The Lost Village of Merston

I only knew one person who actually lived in the village of Shorne, near Gravesend.   Her name was Sally and my mother definitely approved of her because her parents were hard working.  What’s more they were what we might now call socially upwardly mobile but of course we didn’t use such a term at that time.   They did all their hard work, I was told, on a smallholding just outside the village.  Smallholding was another term I wasn’t familiar with but one of my many Hendy male cousins from Waterdales said it was what you had when you couldn’t afford a proper farm.  

My Grandmother was of the opinion that as a village Shorne was not much cop which meant that she didn’t think much of it.  She added that once upon a time there was a village called Merston on its border but by the time we reached the 1950s nobody bothered to mention it.   Shorne was the only name you heard to do with the area and when you came to think about it, not a great many people were drawn to live there. 

However a few years later an archaeological investigation revealed the foundations of a small Norman church where Merston was said to have been.   This was widely reported and people began to change their thinking to some extent.   Sally of the smallholding told me when I bumped into her in Woolworths one Saturday morning, that her father was of the opinion that The Black Death had been the finish of Merston.  That’s precisely what a lot of people thought and clearly Shorne and Merston elicited a certain amount of controversy one way and another.  

In the nineteenth century a man called Tufnell Carbonell Barratt who appears to have been a speculative builder put considerable effort into the recovery of boggy land nearby previously felt to be not suitable for building.  He then erected a number of Elizabethan style cottages which were widely commented on as most attractive.  He must have thoroughly agreed because he then built himself a house nearby!   I now wonder if he said he lived in Shorne or in Merston.