Day 9 in England: There Were (Not) Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover

 

The sky was VERY blue, however!

I don't like the feeling of not being... thorough, I guess, in my sightseeing. If I'm going to a place, I've always had an open-to-close, see all the things or die trying kind of personality: hence the previous day's silly and anxious dithering over even going into Canterbury Cathedral if I couldn't spend a proper eight hours seeing every nook and cranny of artistic and historic interest. 

It was AGONY, then to have to do so much tourism triage on this trip! I really wanted to see the White Cliffs of Dover, and Dover Castle, the Dover Museum with its Bronze Age boat, the ossuary at St. Leonard, three different castles and one priory on my route from Dover through Hastings and on towards our overnight accommodations in the little town of Rowland's Castle. 

Mostly, though, I really wanted to see Battle Abbey and the site of the Battle of Hastings, so painful as it was, we had, gulp, to prioritize. Here, after much agonizing, was the day's itinerary:

• Hike to a good viewpoint to see the White Cliffs of Dover
• Peek into Dover Castle
• Battle Abbey and Hastings Battlefield from early afternoon to close
• Bramber Castle ruins
• dinner and overnight at the Robin Hood Inn in Rowland's Castle

Were we less terrified to get back into our rental car this morning?

We. Were. NOT.

So many tiny, windy roads on the way up to the White Cliffs of Dover! No matter what Matt tells you, I swear that I did NOT scream at him; I cannot say the same thing about him, ahem. But what a view for the last sights you're positive you will see on this earth: Dover Castle up among the clouds, blue sea meeting the blue sky off the coast, green pastureland with chalky bits at the roadcuts. It was an enchanting spot to never quite remember what side of the road you were meant to be on, or what the speed limit was, or where you were supposed to turn shit we just passed it.

Another enchantment that we experienced in nearly every natural and historic site we visited: the used book shop!

Nearly every place had one! This tent was the nicest, but most sites had a few shelves of used books in their gift shop or foyer. It was hard to convince the kids, much less myself, not to fill up our entire carry-on luggage with books.

But no books at the moment, because nobody would want to carry them on our hike to see the White Cliffs!

We never figured out how to open these gates, even though it looked like it was supposed to be dead simple. Matt and the teenager were the most adept at fiddling with them until they opened; the college kid often simply scaled the gate, and I liked to lurk until another hiker came by and then follow at their heels:

There were numerous pretty and magical things along our path--

Real chalk!!!

--but this was the prettiest:

And look at that ocean! And that sky!

My teenager looked so adorable taking a photo of me and Matt that I had to ruin her photo by also taking a photo of her photographing us...

And then I took a selfie for my Facebook!

We didn't walk the entire coastal path, because triage, but on the way back I made a monumental discovery that derailed us entirely for a good, long while: The White Cliffs of Dover has a TEA SHOP!!!

It turned out that almost ALL of the natural and historical sites we would visit on this trip would have tea shops!!!! And I would order myself a nice cream tea and a scone with clotted cream and jam in every single one! 

My diet on this trip now became 70% clotted cream, 20% hard cider, 10% Cadbury with Popping Jellies. I have zero regrets.

As we hiked back to our car, we could see our next destination in the distance:

Just one terrifying drive, complete with one terrifying parking experience later, we were walking through Colton's Gate--

--into the outer bailey, then through the much bigger Palace Gate, and on to the Great Tower of Dover Castle:

The inside of the Great Tower is set up with Medieval-era furnishings and decorations, and you can wander around and explore:

Yikes!

Throne room. Henry II must have been so comfy here!

Arrowslits for defense

We were able to see the entire inside of the Great Tower and walk the Medieval tunnels, but we decided that we probably didn't have enough time to explore the wartime tunnels that we'd also really wanted to see. Triage is so painful, but I had a very, very, very important date with history that I didn't want to skimp on!

