The four miles onward to Sandwich are a dead level. In the dawn of history, when Thanet was still an island, and when ships bound to and from London sailed round the Wantsum channel, by Minster and Sarre, the sea rolled where now this road runs. It is an impressive thought, and renders this scenery more than a little romantic. As you proceed, with the reedy dykes on the right, towards the red, clustered roofs of Sandwich, ahead, there rise away across the marshes to the right the grey, solitary walls of Richborough, the place that was once the Roman port and fortress of _Rutupiæ_, guarding this entrance of that ancient channel, just as _Regulbium_ kept watch and ward at the other. The river Stour, which here flows in an extraordinary looped course, prevents access to Richborough this way, and one must come to it through Sandwich. No one, once arrived on that spot, can be insensible to its peculiar charm; the hoary walls, still in places some thirty feet high and ten feet eighteen inches thick, displaying the Roman construction of rubble and stone, alternating with courses of red brick. The walls form three sides of a square, the fourth side originally giving upon the water in those days when the Roman vessels anchored here at the quays. The area enclosed by these walls is ten acres, now under corn. A singular puzzle for archæologists, who have not yet explained the meaning of it, is the extraordinary subterranean passage, discovered in 1866, which runs beneath this enclosed area and is, in effect, a tunnel some five feet high, made of flints embedded in concrete. It has a right-hand elbow and ends abruptly. There is usually some one at hand with candle and matches, who is prepared, for a modest consideration, to conduct the visitor along this passage. Above this, in the centre of the station, is a concrete platform in the form of a cross. This, also, is a prime enigma to the inquiring mind. Some archæologists consider it to have been the base on which was built a pharos, or lighthouse. The mind of the contemplative visitor to this solitary spot dwells upon the contrast between the busy Roman port of sixteen hundred years ago and the remoteness of life from it now. Ivy of great age mantles the walls, and wheat grows ripe to harvest in the great field that was once a populous camp. All is changed, except the cliffs of Thanet, shining whitely in the distance; and they, too, bear the burden of Ramsgate’s sprawling streets, dimly made out against the skyline.