It is situated between East Stourmouth and the Monkton marshes to the north, with the old Red House Ferry to the east and Grove Ferry to the west. Judith Glover's The Place Names of Kent (publ. B.T. Batsford Books Ltd., 1976) states:
According to local tradition, the river Stour at this point takes its name from a Mr Pluck, a landlord of the Dog and Duck inn. During the building of the bridge here last [19th] century, he is said to have ferried the builders to and fro across the river, and in friendly appreciation of his services they nicknamed this stretch of the Stour "Pluck's Gutter".
In June of 2006 I was pleased to be contacted by Mike Holmes, current owner of the Red Ferry House. He advised:
The name Plucks Gutter is listed from the 1700s and certainly long before the Road Bridge was built in 1902; so the tale that it was named after a Mr Pluck during the bridge building is wrong. The ferry Cottage was originally built about 1530 when it was a timber framed farmhouse and ferry; it is first recorded as an alehouse as well in 1622 when it was called The Dog and Duck. Many pubs are called this, especially where dogs were used to flush out ducks to guns and retreive them.
The ferry cottage remained as an alehouse until Francis A. White [owner of the Stourmouth Brewery, and a local councillor] contributed to the building of the new road bridge and the building of a new pub in 1902. He closed the old Dog and Duck at this time together with the ferry, and the cottage passed eventually to the water board as a sluice keeper's cottage. I bought it from Southern Water in 1996.
After Henry VIII closed the Augustine monastry in Canterbury, the sea walls of the Wantsum fell into disrepair and the sea started to reclaim the drained land - many of the banks of the Stour are still called to this day "Monk's Wall". Elizabeth I invited Dutch Protestants [being persecuted by their Spanish Catholic Colonial Masters] to settle in England offering them as much land as they could reclaim from the sea. A great many took up the offer as can be evidenced by the dutch gables in many East Coast Towns, especially Sandwich and Lincoln.
The traditional way of draining the land was to start with a deep furrow made by a plough and to let the land drain naturally into this - this proved that the drain would flow downhill, difficult to see on what is very flat land; over time this opened out and was widened and deepened by man. The East Kent word for such a drain is a gutter and the dutch for a plough is ploeg [pronounced plerg rhyming with iceberg]. Plucks Gutter is an corruption and anglisation of these two elements; so the meaning of Plucks Gutter is "ploughed drain".
Maps drawn in the first half of the 19th century sometimes show Plucks Gutter as Plux Gutter. In 1821-23, the notorious North Kent Gang of smugglers made use of Pluck's Gutter. They travelled some fourteen miles, on foot, through Trenleypark Wood to Stodmarsh, via Grove Corner to Pluck's Gutter where they crossed the river, northeast to Mount Pleasant then up to Marsh Bay.
I am fortunate to have received an essay from Mrs Maggie Baldwin who was born in Stourmouth; read it, and take a walk through the village in the 1950-1970 timeframe.
Below is my (very amateur) map of the eastern and western reaches of Stourmouth, as it appears today.
I hope to, eventually, look at various parish chest records that have been filmed by the LDS, such as the Overseers and Churchwardens accounts, and land tax assessments. I hope they will yield more pertinent information about day to day life in Stourmouth. The data will, of course, be posted to this website. Stay tuned!