Ancient Maps
which we know to have been formerly covered with forest-growth, being probably then below sea-level, must have required " inning " by means of artificial embankments, to prevent a possible inundation by the sea at high tide, or flooding by a sudden displacement of the shingle-bar. These embankments would have been constructed along the former shingle-spit south-east of the White Rock, and on the western bank of the estuarine harbour. Speaking generally of these recent forest-beds on the south-eastern shores of England, it is never safe to infer that because submerged land containing these old forest-beds was dry land at a certain period of history, therefore this period must have been contemporaneous with the forest-growth. It is possible that the phenomenon of the formation and dissolution of the shingle-barrier may have been repeated more than once at considerable
intervals of time, the shingle alternately defending the land against the sea, and exposing it by its dispersal, and this without any alteration in the levels of the land by subsidence. Thus, in mediaeval times, one of these forest-beds, the product of some primaeval growth, may have been buried beneath a layer of alluvial soil, and as effectually hidden from view as others now are by superincumbent sea, sand, and beach.
So much has been said and written about the Island (a mile and a half long!) opposite St. Leonards and Bulverhithe, which appears marked on most of the seventeenth-century maps of Sussex, that the matter cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed here. It may be as well to state at once that this Island is as conspicuously absent from the original maps of the sixteenth century and of the early years of the seventeenth, as it is from our own Ordnance Survey maps. The earliest printed map of Sussex with which the author is -
