Our 2014 short break in Kent included a day in and around the town of Dover where there were two sights we were interested in seeing for the first time. It was a windy day and when we arrived at the Kent port it was also raining so that decided the order in which we would see the attractions. We started with Dover Castle.
Dover Castle is managed by English Heritage, which we’re not members of, and which the staff quickly went out of their way to attempt to remedy once we reached the ticket office.
Two adults, please.
Are you English Heritage members?
No.
Would you like to join? You’ll be able to save on the price of today’s admission.
No, thank you.
It’s really worth you joining.
We don’t visit enough of your properties to make it worthwhile, but thanks.
Where are you from?
Portsmouth.
We have plenty of properties near there that you could visit for free if you were a member.
Yes, we know, and we’ve likely seen them all at some point. We’ll just pay for the admission tickets today.
Have you seen how much you can save by becoming a member?
Yes, we’ve had some of the top mathematical brains from continental Europe fly over just ahead of this trip and boffins from research labs across the country crunching the numbers throughout the night and we’ve determined it’s more cost-effective for us to just pay on the door today which is what we’re trying to do.
Okay. Well, if you change your mind then come and see me later and I can sign you up. Here are your tickets. Please show them when you get through the door over there.
They really, really wanted us to become members. As forewarned, we had to show our tickets to another person.
Thank you. Oh, aren’t you members?
No.
Did my colleague ask if you wanted to sign up for membership?
Yes, thank you. We decided it wasn’t financially sensible for us to do so today. Is it just down here that we go?
Wait a second. Let me see if I can find details of membership benefits.
Please don’t do that.
It won’t take a moment. If you sign up today you’ll be able to save the cost of entry.
We know that. I’m begging you to just let us through.
I’m really surprised you didn’t sign up for membership. I can take you through the process now if you like. What are you doing!?
We rendered the castle staff member unconscious and hid the body where we hoped it would lay undisturbed for a few hours then proceeded to take a look around. We quickly discovered that some areas weren’t open and others required booking a tour that we didn’t want to hang around for so we prioritised anything that involved getting out of the rain. We were soon wandering through the medieval tunnels that had been dug out during the First Barons’ War (1215-1217) when the castle had come under siege; the tunnels allowed the defending English soldiers to counter-attack the besieging French from behind.
Although there had been some form of defensive fortifications on the site since at least the second century during the Roman occupation of Britain – with archaeological evidence that some other kind of building occupied the spot going back as far as the Iron Age too – it wasn’t until the reign of King Henry II that Dover Castle started to grow into the structure that survives to this day. The inner and outer baileys built from around 1179 onwards as concentric defensive rings around the central keep were likely the first to have that design in Europe. Additional defensive improvements were made during Henry VIII‘s reign and significant changes to add bastions for gun emplacements took place on the cusp of the nineteenth century during the Napoleonic Wars.
Dover Castle is home to the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment and The Queen’s Regiment museum which might well be the museum with the longest name in the world. Not exactly the sort of thing that trips off the tongue.
While we’re fond of museums in general we’re not terribly military-minded, and histories of regiments aren’t the sort of draw for us that they may be for others. You might like it a lot but we found this to be little more than of passing interest, but it was inside where the wind and rain couldn’t get us so that was a bonus.
Of more interest to us was Henry II’s Great Tower, or the Keep. The rectangular design of the keep belongs to the fabulously-named Maurice the Engineer (or Mason), and Dover Castle’s keep would be one of the last to inherit this shape. Maurice had previously worked on the castle at Newcastle. The Great Tower is one of the largest castle keeps in the country and was built from Kent ragstone covered by Ashlar stone from Caen.
The main point of visiting the Great Tower was to climb to the top and brave the elements for views over the countryside and nearby town but there were a number of rooms to duck into on the way up – a handy excuse to take a rest if for some reason you’re not particularly fit but still find yourself compelled to take on physical activity practically beyond your capability at every chance like a certain couple of people I could mention – and we got to see glimpses of how the keep would have functioned during the medieval period.
To the roof of the keep then, and a chance to get a good feel for the challenge that would be faced by any attacking army in getting up the land and breaching the perimeter walls.
The views over parts of the Kent coastline and landscape and down into Dover were very good, and on a warm, bright day it would have been lovely to spend more time out there, but the wind was fierce and even though the rain was only drizzling now it was all still enough to encourage us to keep the visit brief. Brief for me is a relative term and my wife is fully aware that it means “Just one more shot from here, and then I haven’t taken a photo looking in that direction from on those steps, and then I might just need one more circuit in case I’ve missed something.”
Despite the high pressure sales tactics of the English Heritage staff on the day we’d like to return to Dover Castle at some point because there was a lot we didn’t get to see, especially everything connected with the first and second world wars. As mentioned before, this was due to a combination of some areas not being open on the day of our visit and some requiring timed entry that we didn’t feel was worth the wait then.
We finished our look around by heading across to St Mary in Castro, a church in the grounds of Dover Castle comprising of a main building dating back to the Saxon period (albeit significantly restored at various later periods in history) and a tower that was formerly a Roman lighthouse likely constructed in the second century C.E. This is one of only three lighthouses from the Roman era still surviving in the world, is the tallest still-standing Roman structure in the country, and has a claim to being the oldest standing building in the country too. That last one sounds a bit like those “oldest pub in England” claims that you can find somewhere in nearly every city, but it might actually be true.
