Has the River Cray course been changed over the years?

Answer 1

This is a question I recently tried to answer by driving/walking along the course of the river. The fundamental lie of the land is unlikely to have changed much since the last Ice Age, so the Cray must always have run along the bottom of its valley in a similar course to the modern one. However, much ancient river flow has nowadays been shifted into sewers, and the level of the Thames (into which the Cray ultimately empties) was lower (by as much as 4 metres) in Roman times. So one can confidently say that the ancient river Cray was bigger and faster than the modern stream, which presumably explains how the many mills on the Cray could get enough power. Also in former times there would have been more surrounding marshland into which the Cray could overspill and naturally change course. Humans (farmers, mill owners, boatmen) could easily have helped the process of course changing, on a scale of perhaps hundreds of metres, but I don't know if there are any historical records for this. Why was I interested in the Cray's course? Because the whole area is thick with ancient chalk mines (deneholes) notably on the high ground of Joyden's Wood, etc. I was exploring the hypothesis that the river took its name from an old English word cray meaning chalk, and that the river was used as a means of transport (in boats called crayers) to take the huge tonnages of chalk and lime to distant markets. This idea flies in the face of vested interests in university linguistics departments who have constructed a huge edifice of theory that the English language was born around 450AD and that the names of most ancient rivers are "Celtic". So the word Cray is allegedly Welsh: crai meaning fresh/clean. Lots more to tell along those lines if anyone wants to contact me at: chalk (put an at sign) wightscientific (go dotty) com. How do the Celtic etymologists explain that on the other side of the Thames lies Grays, which was also a huge centre of chalk mining?