Dover castle

While we were at Stonehenge last week, we joined up to the English Heritage Society (whose name I have now confirmed), which means for the next 15 months, we’ll be plotting a lot of weekend trips around places that we can get into for free. One place that falls into this category is Dover Castle and the Secret Wartime Tunnels, of which John spoke highly a while back. So, this weekend – our second in a row with a car – we headed out to the white cliffs with Mom and Dad, to check out what the castle had to offer.

I don’t know what they were thinking when they erected this sign right over the tunnel’s entrance. Maybe they were banking on the enemies not being able to read or speak English? I dunno – to me, it just seemed to make the enemy’s job a little too easy, and perhaps if they were trying to keep the tunnels a secret, they may want to employ a new manager of covert operations. Then again, it also made finding the tunnels easy for us, so I guess the sign wasn’t all bad.

In fact, it was quite the opposite – all good! Touring the excellently preserved tunnels was really great, and super interesting. They basically had a full city down there, with a kitchen, sleeping quarters, and even a hospital! In fact, that was one of the tunnel’s primary usages during the second world war – a hospital for soldiers injured defending the English Channel.

Anyway, after the tunnels, we wondered up to the castle itself. We had to hurry around a bit, as we didn’t get up there until quite late in the day, and we only had an hour to look around before the park closed. Probably the highlight was climbing up to the roof of the keep for a birds-eye view over the Strait of Dover.

By the time we climbed down, the site was closing, so we made our way home through Canterbury. It seemed like a nice town, but not nice enough to warrant getting out of the car, given that dinner was pending back home in Chiswick.