Thursday, October 29, 2009
More from the White Cliffs of Dover
(In the bottom picture here, you can see how pieces of rocks stick out of the face of the cliff as the chalk is worn away.)
From the White Cliffs of Dover
Shakespeare’s Cliff; Ray; Cliffs; 2 pictures of the sun near the Western Heights.
Castle and Cliffs
Interesting contraption that I figure might be a place to put twigs, etc., to burn and use as torch? (Margaret & Colin?)***Margaret answered that this is one of the Queen's Silver Jubilee Brazers. A whole series of them were lit in turn beginning at Windsor Castle, all the way to Lands End and John O'Groats--this is for celebration but used to be used to warn of attacks; Admiralty Lookout Platform—we were on this and I had no idea that it stuck out OVER the cliff edge; another strange building on the way to the cliffs; Ray being very brave; sun in the fog.
STILL at the Castle
Ray and his Spider friend in the tunnel; White Cliffs from the Castle; funny sign near the cliffs; Shakespeare’s Cliff with our hotel in foreground; poster in the Secret War Time Tunnels.
Still in the Castle
Children playing on the Trebuchet--I couldn't help but worry that one of them was going to be flung to the other side of the castle walls at any moment; sanctuary in St. Mary-in-the-Castle; Pharos Roman Lighthouse; “mannequin”; ghost lady.
Dover Castle
Dover Castle high on a hill over the town; children’s room in the Great Tower; Becket Chapel; Ray on the spiral staircases; Church of St. Mary-in-the-Castle.
Dover's Market Square
Fountain and Dicken’s Café; Dicken’s display; Christmas or Diwali?--There are Christmas decorations in store windows and stores are selling Christmas stuff; Eight Bells pub where we had dinner; St. Mary the virgin church in Dover.
Thursday, October 29--Dover Castle, Cowgate Cemetery, & The White Cliffs of Dover
I think I have found my ghosts. They were just waiting until closer to Halloween to appear! How silly of me to think otherwise.
First, yesterday while we were at Canterbury Cathedral, there was this statue of Thomas Becket that I was staring at while Ray read the sign telling about it. And I swear that the statue blinked his eyes!!! Just out of the blue!
Then we get to the hotel and are sitting here, Ray on the edge of the bed and me at the laptop, and all of a sudden, the bathroom door starts ever so slowly opening with this very creepy squeaky sound just like in every haunted house you’ve ever seen. It is really weird.
And we are going to visit Dover Castle today which is set up to be especially haunted this week with at least 9 ghosts! Who knows what will happen there. Yeah!!!
We walked through the underground passageway to get under the highway and saw the spot where in 1992, a 3600 year old Bronze Age boat was found. Dover has been a port for that many years as this boat was built in 1550 BC!
Our first stop today on our walk was to the Cowgate Hill Cemetery. It is called that because the medieval town wall allowed people to graze their animals on the slpes of the hill. It is now a National Reserve as a family of dormice were found living here. The site is rectangular, enclosed on three sides by a high stone wall. Its upper boundary, the fourth side, consists of a row of vaults excavated in the chalk hillside. The terrace along the upper edge of the cemetery has the family vaults, with tiny front gardens, it seems. This was the last resting place of prominent Dover families. Aged 46 in 1839, Mr. Mowll was the first of his clan to be laid to rest in a vault where six generations are since commemorated. The memorials above them are written in beautiful lettering.
John Latter, who grew up here in Dover, took a small camera and put it into the opening at the top of one of the vault doors and says that inside the vault where 9 people are supposedly buried, what he saw in the photograph he took was AN OPEN & EMPTY COFFIN!!!! Freaky!
(He has posted the picture at http://www.doverlocals.co.uk/showthread.php?t=4656 if you want to see it.)
I tried to get a picture of the same, but my camera would not fit in the opening, so without a good flash, there was no hope. There is a large obelisk memorial here to a Sergeant John Monger who was killed at Archcliffe Fort, the practice Battery, when a gun exploded & killed him. There are many typhoid and cholera victims from ship voyages buried here along with shipwreck victims and victims of drownings. Most of the unidentified bodies that were washed-up around the coast near Dover were buried at Cowgate, and there are a few mass graves from shipping disasters here, too, in the area that was damaged by a bomb in World War II.
The cemetery has some beautiful ironwork and stone carvings, but it has pretty much been left to revert to nature to encourage wildlife. Small trees and shrubs have been planted to obscure its distinctive outlines on the hillside. Some of the graves have these creepy stone cylinder things on top of them that I have no idea what they are used for but Ray says maybe they helped prevent grave robberies. To one of the graves, someone had attached a plastic seat! I mean, my first thought was--oh, when he comes up out of his coffin, he wanted a place to sit. That was kind of strange. Another one had a shepherd’s staff in stone on top and strange writing all along the sides.