We next drove the short distance down into Dover, not because we had any illusions that there would be much to see there – it’s a mainly commercial port town so if diesel fumes and the sight and sound of trucks is your thing, ya weirdo, then you might be thrilled by it all – but because we fancied a bite to eat and something to drink.
Dover was not a particularly attractive place, although the strong winds that had been with us had by now blown away most of the cloud cover and brightened it all up substantially. My love of brutalism means I do like to see lots of concrete and modern, sometimes highly utilitarian styles of architecture from the post-war period, but even here there wasn’t much to excite me. We naturally made our way down to the beach because we do like to be beside the seaside, and the views from the town up to the castle on the hill helped to give those fortifications a grander sense of imposing scale, but ultimately we stayed only long enough to eat, drink, and use the toilets before heading off.
The image that springs into the mind of most people who think about Dover is that of its famous White Cliffs, the chalk faces that stretch for thirteen kilometres and face towards France as historical symbols of defence and modern symbols of xenophobic insularism.
A short drive from the town set us down at the car park at the start of the walk we wanted to take just really to have said that we’ve done it. The initial view down to the commercial port really highlighted just what a blight it all was when compared to the historical monument we’d explored earlier in the day and the natural wonder we were about to stretch our legs along. Dover as a whole felt like a horrible mash of unconnected parts, possibly a result of constant threat and actual attacks due to its proximity to the continent, and possibly partly due to its exploitation for commercial means due to its proximity to the continent too. I’m not sure if I’m truly conveying how mostly unimpressed I was by it.
The walk along the White Cliffs of Dover was lovely. It was possible to get very close to the edge at times and the dipping, snaking route along the coastline of the English Channel provided some lovely views of the chalk cliffs and long drops in places. I’m not sure we would have enjoyed it quite as much if the rain from earlier in the day had still been present, but it wouldn’t have stopped us experiencing it and you really can’t visit this part of the country without doing this.
If you’re wondering whether it’s possible for you to see France from the cliffs at Dover then I can confirm that this is indeed the case. I can also confirm that if the weather conditions are right, as they were when we took this walk, it’s also possible for your phone to connect to a French provider because it has a stronger signal. We were quite surprised to get a message telling us we were on Vodafone France at one point and while this was fine for us because of there being no roaming charges to worry about it might be something you need to be aware of depending on how your phone contract works and whether things change in the future in the wake of Britain’s moronic face-plant out of the EU.
We had no intention of walking the entire length of the white cliffs – what the hell do you take us for? – but we did have a destination in mind; that being the South Foreland Lighthouse.
You can only reach the lighthouse on foot by walking from Dover or via a bicycle route, and the building, owned and managed by the National Trust (of which we are members) is well worth the visit. South Foreland was the first lighthouse to use electricity and it was where Marconi conducted a number of radio transmission experiments.
There are actually two lighthouses but the reasons for both being built is not truly understood since the answer typically given – that sailors would line both lights up in order to know when it was safe to turn past the Goodwin Sands – doesn’t ring true due to the shifting nature of the sandbanks which was known about long before the beacons’ construction in the nineteenth century. But never rule out it being the result of that most popular of Victorian pastimes, though:
Percy, listen to this idea! Not one, but two lighthouses at Dover!
Two!? Come now, James. We’re contracted for just the one.
But what if one falls off the cliff?
That’s… Well… I suppose it would be safer with two. Do they often fall off cliffs?
It’s very windy. I almost fell off a cliff once.
That’s settled, then. Two it is.
You know, three is better than two.
I think you’ve had enough opium for one day, James.
Exploring the relatively remote South Foreland Lighthouse during a reasonably quiet period of the year meant that there was hardly anyone else around which had the benefit of meaning that when we got to see the clockwork mechanism which turns the optics of the building my wife was told by the guide that she was allowed to turn the crank and set it all in motion. She is fond of pressing buttons and pulling levers if allowed to and she didn’t hesitate to play with the machinery.
Another good reason for visiting the lighthouse along the cliff walk was for the tea room that was attached to the property. Even though we’d not long eaten and had a drink in Dover we do try to spend a little extra whenever we’re visiting historic properties and this gave us a good excuse to have another sit down. The tea and cake we had were fantastic.
After we’d rested we made our way back along the cliffs to the car. This early in the year the sun was dipping towards the horizon already and we were walking directly towards it so there were fewer photographs on this return trek, with a rotating radar dish being the only thing that caught my attention.
So, my conclusion for our day trip to Dover is that I’d like to return one day to see more of the castle and ideally with better weather conditions. I’d also like not to have to incapacitate staff members for persistent upselling attempts. No means no.
If we were to return then I’d definitely head for another walk along the cliffs because that was nice, the views were lovely, and we need every opportunity to get out into the fresh air and move our legs since we probably don’t do anywhere near enough of that. As for the town of Dover, though, we’d likely give that a miss. It wasn’t unpleasant and oppressive in the same way that Barnsley and Blackpool are, but there was also nothing that suggested it was worthy of a return trip, and in a post-Brexit world it feels like it’s a place that will become more congested, noisier, more industrialised, and less welcoming over time.