On to Battle Abbey! I was so excited that I was practically vibrating out of my skin. I pored over everything in the museum, cast my most important vote--

--and then we walked the perimeter of the battle site! THE battle site!!! There was an audio tour that told the exciting tale of the battle, and these awesome carved wood sculptures scattered around to illustrate the scenes:

My face, you guys. I WAS SO INTO THIS MOMENT.

There was randomly a private school located on the grounds of the abbey, so as we passed the battlefield on one side, on the other side we passed children playing soccer. Also, sheep!

Standing at the far end of the battlefield, closest to France, you can just see Battle Abbey at the top of the hill:

It was absolutely enchanting.

After walking the battlefield, we explored the ruins of the abbey, built over the very spot where Harold was killed:

We picked up the teenager where she'd been wandering around and not learning anything, played on an absolutely epic Medieval-themed playground, and then everyone sat outside the lovely cafe and had a snack.

My snack? Cream tea and scones with jam and clotted cream, of COURSE!

Y'all, they have little single-serving containers of clotted cream. WHY DO WE NOT HAVE LITTLE SINGLE-SERVING CONTAINERS OF CLOTTED CREAM?!?!?!?

Matt had a horror of driving through England at night, so we really needed to get our butts to Rowland's Castle, but I also have an absolutely ridiculous Google Map on which I had marked absolutely every site of interest that I could find in eight months of trip planning--

--and whenever I set up our navigation to get us to our next stop, I'd check my map to see what we were passing near-ish to, then kick up a fuss and insist that we ought to actually stop and see all of these things, since they were "on the way."

But to be fair, that is how we discovered what would be the kids' favorite activity: poking around castle ruins!

This is Bramber Castle:

I think we parked accidentally illegally on a neighborhood street, then hiked up the hillside path to discover the utter magic that is the ruins of a castle on a hill:

I lost sight of Matt and the kids, and thinking that they might have started back down the path (they hadn't, and instead were exploring what they later told me was a very charming knoll), I wandered back down a few yards, myself. I didn't see them, so I started looking around harder, and oh, my god, look what I found:

It's a holloway! I'd been reading about them and really hoped to find one, and even had a couple of places in Dorset marked where I was pretty sure we could hike to one. But of course a magical, ancient castle on a hill would have an equally ancient footpath passing by it. 

I walked down this particular holloway until I couldn't see the main path anymore. I was still right there where I'd been, not far from the roundabout and the A283, but it felt like I was miles away and 3,000 years ago:

It was SO GREAT, you guys.

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

The (First) Book That I Read about Stonehenge After Visiting Stonehenge

Here's my latest Goodreads review, with some blog-only bonus content!

Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery by Mike Parker Pearson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked up this book after a visit to Stonehenge, wanting a deep dive that was also accessible to me with my novice, non-science background. I won’t say that absolutely none of the book was over my head, but overall it was exactly what I wanted. Pearson does go into a lot of depth, but he defines all his terms, provides a lot of background, includes numerous diagrams and other illustrations, and overall builds geographic, cultural, and historical context as he writes about the history, archaeology, and perceptions over time of Stonehenge.

I see now that Pearson has written several other books, all of which look more in-depth than this one, so I think I made a good choice for a first text on Stonehenge (other than The History of the Kings of Britain, of course, which clearly explains the origin of Stonehenge in its present location). I’m looking forward to reading Pearson’s other books and following the references that I flagged in this book. I’ve already followed up on one mention, Star Carr, and found myself signing up for a four-week MOOC about the site!

If you don't make a gingerbread model of something, do you even love it?!?

I found the writing about the construction of Stonehenge harder to wade through--so many cremations and pits and barrows and earthworks and putting the stones here and moving them there and adding some more and digging more holes, etc.!--but the conjecture about who made them, why they were made, and what else they were thinking and doing at those times was vivid and easier for me to follow. I was very interested in the brief reference Pearson made to possible execution burials from 400-800; I’ve just finished reading The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England, in which he also discusses likely execution burials at the mounds. His theory is that the executed were deliberately buried there because it was an unconsecrated, “pagan” location, which would also make sense for Stonehenge.

