and Early English date, and, constructed as they were largely of the materials of the ruined Roman buildings, are rich in fragments of tile. The towers were erected to serve as a sea-mark, to warn vessels beating up for the Swale and the Medway of the dangerous Columbine Sand, and their origin has from time immemorial been the subject of the legend of the "Twin Sisters," which tells how the Abbess of the Benedictine Priory of Davington and her sister, voyaging to fulfil a vow made to Our Lady of Broadstairs, were wrecked here for lack of a sea-mark. The Abbess was saved, but her sister was drowned, and, as a combined thank-offering for her own escape and by way of memorial to her sister, that holy woman erected the twin towers, to serve all mariners sailing by. Barham perverted the legend in his "Brothers of Birchington." Perhaps the temptation to alliteration was too strong to be resisted, and then the idea came to him of rejecting the familiar story and using in its stead an old monastic tale of how there were two brothers, the one pious and the other given up to all manner of evil courses, and how the Devil came for the wrong one by mistake and was obliged to restore him. In the Ingoldsby legend the brothers become Robert and Richard de Birchington, and their vow it was, he tells us, which produced the famous sea-mark: Well--there the "Twins" stand On the verge of the land, To warn mariners off from the Columbine Sand, And many a poor man have Robert and Dick By their vow caused to 'scape, like themselves, from Old Nick.