Day Nine: From the White Cliffs to Cathedral the Third

This is the latest entry in a series of posts on my vacation trip in May. The prior posts were:
Prologue:  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Day One: The City of Dreaming Spires
Day Two: Eccentric Ramblings
Day Three: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Palace
Day Four: A Day in Alfred's City
Day Five: Déjà Vu - In a Good Way
Day Six:  Artists and Patrons and a Walk by the River

Day Eight: Now That is a Castle!

This is the latest entry in a series of posts on my vacation trip in May. The prior posts were:
Prologue:  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Day One: The City of Dreaming Spires
Day Two: Eccentric Ramblings
Day Three: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Palace
Day Four: A Day in Alfred's City
Day Five: Déjà Vu - In a Good Way
Day Six:  Artists and Patrons and a Walk by the River

Day Seven:  Great Heights

Friday- May 27

Friday we got an early start and took one of the high speed trains to Dover. We really liked the high speed train-- clean, comfortable, convenient and astonishingly quiet. Unlike most people, we weren't just passing through but Dover was our destination. We had all our gear with us, but we didn't let that slow us down—we headed right from the train station to our first planned destination, Dover Castle.

Dover Castle sits on a high promontory overlooking the city. The key word here is 'high'. We had a stiff climb up the hill. My legs very quickly started muttering things like, 'St Paul's yesterday, she's trying to kill us, whine, whine, whine'. I ignored them. Wusses. We arrived in good time at the formidable entrance:

The views were spectacular—here's a view of the moat and outer wall with the breakwater of Dover Harbor in the background.

One of the interesting things is that Dover Castle was used more or less continuously as a fortification for 800 years. It's not just a building, it's a whole complex. The site itself was clearly strategic—it's the crossing-place with the shortest distance to the Continent. Long before Henry the Second there was an Iron Age hill fort there, and there is still a Roman Pharos (lighthouse) in remarkably good condition on the grounds. The present castle was begun in the 1160s, and used right up through World War II. There are sections that were build in the Napoleonic wars, and the cliff underneath the castle itself is riddled with tunnels. The castle chapel, still in use, is Anglo-Saxon.

We started with a tour of some of the WWII era tunnels, that were used as a hospital. We were unfortunately just a few weeks too early to catch their new multimedia exhibit. Some of the parts of the tunnels we would ordinarily have seen were closed while they completed the installation.

Then we went to see the pharos and the chapel. The pharos is astonishing.

Looking up inside you can see where the lamp was lit.

It's not quite so surprising that it's lasted so long when you see how thick the walls are:

(The doorway is a comfortable height for a medium sized person- a taller one would have to duck.)

From there we went up to the castle proper. Interestingly, the castle has been furnished with replica furniture in the styles and colors that would have been used by Henry the Second when he lived there. (Yes, this is the same Henry who got into so much hot water over Thomas Becket.) In addition to the furnishings, there were various audio and holographic exhibits to try and give the visitor a feel for palace life.

Here's the great hall:

Henry's bedchamber:

The view from the top of the tower was pretty fantastic too:

We walked part of the outer walls.

We had a typically excellent lunch (National Trust sites especially tend to have outstanding food, made from fresh local ingredients).

We spent way longer there than we had anticipated, exploring tunnels, viewing some of the channel lookouts used during WWII and viewing exhibits. We were especially taken with the exhibit that talked about Henry the Second's conquests and familial difficulties. He reportedly had more trouble with his four sons than he did with the whole rest of his empire combined.

Finally we decided we ought to get back into Dover and find our hotel. We'd been trekking up and down the hilly Dover Castle site all morning and early afternoon, now we headed back down the steep slope to Dover. (My legs were beyond protest and well into profanity. It availed them naught.)

En route to the hotel, we stopped at the Dover Museum, which had some amazing film footage of the Dunkirk evacuation. This was actually one of the pieces of history that had inspired us to want to come to Dover. For those who are a bit rusty—English and French troops, having resoundingly lost the Battle of Dunkirk, were pinned between the Germans and the water, on the verge of capture. The British mounted a colossal rescue—over 800 boats, and not just military, anything that would float, yachts, ferries, fishing boats and lifeboats. Nowhere is level of desperation better summed up than in James Keelaghan's marvelous song, "The Fires of Calais"

...

