The Short Brothers, Horace, Eustace and Oswald, built aircraft at Battersea to be tested at the site; later Moore-Brabazon, A. K. Huntington, Charles S. Rolls and Cecil Grace all visited and used the flying club's services.

The Eastchurch airfield was also the site, in July 1911, of the competition for the Gordon Bennett Trophy for powered air racing, attended by flyers from all over the world and won that year by the American pilot C. T. Weymann.

A stained glass window by Karl Parsons in the south side of All Saints' Church, Eastchurch (built in 1432), was dedicated to Rolls and Grace, who were killed in July and December 1910 respectively.

SkySheppey brought together a number of associations and joined with many visitors to recognise the importance of British aviation history which started in Eastchurch.

[2] The gatehouse is now all that remains of Shurland Hall, connected with many families including the Cheneys who were there in 1274; and Sir John Stanley, who was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports in the 15th century.

For a short period before it was acquired by the Spitalfields Trust in 2006, it was owned by Violet Searle, a business woman who developed an early house within the village in Warden Road.

In Hidden Kent by Alan Major (Countryside Books, 1994), there is a note from the 1847 gazetteer commenting on the scarcity of fresh water which "makes the inhabitants very careful to preserve such falls from the clouds" and tells of spouts from the church designed to fill large tubs around it in the churchyard.