These Sands, so well known to, and feared by, the mariner, are ten miles in length, running in a north-east and south-west direction off the east coast of Kent. They are divided into two portions by a narrow channel, and parts are uncovered at low water. When the tide recedes, the sand is firm and safe, but when the sea permeates it, the mass becomes pulpy, treacherous, and constantly shifting. Three light-vessels (one seven miles from Ramsgate) mark the most dangerous points, and these are themselves exposed to a considerable amount of danger. The only advantage derived from the existence of the Sands is that they form a kind of breakwater, securing a safe anchorage in the roadsteads of the Downs. But if the wind blows strongly off shore, let the mariner beware! The ancients thought that Britain was distinguished from all the world by unpassable seas and northern winds. The shores of Albion were dreadful to sailors, and our island was for a time regarded as the utmost bounds of the northern known land, beyond which none had ever sailed. These dangerous Goodwin Sands, if we may believe the chronicles, and there seems no reason why we should not, consisted at one time of about 4,000 acres of low coast land, fenced from the sea by a wall. One tradition, not usually credited, ascribes their present state to the erection of the Tenterden Steeple, by which the funds which should have maintained the sea-wall were diverted. An old authority, Lambard, says, “Whatsoever old wives tell of Goodwyne, Earle of Kent, in tyme of Edward the Confessour, and his sandes, it appeareth by Hector Boëtius, the Brittish chronicler, that theise sandes weare mayne land, and some tyme of the possession of Earl Goodwyne, and by a great inundation of the sea, they weare taken therefroe, at which tyme also much harme was done in Scotland and Flanders, by the same rage of the water.” At the period of the Conquest, these lands were taken from Earl Goodwin and bestowed on the abbey of St. Augustine, Canterbury, and some accounts say that the Abbot allowed the sea-wall to become dilapidated, and that in the year 1100 the waves rushed in and overwhelmed the whole. The inroads of the sea in many parts of the world would account for anything of the kind.