I hadn’t realized how much history there was in Dover and Canterbury but we got a quick overview on our tour today. We cruised in and docked under the White Cliffs of Dover, made of chalk, and “an icon of Britain” and “a symbol of home and wartime defense”. The medieval Dover Castle, built to repel invasions from across the English Channel, sits atop the cliffs along with the Victorian era lighthouse.

Some people think the locals paint the cliffs to keep them white 🙂 but actually the constant and difficult removal of the vegetation is the key.

Dover Castle is the largest in England and has secret wartime tunnels beneath it.

Leaving Dover, we drove a short distance through Kent, “the garden of England”, which grows much of England’s fruit crops and extensive fields of rape seed for oil, to Canterbury, which we all know from that one piece of Middle English which we read so long ago.

In Canterbury we saw the pub (I assume it was then) where the contract for the ships to transport the Pilgrims was signed and the inn where the assassins of Thomas Becket holed up.

We saw the “crooked house” which has weathered many centuries even after its center beam was removed (didn’t get that whole story) and the statue of Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales was presented as part of a story-telling contest of pilgrims on their way from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket. The pilgrims are featured on the base of the statue and apparently many people, famous and otherwise, vied for the honor of being those faces.

The main attraction in Canterbury is of course the Cathedral. We didn’t go in and it was undergoing extensive renovations but we heard the stories. Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered at the alter there in 1170 by three knights hired by the king and henceforth the cathedral became a place of pilgrimage.

During WWII the cathedral was a prime target and on June 1, 1942, sixteen bombs fell in the vicinity but five “fire watchers” heroically climbed upon the roof and put out the bombs before they could burn the cathedral and it escaped largely unscathed.

The town was an interesting mix of old and new as is the norm in so many English towns where they go out of their way to preserve their history. One interesting thing I learned was that the round towers on the city walls (these were built by the Romans and then lost to history and rebuilt in Medieval times) repelled canon better than square ones.

I’ll be back after dinner.