The last couple days have been busy and without a very good internet connection, but now I have some time and good wireless internet, so I'll try to get us up to date! This comes to you from Canterbury, but we've only just arrived this evening instead of two nights ago as planned. We made a spontaneous stop along the way.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. My last post left off on our second night in Brighton. The following morning (Thursday) was beautifully sunny, so we went down for a walk on the beach after breakfast.
The last photo was more interesting to us than it looks. In Morocco, more than one group of goofy kids assumed we were English (since not as many Americans go to Morocco) and shouted at us "Lovely jubbly fish and chips!" before collapsing into giggles. We thought this was very odd and wondered if it was some kind of Cockney slang we'd never heard of. We still don't know where they heard the phrase, but it appears it may originate in Brighton.
We checked out right on time at 10:00, then drove east along the coast, heading for Canterbury but making some stops along the way. Our first stop was to see the Long Man of Wilmington, a figure on a hillside similar to the Cerne Abbas Giant. Like the more explicit Giant, the Long Man has unknown origins and meaning. It was first recorded in 1710, but may have been there since ancient times. Due to the haze and position of the sun, our pictures are not impressive, but at least give you an idea.
The Long Man is right under the sunbeam on the hillside.
No one knows what the staffs represent.
Wilmington also has a Priory, supposedly accessed from the same parking lot as the Long Man, but after much wandering we couldn't figure out how to access it. We visited the parish church instead, which had a nice churchyard but wasn't terribly interesting.
Next up was Beachy Head, which David especially wanted to see. It's only a few miles down the coast from Brighton and is part of the chalky cliffs we could see from the Pier. Turns out Dover isn't the only place with white cliffs! Beachy Head is the tallest point along that coastline, and is one of the most popular places in England to commit suicide. Aside from that grim fact, it was a really spectacular place.
The lovely landscape at Beachy Head. That's our car on the far left. The grass was soft underfoot and would make an excellent picnic spot on a warmer day.
By this time we were getting mighty hungry, so we stopped at a convenient nearby pub/restaurant called (not surprisingly) The Beachy Head. It was actually much nicer than it looked on the outside and we passed a very pleasant hour or so there, with a good meal (gammon and chips for me, burger for David) and our laptop set up on the wood table for hotel research.
And I try not to get dessert with lunch too often, but I couldn't pass it up here because they had a treacle sponge on the menu and I hadn't yet tried anything with treacle. It was not as sweet as I thought it would be and mighty good!
We hadn't made a whole lot of easterly progress by this time, and sadly it wasn't long before the sun began to go down and both of us were not thrilled about going another hour and a half to Canterbury. So when we drove through the historic town of Battle and liked the looks of it, we decided to stay.
David parked for a moment while I got out the laptop and found a place that was well-reviewed on TripAdvisor and David plugged its address into the sat nav (we are getting very spoiled by the wonders of technology!). Leeford Place Hotel turned out to be an old country house a couple miles outside of town in the woods. We went in and looked at a room, but the shower was tiny and the bed not great. It was also weirdly empty and looked like a good place to be murdered in a mystery novel.
So David called another place listed in Rough Guide England, and this turned out to be much better. The White Lodge B&B was just outside of town and had a spacious room, large shower, and even a cat! Perfect.
After settling in, we drove back into the town of Battle to wander around and look for dinner. The village of Battle is the site of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated the Saxon king Harold and thereby won England for the Normans. (Confusingly, Hastings is a different city located 10 miles south of Battle.)
Immediately after the battle, William built an abbey on the site to atone for the bloodshed and to fulfill a vow he made to God if the Normans won. It's called Battle Abbey and the church's high altar stands on the exact site where King Harold was pierced by an arrow and died.
But this evening the abbey was closed, so we could only admire the giant Abbey Gate, which is so huge we thought it was a castle.
Battle is a mighty small village and it took us all of 10 minutes to walk up and down the main street. But there is an astonishing amount of traffic running through it, which made the place less pleasant than it should have been. The choices for dinner were about three pubs and an attractive half-timbered restaurant next to the Abbey Gate called Pilgrims. We chose the latter!
It was a great experience, especially for me with my love for in all things medieval. The building dates from the 15th century and really looks it.
It wasn't quite dinner time (7:00) when we arrived, so we had cider and beer on a comfy sofa in the lounge area while we waited. They gave us menus and took our orders from there, then moved us into the dining room when dinner was nearly ready.
The dining room. David had steak and I had butternut squash risotto, and both were excellent.
Well I didn't get as far as I'd hoped but it's getting late, so I will post more tomorrow hopefully. We get to visit Canterbury Cathedral tomorrow, hooray!
