Another historian places the date of the battle three hundred and eighty-seven years later. “A.D. 843,” he says, “in the reign of Ethelwolf, the Danes landed on the coast of Kent, near to the town of Hyta, and proceeded as far as Canterbury, great part of which they burnt. At length Gustavus (then Governor of Kent) raised a considerable force, with which he opposed their progress; and, after an engagement in which the Danes were defeated, pursued them to their shipping on the sea-coast, where they made a most obstinate resistance. The Britons, however, were victorious, but the slaughter was prodigious, there being not less than thirty thousand left dead. After the battle the Britons, wearied with fatigue, returned to their homes, leaving the slain on the field of battle, where, being exposed to the different changes of the weather, the flesh rotted from the bones, which were afterwards collected and piled in heaps by the inhabitants, who in time removed them into a vault in one of the churches of Hyta, now called Hythe.” Hythe owes a great deal to the memory of William Pitt, whose Military Canal has, in the more than a hundred years since it was made, become one of the loveliest of waterways, on which splendid boating, under the shade of century-old trees, may be had. Leaving the town, the road comes at once, past the bridge over the Canal and by the “Duke’s Head” inn, into the romantic region of Romney Marsh. Romney Marsh was in merry Tom Ingoldsby’s time so out of the way that he could find it possible to say, with that humorous exaggeration which enshrines some little truth, “the world, according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Romney Marsh. In this last-named, and fifth, quarter of the globe a witch may still be occasionally discovered in favourable, _i.e._ stormy seasons, weathering Dungeness Point in an eggshell, or careering on her broomstick over Dymchurch Wall.” The last witch eloped with the ultimate smuggler, full seventy years since, but Romney Marsh remains, a beautiful open expanse of wide horizons, clear skies, and succulent pastures. The coastwise road runs across its levels, seven miles to New Romney, with the village of Dymchurch in between, Dymchurch Wall keeping out the sea. This, viewed from the inner side, is a lofty grassed earthen bank, faced seawards with a masonry “apron,” as engineers style it; while at regular intervals the martello towers of an olden scheme of coast-defence are features of the way. Cobbett, writing in 1825, was very severe upon them: