Another brief look back

Way back in Deal (Day 13), I spent the morning having a look around Deal, before hopping to train to Tunbridge Wells. The day I arrived in Deal I had a walk along the seaside and noticed some beach art that someone had done on the sidewalk near the rocky beach. The beach in Deal is not sand, but an enormous collection of roundy rocks - mostly in white-ish, black-ish and red-ish colours. Some clever person had taken these rocks and arranged them in a collection of pictures on the sidewalk.

See? Pretty!

I decided then that I'd come back and leave my mark, and on the morning of Day 13 I did just that. And since it forms such a nice parallel to my sidewalk chalk art at Trafalgar Square, I had to post about it.

Awww...

The rest of the morning was spent at the perfectly excellent Deal Castle. Built in 1539-40 by Henry VIII, it's certainly not the oldest or biggest castle I've seen, but it was really really fantastic. It cost 4.50 to get in, and included a really good audio guide. It was worth every penny.

A nice aerial view of the castle (happily, there was an aerial photo crane available for inquisitive tourists).

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

It is one of the most impressive of the Device Forts or Henrician Castles built by Henry VIII between 1539 and 1540 as an artillery fortress to counter the threat of invasion from Catholic France and Spain. It is shaped like a Tudor rose, being perfectly symmetrical, with a low, circular keep at its centre. Around the circumference of the keep are six bastions, with a further series of six bastions in the curtain wall, one of which serves as the gatehouse. All the outer walls of the castle and bastions are rounded to both provide strength and to deflect shot more efficiently than flat walls. Over 200 cannon and gun ports were set within the walls and the entire structure was completely surrounded by a very deep, wide moat.

It's really well preserved, and you can walk along the outer wall, and explore all levels of the keep inside, and even go down into the lower level gun emplacements, which was my favourite part (though sadly not good for photography). The lower level had a dark, damp corridor that ran all the way around the keep and you could walk the whole circumference of it, through deep puddles, and look at where the cannons used to be placed, and at the smoke holes in the ceiling, and it was all just great.

Me, at the Castle