THE ISLE OF KUIM. 



pERiiArs you have never heard its name before ; yet in 

 the earlier ages of this kingdom of Britain, Kuim Isle, 

 rising dim through the mist of prehistoric oceans, was 

 once in its own way famous and important. 



Off the old and obliterated south-eastern promontory 

 of our island, where the land of Kent shelved almost 

 imperceptibly into the Wantsum Strait, Kuim Island — 

 the Holm of the Headland — stood out with its white wall 

 of broken cliffs into the German Sea. The greater part 

 of it consisted of gorse-clad chalk down, the last subsiding 

 spur of that great upland range which, starting from the 

 central boss of Salisbury Plain, runs right across the 

 face of Surrey and Kent, and, bifurcating near Canterbury, 

 falls sheer into the sea at the end of either fork by 

 Ramsgate or Dover. But in earlier days Ruim Isle was 

 not joined as now by flats and marshes to the adjacent 

 mainland ; the chalk dipped under the open Wantsum 

 Strait, much as the chalk of Hampshire dips to-day under 

 the Solent Sea, and reappeared again on the other side 

 in the Thanet Downs, as it reappears in the Isle of 

 "Wight at the ridge of St. Boniface and the central hills 



