Valuable piece of Herne Bay history reopened to the public after twenty years

The Reculver Towers have undergone restoration work, including on the roman Wall.  Finn Macdiarmid reports.

Transcript

00:00Recolva is a village just three miles along the coast from Herne Bay, and it's home to

00:05a halfway house of history, with the Recolva Towers having been a Roman settlement, a fort,

00:10a monastery, and then a church. Now, after more than ten years, members of the public

00:16can access the inside of the towers.

00:18Well, the Romans, Britons, and Saxons, all the way back in the 12th century doing that

00:24walk, might have been a bit fitter than me. They were part of a Christian sect known as

00:31the Recolvas here at Recolva Tower, and they would have had a bit of a better reward waiting

00:36for them at the top. That would have been their storage here, which would have mostly

00:40been gold. Well, no-one's really been up here in about 20 years because of the closure.

00:48When Emperor Claudius and the Romans conquered Britain in AD 43, it's widely believed that

00:53they used the River Wansum in Kent as a shortcut into the mainland from the sea. That meant

00:58they developed it from a settlement to a fort, which was then eventually turned into a 12th

01:03century monasteric church. But the Romans' brickwork can still be seen with these red

01:07tiles.

01:08Well, the history of the church, what we see here now is the remnants of a church that

01:14was built in the centre of the Roman fort when the Romans had gone, and it was owned

01:20by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who obviously was the bigwig, wasn't he, for this area?

01:25And it was formed by monks in about the 630s.

01:30With the small entryway, people were queuing up to get through the door, and told me it

01:33had been closed to them for what felt like so long.

01:36It's a really important site for the council and for Herne Bay. As you can probably see,

01:48it's drawing a lot of people here, so it's great to see so many people coming out.

01:54But it wasn't an easy journey. With the tower's location, the conservation efforts had to

01:58ensure the towers were not just suitable for the public, but for future generations to

02:03enjoy as well.

02:04So we started off with the Roman fort that surrounds the church, and getting all the

02:10brickwork and stonework that's still there from the Roman period into a condition where

02:15it's not going to deteriorate any more than it already has.

02:19We then started doing some conservation work on the main parts of the church other than

02:24the towers as phase two, and then phase three, obviously the biggest project of them all

02:28was to get these towers into a fit state.

02:33Well from the 1st century to the 12th and now in the 21st, hopefully this piece of Kentish

02:37history can stand the test of time.

02:39Finn McDermid for KMTV in Recolva.