On the beach allied confusion, will they stand or are they running

If it's run, where will they go to between the sea and the melee

On the flanks the troops advancing and with heavy guns they're firing

And not a mother's son could save them from the fires of Calais

...

I've fished these channel waters since I was man enough to face them

For the herring and the flounder I have often hauled away

But a catch like this I've never had in forty years of sailing

Saving Tommies as they flounder 'neath the fires of Calais

...

The fishing boats roll out across the dark green channel water

As they gather speed for Flanders they cut their nets away

It's not herring they'll be pulling from the waters on this morning

But they'll reap a bitter harvest from the fires of Calais

The museum also had a fabulous Bronze Age boat, that had been found buried and preserved in water-soaked ground. The amount they learned about boat-building tools and techniques was amazing. And then there was the sheer wonder of being able to stand and look at such an ancient vessel.

We eventually made it to our hotel (which turned out to be right on the beachfront)- 

and got checked in and shed our backpacks. We'd been on the lookout for a promising dinner place, but Dover, despite the excellence of its attractions, does not seem to have leveraged them into the kind of touristy place with that has lots of dinner options. However trains were frequent, and since we had already traveled by train that day, any additional travel would be covered by our railpasses (the railpasses gave us unlimited travel for eight non-contiguous days, which we had planned to take full advantage of). So after consulting the internet as to the amenities of nearby towns we could easily reach by rail, we decided to see what we could find in Deal.

As it turned out, Deal did not have a lively restaurant scene—it just had a really competent website designer and marketing consultant. We got off the train—and mind you, this was on the Friday evening of a bank holiday weekend—and the place was completely empty. We walked around in increasing dubiosity through largely deserted streets, looking for any signs of life. We did in the end find a couple of (empty) restaurants and chose an Indian place. The two young waitstaff on duty looked rather surprised to see us, and asked what we wanted. "Dinner," we told them. After a long and utterly non-plussed pause, they leapt to our service with considerable enthusiasm.

We dined in solitary splendor, on quite decent, if not extraordinary food. The staff were extremely attentive. In the whole time we were there, we saw one person come in to pick up takeout, and they had one phone call.

We returned on the train to Dover, and left the station with a handful of other people. Suddenly Dover didn't look so quiet to us. "It's slow," we told each other. "But it's no Deal."

There wasn't any obvious entertainment in Dover that compelled us, but we still had a couple of hours of daylight, so we climbed up to the promontory on the other side of the harbor, opposite Dover Castle. (This is nearly as high as the one Dover Castle sits on. There was faint whimpering from the extremities.) The castle shone gold in the late evening light.

The view up the Dour River valley was pretty, too.

We inspected the Napoleonic fortifications on the summit.

These were largely closed off, and not really a tourist attraction though there was a walking trail that went around and through them. We found a series of interesting plaques that talked about the area. It seems that when the fort was in use, they had direct access to the harbor via a triple spiral staircase that went down through a vertical shaft in the chalk. The triple nature was to provide for segregation of the classes- one stair was reserved for the use of 'officers and their ladies', the middle stair was for 'sergeants and their wives', and the third was for 'soldiers and their women'. We had a good laugh. We soon discovered though, that the spiral stair was the only way down the cliff on this side, so we had to retrace our steps back through the fort and return more or less the way we'd come. We met a local chap walking his dog whom we chatted with briefly. He told us a tall tale about ghostly horses (which we smiled at).

And we made our way back to the hotel, discussing dinner options for the next night. Not Deal, we agreed. Jonathan added, "I'm not sure I could take that kind of excitement two days running."

*

And because I just had too many photos that I wanted to include--check out the Dover photo slideshow:

Day Seven: Great Heights

This is the latest entry in a series of posts on my vacation trip in May. The prior posts were:
Prologue:  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Day One: The City of Dreaming Spires
Day Two: Eccentric Ramblings
Day Three: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Palace
Day Four: A Day in Alfred's City
Day Five: Déjà Vu - In a Good Way
Day Six:  Artists and Patrons and a Walk by the River

Thursday May 26
The plan for the morning was to return to St. Paul's and take the tour we'd missed earlier in the week. We took both the guided tour and the audio tour and regretted neither.

