Churches of the British Isles

Boatman's Hill Cemetery Chapel is on the south-east side of Woodnesborough Road, midway between the Sandwood Road junction and the entrance to Sandwich Leisure Holiday Park. Officially Sandwich Cemetery, its chapel dates to 1855 and the first burials date from the following year. At the chapel's front is a room in which bodies were laid prior to burial. On the left is a small room in which gravediggers kept their equipment. The chapel has been vacant for many years.

St Mary-le-Bone Old Chapel stood on Mary-le-Bone Hill, in the fields between Woodnesborough Road and Poulders Road (well to the right of the houses here). Its chalk-and-pebble foundations were exposed in 1959, notably with an east-west orientation and a division into 'nave' and 'chancel' parts. Pottery dated the find to the 1200s. It may have been an early site of The Maldry (a leper hospital), or was part of a Leeds Priory enclosure with the field still bearing its name.

A location for the former Sandwich Quaker Meeting is unknown, predating any useful maps of the town. Quakerism first arrived in Kent in 1655 and, soon after, a congregation was recorded in Sandwich. William Penn's journal entry for 16 October 1672 records his attendance at the meeting and an overnight stay at the house of Thomas Loutens where he met notable local Quaker Valentine Bowles.  The meeting certainly survived into 1691 but its final fate is not known.

The former Our Lady of Carmel Friary (New Street) is today embodied in the Cattle Market (see links) and the frontage of No 34 New Street. Much of the land behind the entire western side of this street was priory land until the Dissolution. The friars had no money of their own and must have been granted the land. Various people are mentioned as being 'founders', including Thomas Crauthorne, recorded as the founder of St Bartholomew's Hospital (see links).

Initial building seemingly focussed on the White Friars meadow, not extending to New Street to its east. The original small marshy site was augmented in 1280 by John of Sandwich, who gave an adjacent plot of land, and a further 'two acres' was given by a named group of men in 1336. By the mid-1500s Dissolution records show that the friary included orchards, gardens, a barn, and a stable, all of which lay behind the New Street frontage, and was later to be sold off.

All photos on this page by P L Kessler.