Another interesting (to me) conversation between Sutton Hoo and Stonehenge is their different histories of excavation. Although Sutton Hoo had several robberies, resulting in the probable loss of most of its physical artifacts, it’s lucky that its first official excavation wasn’t until the 1800s, and most of the damage that excavation did was having all the ship rivets they uncovered melted down and turned into horseshoes. But Stonehenge, Pearson makes clear, has suffered endless excavations--the first official one was led by King James I!--and therefore who knows what potential discoveries have been lost.

I think I might most enjoy learning about historical depictions and ongoing cultural utilization of Stonehenge, so I’m very glad that Pearson included a history of these in his final chapter. His mention of the Lucas de Heere watercolor (there’s an excellent digital copy of this image on Wikipedia) led me down a rabbit hole of looking up other historical artworks that feature Stonehenge. Now I have quite a mental collection of Stonehenge and quasi-Stonehenge art!

Pearson’s single paragraph on the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield led me down another rabbit hole, and I highly recommend finding the short 1991 documentary, “Operation Solstice,” on YouTube to learn more about it. I was surprised to see how relatively raucous and populated current Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge are, compared to how careful and regimented typical English Heritage-run visits to the site are, and now I’m wondering if there’s a connection between these “New Age travellers” who made up the “Peace Convoy” and current attendees of the Solstice celebrations. Did the free festival people finally get to come back, or are these all-new hippies?

Pearson also covers the history of scientific interpretations of Stonehenge, and I think that these are also fascinating. The more probably wrong they are, the better! Good old Stukeley, theorizing that Stonehenge was a temple for Iron Age druids.

This probably could be the sole book that you read about Stonehenge, and you’d come away with enough understanding of it to make a trip there even more enjoyable, or to monopolize the conversation at your next party, but if you’re very interested in Stonehenge, I think you’re really going to like this as a jumping-off point. Thanks to Pearson’s bibliography and in-text references I’ve got several more books and articles on my reading list now!

View all my reviews

Day 8 in England: In Which We Draw the Dread Sigil Odegra, and Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach

Do you know Good Omens, the Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman joint?

If you haven't, spoiler alert! Also, you should really be consuming media more quickly, because the book is, like, 33 years old by now. Read the book, then watch the series, then read a bunch of Aziraphale/Crowley fanfic, then buy yourself some cute little fanart on etsy to celebrate your obsession. You're welcome!

Anyway, there's a running joke/semi-major plot point involving the M25 that circles London, mainly how it's terrifying and terrible because it was secretly designed by the demon Crowley to form an ancient sigil that reads, "Hail the Great Beast, devourer of worlds." Everyone who drives it empowers and becomes part of its low-grade evil emanations.

So guess what was the very first road we drove on after picking up our very first right-hand drive car and veering our way out of the Gatwick Airport parking garage, poor Matt with his hands at 10 and 2, knuckles white, me screaming, "Left side! Left side! Oh Sweet Jesus LEFT SIDE!" as a helpful reminder of England's left-hand traffic, and both teenagers actively having panic attacks in the back seat?

I think we have never been so collectively terrified in our lives.

Also, I cannot BELIEVE that they let us just... rent this car and drive away? Like, they slapped a sign by the exit that reminded us to drive on the left hand side of the highway, and then boom! There we were, zipping along in bumper-to-bumper traffic!

I will go to my grave insisting that roundabouts are not better than traffic lights and why do they have so many lanes in them and how do you know which lane to be in, anyway? We never did figure that one out...

We had yet to experience how very narrow English roads could actually be, so after we'd careened our way to Canterbury and I was attempting to navigate us to a parking lot, I kept being all, "Turn here--OMG wait don't turn there that must be a sidewalk or something! Do the next--no, wait, that's surely another sidewalk. WHY IS GOOGLE TRYING TO GET US TO DRIVE OUR CAR INTO THESE TINY LITTLE CREVICES!?!"

