Kemsley, once a separate village, is now a suburb of

Sittingbourne Sittingbourne is an industrial town in the Swale district of Kent, southeast England, from Canterbury and from London, beside the Roman Watling Street, an ancient trackway used by the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons. The town stands next to th ...

Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...

, England. According to Asserius Menevensis in his contemporary survey, the

Danes Danes (, ), or Danish people, are an ethnic group and nationality native to Denmark and a modern nation identified with the country of Denmark. This connection may be ancestral, legal, historical, or cultural. History Early history Denmark ...

built a fortress or castle here in 893 at a place called 'Kemsley downe'. This later became 'Castle Rough'. At the end of the 19th century, the site of the village was simply a row of cottages beside a brick works, located close to the remains of the

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...

fortified manor house Castle Rough. In 1924, with expansion impossible at the old Sittingbourne Paper Mills, owner Edward Lloyd built the new Kemsley Paper Mill, which served by a creek allowed the direct importation of raw materials to the site. At the same time he built a garden village to house his employees, the core of which comprises the modern day Kemsley village. The

narrow gauge A narrow-gauge railway (narrow-gauge railroad in the US) is a railway with a track gauge (distance between the rails) narrower than . Most narrow-gauge railways are between and . Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with Minimum railw ...

industrial railway An industrial railway is a type of railway (usually private) that is not available for public transportation and is used exclusively to serve a particular industrial, logistics, or military site. In regions of the world influenced by British r ...

which served the factory is now the preserved Sittingbourne and Kemsley Light Railway, a tourist attraction. Kemsley railway station is on the Sheerness Line.

References

Villages in Kent Sittingbourne {{Kent-geo-stub