THE YPRES TOWER AT RYE.
190 The Ypres Times.
It is curious that the most conspicuous monument of mediaeval warfare overlooking
what for a time was regarded as the danger spot of England should bear the name of the
memorable Flanders town. The Ypres Toweralways known locally as Wypers
stands upon the line of the old walls which surrounded the high perched town of Rye.
faces the sea which once lapped at its feet and is now two miles distant. At the same
time it looks eastward across the whole twenty-mile length of Romney Marsh to the
distant heights which overlook the old Cinque port of Hythe, with Folkestone and the
Dover cliffs filling in the background. Ypres tower is a small four-square fortalice with
drum towers erected in the twelfth century. The builder is popularly supposed to be
YPRES TOWER AT RYE.
one William of Ypres, a Norman earl of Kent (including Sussex), though this is but a
vague tradition. It is practically intact and standing high up on the Rock of Rye
presents an almost startling survival of the early Middle Ages on the skyline of a town
which, though ancient enough as such things go, hardly professes to symbolise in its
exterior the time of Henry I.
Ypres Tower must have been a useful station for the defenders of the town in the
many attacks made on it in the Middle Ages by the French and must have seen some
strange doings, for the natural landing place of the invaders would have been on the
strand immediately below it from which the sea or, rather, the then expanded estuary
of the Rother, only retired some two or three centuries ago. What is now a wide expanse
of green sheep pasture with the bridled Rother winding through its midst was in former
days a vast sheet of water extending westward to the sister Cinque port town of
Winchelsea two miles away, with a comparatively narrow entrance where the Rother