My first impression on entering the church was to think that it looked nothing at all like I remembered from the brief visit on our first trip over ten years ago. I remembered it as being large, dim and subdued, much like many of the other large cathedrals we had visited. But now it seemed much brighter and more highly decorated. And there turned out to be a good reason for that. For most of the intervening decade, St. Paul's had been undergoing a massive cleaning and restoration. The details of this were simply astonishing. The cleaning had been carried out by quite a small crew—less than two dozen people—and they had done it in the most painstaking manner- mostly with cotton wool and q-tips and occasionally very mild detergent on the dirtiest bits of the mosaics. The area to be covered was immense, and the results- utterly spectacular.

They don't allow photos inside, but there is an online virtual tour if you'd like to see for yourself.

The audio tour guided us around the sights—we spent some little time figuring out the locations that appeared in Connie Willis' latest books (Blackout and All Clear), as well as seeing for ourselves William Hunt Holman's famous painting 'The Light of the World'. But it also showed us images of the cathedral from various points in history, provided portraits of some of the personalities described, played music from the cathedral choir, and provided footage of some of the famous historical events that happened there. It's a quite excellent tour, we highly recommend it.

And the verger's tour was also excellent and different. We got to see several of the chapels that aren't open for people to wander into and we saw the famous oval staircase which has been used in many films- most recently one of the Harry Potter films (Prisoner of Azkaban, I think).

After finishing the tours, we climbed up to the dome. The dome has three galleries- the Whispering gallery, an interior balcony running around the inside of the dome, a slightly higher exterior platform with views of the cities, and then for anyone who still has any breath left, there is a third balcony around the top of the dome itself. We'd discussed climbing up to the dome during our first visit, ten-plus years ago, but at the time JT had been getting over a cold and doubted he had the wind for the climb, so we'd gone and done other things. This time, I wanted to go up.

The first bit is a wide spiral stair, with shallow steps and occasional landings. It went on for quite a ways, but 259 steps later, we reached the gallery. It was high. It was really, really high. Terrific views down to the cathedral floor, and it is the best place to view the mosaics in the dome. But it was really high. JT took a quick look out...and down...and quickly averted his gaze and said, "I think I'd better go back down." Not a unexpected problem—he's not fond of heights generally. And it's worse after a stiff climb because the exertion seems to amplify the vertigo reaction. He turned back to the door—and the guard said, "Sorry, sir, this is the entrance." He pointed out the exit—about a third of the way around the dome. They use one set of stairs for people going up, and a different one for people going down. JT gulped and steadfastly not looking at the big drop, worked his way around to the exit and escaped.

I admired the view for both of us, and regretted that I couldn't take photos. Then I headed up to the next level, the Stone Gallery, another 119 steps. Ironically, I think JT would have been fine on that one- there was a broad stone platform and a stout high fence that hid the edge. The views of the city were amazing:


At this point I was pretty short of breath, but I decided that I couldn't stop there. So I tackled the last 152 steps up to the Golden Gallery, the highest point of the dome, 280 feet above the ground. Here it helps to know something about the construction of the dome, or rather domes. The architect (Christopher Wren) wanted the dome to look proportionately right from both the inside and the outside of the cathedral. That's harder than it sounds—high enough to look right from the outside would mean the interior of the dome would be too high above the cathedral floor to see the decorations. So St. Paul's has two domes- an interior dome of stone. Then a cone-shaped brick support structure, and then a lightweight (relatively) wooden outer dome. So the stairs to the top of the outer dome go up between the two domes, winding around the brick cone. The stairs are quite open—iron gratings for steps and landings, and even I, sometime acrophile that I am, kept a tight hold on the railing and avoided looking down.

I lost count of the flights of stairs as I panted my way up, and stopped to catch my breath on a stone landing where one of the cathedral staff was posted. "Only twelve more steps," he told me encouragingly. I laughed breathlessly. "I think I'll catch my breath first." I looked over at him—a young guy, very fit-looking. "I bet you run up and down these all day and think nothing of it." He smiled and courteously assured me that no, they never got used to it. He looked very fit. I'm not at all sure he was telling the truth. But he was certainly very polite.