I'm very glad we didn't reverse our touring plans and go to Lyme Regis first. Now THOSE were some narrow roads! 

Eventually we found a parking garage, left the car and kissed the concrete under our feet, thanked Thomas Becket for helping us arrive alive, and wandered through Canterbury to find the newly restored Christ Church Gate:

Zooming in on my photos at home so I can see all the little details is the next best thing to having binoculars!

We'd arrived a lot later than I'd planned, thanks to having no idea how to drive in England, so I dithered at first about actually going into Canterbury Cathedral, knowing I wouldn't have time to see everything. We wandered around a bit, checked out a couple of secondhand bookshops and vintage clothing stores, and then a shopkeeper gave us the tip that you could get a good view of Canterbury Cathedral through the second-floor window in the visitor's center:

The shopkeeper knew what she was doing, because as soon as I saw Canterbury Cathedral in real life, I said, "Yep, I've got to go there."

And thus my pilgrimage to Canterbury, begun four days earlier at Southwark Cathedral, is complete!

Even under construction scaffolding, Canterbury Cathedral is the most impressive building I've ever seen:

I kept craning my head to look at the super high ceilings:

Guess I wasn't the only person who walked into Canterbury Cathedral and stopped looking where I was going!

I was so busy goggling at the architecture that I barely got a single photo of the assassination site of Thomas Becket:

And I definitely almost fell down a giant flight of stairs in my desire to stand exactly centered beneath the Bell Harry Tower:

See the lovely fan vaulting! I don't know how tall this ceiling is, but the entire tower is over 250 feet tall.

It was honestly ridiculous how beautiful Canterbury Cathedral is. I was almost offended--like, how dare you just stand there and be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life?!?

And then, as if that wasn't more than enough, there was an exhibition in the crypt that had manuscript Bibles, pilgrim badges, more cool stuff owned by the Black Prince, and some excellent Gothic statuary:

And then as if THAT wasn't more than enough, we also found a library!

Here's some of us, wandering around in baffled amazement:

We really didn't have time to explore the rest of the Canterbury Cathedral site (until next time, then!), but some of us needed fuel and fortification before we got back into our Rental Car of Terror, so we popped into our first (but very much not last!) pub of the trip, The Old Buttermarket:

We even let the 17-year-old order her very first hard cider with our late lunch, thinking that a bit of a sedative before the upcoming drive wouldn't hurt, and might even keep her from having to breathe into a paper bag the entire time:

Another bit of a wander, definitely us procrastinating to avoid the upcoming ordeal because we really did need to get back on the road...

I LOVE how you can look down little streets and see the cathedral!

When I come back again one day, I'm DEFINITELY doing the Canterbury Tales live-action experience omg.

Then we bravely set forth like stalwart pilgrims and let Thomas Becket preserve us as we veered over to Dover Beach:

There was an open water swimming club practicing nearby, as well as the busy ferry port, but, as always, some of us were mainly interested in our Special Interests:

Contributing to the heft of her suitcase!

After a long walk along the beach, we all piled into one hotel room to eat Caribbean takeout and watch, in baffled fascination, this amazing 1969 British TV show about a ghost detective. At the time I thought that maybe I only thought it was so bizarre because I was soooo tired, but no. It really was that bizarre.

And apparently the TV only got more bizarre after I fell asleep, because Matt swears that he stayed up later and found a dating show in which the contestants were completely naked...

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

Tiny Julie Would Have Read the Snot out of The Baby-Sitters Club Graphic Novels

Especially if you compare that to how much fun Grown-Up Julie has reading them!

I am pretty sure that The Baby-Sitters Club (and my grandma) gave me my terrible penchant for snarky gossip. Even as the 10- to 12-year-old that I was when I first read the novels, if I'd had another kid to talk about books with I would have happily snarked away about how bossy Kristy is, how disloyal Stacey can be, and what a pushover Mary Ann often is. Also, I didn't like Mallory, and I wasn't sad when she left the series.