Evidently Charles Dickens stayed in this area for a while and outlined the plot for “Bleak House” while sitting in Pilot’s Meadow just above this cemetery. We walked back down the hill and into town to find the Dicken’s Café on Market Square. There was a case with a copy of David Copperfield in it and a drawing that showed David asking for help finding his aunt right here on the square in front of this very café building. Rich and creamy hot chocolate and delicious scrambled eggs on toast for me. Also on the menu under puddings (cakes) was Spotted Dick and Treacle Sponge. Just outside the café is the square with a huge screened TV that has been installed in preparation for the 2012 Olympics. After breakfast we walked through town and found the Norman Church of St. Mary the Virgin, built in 1100AD. We also saw a huge brace between two buildings, holding them up because the building between them had been removed.
Then we headed for Dover Castle. This was Haunted Castle week at the castle, so we were prepared for ghostly creatures to show themselves. People have occupied the hill where the castle stands for over 2000 years. There was probably an Iron Age hillfort here before the castle. There has been a castle at least since 1180 AD to protect from invasion, probably since shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066. We walked through the Medieval Tunnels and saw the Caponiers and Ray found a big spider friend.
Aware of his damaged reputation, King Henry II built The Great Tower of Dover Castle to assert his authority. He even had a chapel dedicated to Thomas Becket here. The whole tower was decorated as it would have been in King Henry’s time and was very pretty.
By World War II this was an important command center and military depot. Secret War Time Tunnels were built into the cliffs. When France fell in 1940, Dover was only 22 miles from the Germans. Here at the castle, they were prepared to withstand a 3 month siege. The Dunkirk Invasion in 1940 was masterminded from the castle’s tunnels. It was fascinating to walk through the tunnels and see the displays set out just as they were when all the planning was going on in the 40s. There was graffiti all over the tunnel walls where people from that time had carved their initials. Dover castle was a military fortress until the 1960s.
We then visited the oldest building in the castle—the Roman Pharos lighthouse. It is from the 1st century AD! A Roman centurion ghost reportedly still guards the lighthouse, which helped guide ships into the harbour and later was used as a bell tower for the church right beside it—the Anglo-Saxon St. Mary-in-Castro (in the castle). This church was built in the year 1000 AD. Richard the Lionheart’s knights spent the night here in the church before one of the Crusades, and they drew some pictures on the wall which are still visible. This is now the Church for Soldiers.
Sitting outside one of the doors of the church was a mannequin dressed in a dark robe with a scary ghostly mask on. Ray went over and looked very closely and assured me that it was not a real person. She sat there and sat there, but I was very suspicious. She seemed real to me and I told Ray so. He was so certain that he was right. We went around the other side of the church and when we came back, the “mannequin” was in the midst of a crowd and telling a very animated ghost story. Ray was totally surprised.
Then we went back into town and had lunch and decided to try to find the lighthouse we had seen on a postcard of St. Margaret of the Cliffe. During World War II most of the citizens were moved out, and anti-aircraft guns with their attendant military personnel were moved in. There was a wooden dummy of one of the guns, but it obviously did not fool the Germans as legend has it that they dropped a wooden bomb on it.
We had no idea it existed, but ran up on The National Trust site for the White Cliffs of Dover. We paid our money and parked then walked along the cliffs. These cliffs were formed between 65-80 Million years ago at the bottom of the tropical ocean. Sediment formed from the small lime shells of dead sea creatures and fell to the bottom and were compressed by the water into rocks. It was truly amazing to be so close to these enormous cliffs of chalk. The South Foreland Lighthouse was 2 miles away and we planned to go there, but just as we saw it in the distance, the fog began to roll in very quickly and we turned, along with everyone else, to make our way back. But before the fog, there were beautiful cliff pictures and gorgeous sunshine pictures as the sun struggled with the fog over the Western Heights (important in the Napoleonic Wars) and the pointy hill called Shakespeare’s Cliff, because of its appearance in the play King Lear. The cliffs were embedded with all kinds of rocks, some of them obsidian. It was so much fun to walk along the tops of them. I am sure I will be freaked out when I see them from the ferry tomorrow and realize how high up we were and how close to the edge!
Ray returned the rental car and we went into town to The Eight Bells Pub for dinner.
Oh, and about the Christmas decorations I saw, Margaret says—what would I do without her!—that it could have been for Diwali the Hindu festival of Light. In a lot of the larger cities with a large amount of Hindu population, the lights go up for their Festival and then when that is over, the signs are changed and it says Happy Christmas. Saves on the cost of taking them down in between. I took another picture of them today and they do show snow and bells, so I’m not sure.
Packing and sleep. Onward to France!
Pictures from the Cowgate Cemetery
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Dragonflies and Locks--update
Pictures taken by Margaret and Colin of the Hatton Locks and the huge Dragonfly sculpture at the locks. It was too dark for my pictures by the time we got there so Margaret sent some of a previous visit. Thanks!!
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