Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day and an update on the vanishing Ramsgate Sands a ramble.

If ever one day of the year can be called carnival day then it’s today, no fixed date you understand, a movable feast forty days before Easter, which roughly is, the Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox. Not exactly and perfectly right, but good enough for me and The Venerable Bede wrote that definition of the date of Easter down in 725.

About 800 years later in 1559 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, the main historic image of this traditionally important symbol.

Here in Ramsgate what with the temperature at this time of year and stuff, very few of us celebrate this religious festival by removing most of our clothes and dancing in the street wearing feathers.

In fact after last night’s storm we don’t have that much to celebrate as another major running point in the departure of Ramsgate Main Sands has been reached

if you look at the photo you will see the high tide mark has reached the sea defence next to the East Pier harbour wall.

I posted about this issue yesterday, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/ramsgate-main-sands-where-is-sand-going.html#comment-form which resulted in various ideas in the form of comments, mostly on the various Facebook groups that yesterday’s post was linked to.

In fact I have been posting about the problem for several years now and it would seem that finally we have lost our sand above the high tide mark in Ramsgate, although a bit opposite the lifeguard station may remain for a year or two.

In the bookshop here in Ramsgate we are working hard processing the books we have bought recently, if you want to know what has just gone out on the shelves then keep an eye on http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/

As far as I know we are the only bookshop in the world photographing all the books we put out on the shelves every working day and putting the photos on the internet.

Technically it isn’t very difficult to do this now because of cloud computing which puts the photos on the internet automatically after you take them. Strangely although this all links up with blogger and youtube, Facebook it seems has yet to get to grips with the cloud, it’s a funny old world.

Ramsgate town centre wise the 99p shop has closed

the £1 shop is moving to the site

and then the 99p shop is closing, I think. Is that right? Sound like it. 

Ramsgate Main Sands, where is the sand going and why?

Ramsgate Main Sands is the beach on the east side of Ramsgate Harbour and what I am talking about here is the is the part of the sands not covered by the sea at high tide.

When you first look at the beach it is easy to assume that it has been formed by sand collecting because of the shelter of Ramsgate harbour.

The red line on the picture shows the approximate high tide line from around 1940 to around 2010 and the blue line the approximate high tide line now.

One way or another we have lost a lot of sand.

Back in the early 1700s before Ramsgate Harbour was built, Ramsgate had a pier a bit like the one in Broadstairs and a small beach collected there, high tide mark in red.

Ramsgate Harbour was built during the last half of the 1700s and this picture shows the beach then.

During Victorian times it looks like a bit more sand collected above the high tide line around where the pavillion is now, this is an oil sketch done by William Powell Frith in 1850 for his famous painting of Ramsgate Sands.

Here is the famous painting, don't take much notice of the colour differences, which are more down to the way the originals were photographed than anything else.

 The Pavilion was built in 1904 and all of the pre war pictures show the high tides covered all of the sand.

Between the wars the sand above the high tide mark started to build up, I was told by Don Long that this was due to the the sand being held in place by the war time beach defences, concrete block and barbed wire.

More of this in WW2 and as I say this situation was maintained  up to the 1960s.

In the 1970s a lot of the sand from Ramsgate Main Sands was removed and used for the infill in the building of Port Ramsgate, my understanding is that a lot of the buried wartime beach defences that held the sand in place went with it.

In the 1990s Ramsgate dredger that steadily dredged Ramsgate harbour and dumped the sand from the dredging where it would be swept onto Ramsgate Sands was sold.   

Not much happened for some time this is another 2010 picture.

In 2013 the sea seemed to be cutting away the front of the sands.

This was the 2014 situation.

and this about a month ago. The most worrying aspect of this is the sea defences behind the main sands haven't been in contact with the sea for around 100 years and now with the sand going they may not hold.

Both of Ramsgate’s beaches have been named in the UK top 10.

Well that’s what it says on the Good Beach Guide website, I am not sure that this can be right, or even quite what it means click here to go to their website, just close the window asking you to fill in some sort of form.

Ramsgate’s main sands prime leisure site being a deserted building site for the last 12 years, just doesn’t fit with this evaluation.

Ramsgate’s are definitely two of the best beaches in the area despite the Pleasurama site at one and the lorry parking at the other, but no I have to say I am confused over this one.