But I LOVED The Baby-Sitters Club, and well after I'd graduated from its target age range, you could still find me on long evenings in the public library, trusted as a high school page to be the sole staffer in the basement children's department just because the library stayed open well after any reasonable child's bedtime, reading through a couple more Baby-Sitters Club novels in between straightening the picture books and using the staff pinback button maker for my own nefarious purposes.

I've written before about that magical year for reading that was 2016, when the kids discovered so many great books, like Percy Jackson, Warrior Cats, and the new graphic novel versions of The Baby-Sitters Club, then drawn by Raina Telgemeier, still one of my favorite graphic novelists. I checked out every Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel as soon as it came to the library for quite a while, and read them as avidly as my younger kid did, but then she got VERY into listening to long chapter books on Playaway, became happily accustomed to searching the library catalog and requesting them for herself, and as I was kicked out of the kid book selection job, I forgot all about The Baby-Sitters Club.

Fast-forward to this summer, when some search term or other on the library catalog brought one of the newer graphic novels into my first ten search results, and I was all, "OMG! There are more Baby-Sitters Club books!", and I requested every single one.

So that's what I did during a recent stormy weekend. You don't need electricity to read The Baby-Sitters Club!

And remember how when I was a little kid I didn't have anyone to talk about books with? Well, motherhood fixed that problem for me, because my college student sat on the other end of the couch and burned through all these graphic novels with me, only looking up so we could cozily snark on all the kids... and, with my new adult perspective, their parents!

With my 46-year-old eyes, I'm kind of now coming to see that the flaws in each flawed character, combined with their extreme competence in their various academic, extracurricular, and career pursuits, IS the fascinating draw to this series, at least for me. Mary Ann lets her father walk all over her in an infuriating way, and can completely take over the childcare of both a baby and toddler simultaneously.  Stacey can be selfish and vain, but with a diabetes diagnosis and two major moves in about a year, wow is that kid resilient. Kristy is the world's biggest bossypants, and damn, she can organize the SHIT out of a backyard day camp!

Like, gee, do I personally happen to know anyone who considers themselves both deeply flawed in a lot of ways and also extremely competent in a lot of different ways?

Ahem.

I am also extremely impressed at how the series allows big changes. I read Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye on the couch, said, "Holy Shit, College Kid! You're not going to believe what they do to Stacey!," and flipped the book to her. She read it and said, "OMG WUT?!? What the hell?!?!" 

Spoiler alert: Stacey moves away! She's one of the central characters, but her dad's job gets transferred back to New York City and she just... moves away! And then in the next graphic novel, the kids are all, "We miss Stacey so much sigh," but, you know, Jessie's a ballet star and learns sign language and there's a whole thing with a ballet school clique and life goes on.

Like, how sad and what a bummer and it really sucks because Stacey's awesome but, at the same time, such is life, especially when you're a kid. People move away, and life goes on. It's probably great for kids to see that modeled and normalized. 

It's much the same with all the really flawed parenting, because I do think that a lot of these kids' parents suck quite a lot of the time. But... you're a kid, so what are you going to do? Even when your dad is being really unreasonable, he's the parent you've got to deal with, so if you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation, then you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation. If your mom is getting married and moving you abruptly out of the only home you've ever known you're probably extremely distraught but you're still going, so you might as well lean in and help out and rack up some good credit (Kristy's mom does NOT appreciate that kid nearly enough! One of my kids would STILL be rolling on the floor in utter hysterics if I'd tried to pull that on her!). 

In conclusion: am I about to go get on the pre-release list for the newest Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel, set to be released in October? 

Yes. Yes, I am. Although I'll probably wait to read it until my college kid is on a school break and can sit on the other end of the couch to read it right after me so we can gossip about it!