There are prehistoric, Iron Age, Roman, and Saxon settlement remains on the peninsula around Ebbsfleet Farm, which may have also been the landing stage for the Roman ferry across the channel to Richborough. Archaeologists suggest that Pegwell Bay was the site of both Roman invasions of Britain.[1] Claudius landed his army at Richborough on the other side of the channel, to start his invasion of 43 AD, and it became a major port of Roman Britain.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle it is also the site of the landings made by the Saxons in the fifth century AD; an entry states that Hengist and Horsa, on the invitation of Vortigern, King of the Britons, landed in 449 at Eopwinesfleot, usually assumed to be Ebbsfleet.[2] A fleot is a creek and Eopwine is a Germanic personal name; the modern Ebbsfleet may have developed from Eoppa/Eobba, a short form of this name.[3] The arrival of the Saxons is commemorated by a monument and replica longship up the coast at Cliffsend. The Battle of Wippedesfleot between the Britons and the English in 465 is thought to have taken place at Ebbsfleet.
Bede wrote in his Ecclesiastical History: "On the east of Kent is the large Isle of Thanet containing, according to the English way of reckoning, 600 families, divided from the other land by the river Wantsum, which is about three furlongs over, and fordable only in two places, for both ends of it run into the sea. In this island landed the servant of our Lord, Augustine, and his companions, being, as is reported, nearly forty men. They had, by order of the blessed Pope Gregory, taken interpreters of the nation of the Franks."
This has been interpreted to mean Ebbsfleet was where Augustine landed. In 1884, St Augustine's Cross was erected on the lane between Cliffsend and Sevenscore to commemorate his first sermon in Kent.[4]