Wantsum Channel

The Wantsum Channel was a strait separating the Isle of Thanet from the north-eastern extremity of the English county of Kent and connecting the English Channel and the Thames Estuary. It was a major shipping route when Britain was part of the Roman Empire, and continued in use until it was closed by silting in the late Middle Ages. Its course is now represented by the River Stour and the River Wantsum, which is little more than a drainage ditch lying between Reculver and St Nicholas-at-Wade and joins the Stour about 1.7 miles south-east of Sarre.
Eilert Ekwall, a 20th-century authority on English place-names, wrote that the name "Wantsum" derives from an Old English word "wandsum", meaning "winding". Bede, writing in or before 731, mentioned the Wantsum in describing the Isle of Thanet, but he also recorded an alternative name: he described the church at Reculver as being juxta ostium aquilonale fluminis Genladae, or "by the north mouth of the river Genlade". Ekwall compared this to the name of Yantlet Creek, which separates the Isle of Grain from mainland Kent. He suggested an origin in the Old English word gegnlad meaning "'backwater' or the like, [and] very likely the source of the word inlet [for] 'arm of the sea, [or] creek'."

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