Some thoughts on the origin of the name Margate, the name variously appears as Merkat, Mergade, Meregate and Margate in Medieval documents.
Merkat is an obsolete form of the word Market, I can’t find
anything for Mergade, with Meregate a mere had a huge amount of different meanings
including a shortened form of mermaid and merman. All of the local history
sources I can find go with the origin being in Meregate from mere being a pond
lake or some such body of water.
In documents going back to around 1200 the place is most commonly
called St John’s or Margate.
I think there is a lot going for straightforward mar
(spoiled) and gate. Inasmuch as for anyone building some sort of sea gate in the
form of a pier or jetty, it would have soon been spoilt by a storm.
Margate isn’t mentioned in The Doomsday Book, so would have been
insignificant in 1066.
Back in the olden days when the names of places were derived
the Wantsum Chanel was still navigable offering a variety sea gates for
shipping that were more sheltered than Margate.
I am still banned from posting on the “We Love Old Ramsgate”
Facebook group so decided to focus on Margate today. Margate storm photos from
the Mick Twyman collection.
Margate is having a bit of a bad time on the local history
front with the museum closing link to article
Don’t worry I haven’t forgotten about Ramsgate where we do have a very lively local history attraction in the form of the Ramsgate Tunnels. One strange aspect of this attraction is that the western half of it is closed and probably always will be link to photos of the tunnels at that end
Here at Michael’s Bookshop in Ramsgate today we have been much
busier than I expected considering the weather.Here is the link to the latest books we have priced
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.