Kent Halfpenny Token (1794)

Not my field, but this is most attractive!

Yes, it is.

Great token, LuckyCuss!

Brookland is just a few miles from my home, and is a small village in the centre of Romney Marsh, a large flat triangle of marshland and shingle that juts out from the Kent coast and was mostly reclaimed from the sea during Roman and Medieval times. Much of the marsh lies below sea level, and it is protected from flooding by a high sea wall.

Brookland was obviously considerably more important in the 18th century than today. It only has a few hundred inhabitants. In the 1880s it had shops, a Post Office, a pub and a train station. The station closed in 1967, there are no more shops, and the pub closed a few years ago. The main local industry is sheep farming, and this would have employed considerably more people in the past than it does today.

The main sight of Brookland is the church. It's about 700 years old, and is remarkable for its unusual bell-tower, which is made of wood, looks like one spire on top of another and is detached from the church. Archaeologists say that the tower was built to this design because a heavy stone tower would have sunk into the marshy ground and collapsed: the walls and pillars of the church are a few degrees out of the perpendicular, so that seems an appropriate theory. Local villagers, however, claim that morals in Brookland were somewhat lax in the 13th century, and when, one day, a young couple came to the church and asked the priest to marry them, the spire was so astonished that it jumped off the roof in surprise and has been in the churchyard ever since!

A few photos I've taken of Brookland over the years...

Exterior of the church:

Interior of the church:

The former train station:

The sign of the village pub. It was still open in 2011 when I took this photo:

Nice token @Lucky Cuss and nice with some background @NumisRob!