I made my way up the last dozen steps to the Golden Gallery, where I discovered that "Gallery" was something of an exaggeration. "Ledge" would have been more descriptive. And the railing was waist high, barely. And like the Whispering Gallery, the stairs were one-way. You had to go around to the other side to come back down. I settled my buttocks very firmly against the stone of the dome before freeing both hands to wield the camera. The views were even better from the height:



And then I edged cautiously around the top of the dome. In places the 'gallery' was only about eighteen or twenty inches wide and I had to squeeze between the rail and the irregular stone wall of the top of the dome. I felt even more sympathy for JT then than I had earlier. But I made my careful way to the exit and then descended. And descended. And descended. And eventually made it back down to the Cathedral floor, and we departed for the British Museum.

The British museum was hosting a special exhibition of treasures from Afghanistan that our friend Gary (the one who works in Afghanistan) had highly recommended to us. The items in the exhibit are from the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, and their recent history is as remarkable as their ancient origins. Between the Soviet invasion in 1979, the war that followed, and the destruction inflicted by the Taliban, much of the museum was damaged or destroyed. But Afghani officials and museum staff risked their lives to spirit away artifacts and conceal them safely in vaults, cellars and their own homes to prevent their destruction. Other pieces were stolen and sold abroad, but have been identified and returned to the collection. One art collector actually recognized a piece when it was put up for sale and bought it for the express purpose of returning it.

The artifacts came from four sites, and the signature piece of the exhibit was a gold crown found at Tillya Tepe in the 1st century AD. The crown was found in a nomad burial, and was designed to fold up so it could be stored in saddlebags. Amazing!

And while great glittering gold jewelry is always an attention-getter, there were many other notable items. Gorgeously carved ivory statues and long reliefs that originally graced pieces of furniture. A painted glass goblet over 2000 years old. A Chinese mirror, and various other items in stone, pottery and bronze. It was quite fantastic.

I was also fascinated by a computer model made of Ai Khanum, a Hellenistic Greek city on the Oxus river and on the modern border with Tajikistan. From the ruins and artifacts they found, they had extrapolated what the area might have looked like when it was in use and represented it in a 3D model. The degree of cultural mixing and evidence of trade links was considerable. It provided both a tiny glimpse of the complexity and culture of the ancient world, and a heartwrenching contrast to the current war-scarred condition of Afghanistan.

We left the British museum and walked up to Euston Road to see the Wellcome Collection. As we walked, we glanced up at the sky, which was clouding over and JT commented on how quickly the weather seemed to change in England. That must have been the wrong thing to say, because raindrops started splashing down with rapidly increasing enthusiasm. I paused under a bus shelter and pulled out my rain poncho, while JT shrugged off a little wet. I had just managed the surprisingly difficult task of getting head and arms through the appropriate holes when the sky opened up and the rain came down in absolute torrents. JT opted to put on his own rain poncho at that point. We splashed soggily up the street and found more cover in a tube entrance for a few minutes until the rain slacked off a bit, then continued to the Wellcome Collection building, which was running an exhibition on dirt.

Nope, not a typo, dirt. I'd actually been hoping for something about soil composition etc, but the exhibition turned out to be more about trash and the history of cleanliness and sanitation. Still, it was interesting and also dry, which was itself appealing just then.

Both the collection and the Wellcome trust (Britain's largest private foundation for biomedical research) were the legacy of American-British pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome, collector of many quite odd things medical. Wellcome's company, originally founded in 1880 as Burroughs Wellcome continued after his death and eventually merged with Glaxo. The Wellcome name finally disappeared in 2000 when GlaxoWellcome merged with SmithKline Beecham and became GlaxoSmithKline.

We had time to also take a quick turn through the standing exhibits from the Wellcome collection. I'm a bit too squeamish to want to look closely at 19th century medical paraphernalia so I wasn't sorry it was so close to closing. (I also chose not to linger over the collection of sex toys from around the world, though I'm willing to believe it's generally popular.)

When we left, the rain had almost completely stopped and we quickly walked around and located a burrito restaurant for a quick bite, and proceeded to St. Martin's-in-the-Fields for a quite excellent concert.


During the intermission, we took a quick turn around the rainwashed streets before returning for the second part.


A lovely evening in all, but we did not wander far off our path back to the hotel, as we wanted to catch the early train to Dover in the morning.