Stonar Cut

Stonar Cut is a muddy creek on the Kentish shore, a channel through the flats that the sea fills and empties without asking anyone. Nobody lives at it. There is no capstan to haul a boat up, no common fund, no lantern on a post, nothing to mark it as anyone's ground. It shares its name with the Stonars of Sandwich, the old borough family of port offices and shipping accounts, though no one on the coast claims to know whether the creek was named for them or they for it.

Boats come and go by the tide. A craft enters when the water lets her and is out again before the ebb leaves her sitting, and the little that is landed here is mostly fish and ordinary stores, brought ashore in daylight and owing nothing to anyone. With no officer and no entry book, nothing set down at Stonar Cut can afterwards be proved to have come ashore there at all.

For that reason the Cut stands in the third column of the Dover board, among the landings where no licensed merchant hull and no ship of the Crown may touch. A licensed master who puts in here, even to save his crew from weather, gives up his licence and his insurance with the same stroke, and the coast is careful to warn newcomers that a creek is not a landing.