Discover Rye

A Cinque Port the sea left behind

Rye stands on a sandstone hilltop above the Romney and Rother marshes in East Sussex, close to the Kent border. It was a full member of the Cinque Ports confederation by 1289, obliged to supply ships and mariners to the Crown, and by the 1330s Rye and neighbouring Winchelsea together provided half of everything the confederation owed the king. A violent storm in 1287 began silting the harbour and redirecting the River Rother, and over the following centuries the coastline retreated nearly two miles from the town, leaving behind the medieval core visitors find today: the surviving Landgate, cobbled Mermaid Street, St Mary's Church with its sixteenth-century turret clock, and Ypres Tower on the site of the town's oldest defences.

The retreat of the sea did not end Rye's relationship with it; smuggling filled the gap, and the Mermaid Inn's documented association with the Hawkhurst Gang is real history beneath its 1156 cellars. Two centuries later, Henry James wrote some of his major late novels at Lamb House, and after him E.F. Benson turned the town into the fictional Tilling of his Mapp and Lucia novels. Beyond the old town walls, the marsh the sea abandoned now holds Rye Harbour Nature Reserve's shingle, saltmarsh and breeding birds, with the dune-backed beach at Camber Sands a short walk or bus ride further on, the other half of a visit that a rushed half-day trip never reaches.