One of the favorite places I visited was the city of Rye (I believe it’s in East Sussex not Kent). It was once on the ocean but over time with silting, the ocean receding and a very bad storm which changed the coast line a lot, along with a river changing course, Rye is now two miles inland. It has winding cobblestone streets, buildings with sagging roofs and is loaded with that medieval feeling.

St. Mayr’s Church was really interesting. For some reason the clock has an extremely long pendulum which hangs down into the church from high overhead outside.

A really long climb up rickity stairs and ladders will lead you up into the bell tower.

There are eight bells up there. In 1377 the French made a raid of Rye and pretty much destroyed the town and stole the churh’s bells. The next year, the English returned the favor and got their bells back. These aren’t the original bells however. It was incredible being up there. I’m just glad they didn’t start ringing.

There is an incredible view of the city below from the top.

One of the statues on either side of the tower clock. They are called the “Quarter Boys” because they strike the bells on the quarter hour.

The top place on my list to see in Kent were the famous gardens of Sissinghurst Castle. They were created by English author Vita Sackville-West and her husband on the grounds of an old castle (once used as a prison for French military prisoners). The gardens were indeed beautiful although the famous white garden that I heard so much about didn’t live up to my expectations-maybe because only a few things were blooming there at the time. There are ten separate walled gardens and most everything was blooming. It was lovely to walk through the grounds and there was a fantastic view from the tower where Vita once had her office which looked like a cosy and great place to write. Vita and her husband are known for what would now be called an open marriage. He had male lovers, she female, but they truly loved each other and stayed together to the end. One of their sons wrote about it and published their letters to each other. The grandson now lives on the grounds and also wrote a book on how he made Sissinghurst back into a farm. I have the book but haven’t read it yet.

These are called Oast Houses and are used to dry hops, an ingredient for beer. They are the first thing you see as you enter the grounds of Sissinghurst and similar ones are seen all over Kent.

The tower where Vita had her office.

The opening into one of the gardens.

White roses in the white garden growing up a brick wall.

I took so many photos of the flowers there. There were some roses there that looked like they were covered in aphids but it turned out to be how they looked.

Vita’s office.

A look at a portion of the gardens from the top of the tower.

One day we were in the area called Romney March and came to a home called Smallhythe, the former home of a very famous English actress named Ellen Terry-I had never heard of her. She was world famous in her time, the late 1800′s to the early 1900′s. She did some tours in America and her third husband, younger than her, was an American.

Here she is.

A huge fireplace was in the first room when entering.

Items on her dressing table.

Her bed-liked the bedspread.

The wind pulled the curtain out of her bedroom window.

After her death her daughter, Edy, established an annumal play in the barn on the property. She was part of a lesbian menage a trois with two ladies who lived in a house also there.
The grounds were simple but lovely.

The roses were in bloom.
The stairs going to the second level were as steep as a ladder, and there was no indoor toilet when she lived there. The hall and rooms went up and down in a dizzying fashion and one room was so uneven that it felt dangerous. Off to one side of the house was a huge green field that was once a salt river and marsh and there was a huge boat building enterprise but the rive silted up and the house is now well inland. It was a pleasant stop and we enjoyed our time there having lunch in the sun.

The lady who was the bell ringer in the little church we visited told us that an village called Dungeness was an interesting place to visit. It’s located at the end of Kent at the ocean. It has the unfortunate luck to have an enormous nuclear plant there but if you turn your back to it, there’s just the view of the ocean. She told us to look for the home of a famous English director, now deceased, Derek Jarman. It turned out to be a very photographic house painted black with yellow trim.

There was a whimsical garden where along with plants, debris from the ocean and rocks made interesting decorations.

It was a strange area. Shacks and large boats were standing a long way from the ocean and there were old tracks used to move the boats to the water. There wasn’t sand, as you can see, but what the English called shingle and what I would call deep gravel.

A long wooden pathway out to the ocean. The people seemed to enjoy doing just what you would do in sand. It was a very wide area with deep wide ditches formed by the ocean. If we hadn’t been so early we could have had fish and chips. I never did have any while in England, darn it.

On the way back to our rental we spotted a strange cupula on top of a church looking somewhat Russian (it turned out to be a navigation device used by ships in the English Channel long ago to guide them) and came up upon Saint Nichola’s Chruch in a tiny village called Ringwould. The church was over 800 years old with two trees outside over 1000 years. There was a youth group inside having tea and getting ready for an excursion but the pastor kindly invited us in and his wife was very proud to show us around.

The organ pipes were painted in what looked to me to be a modern pattern and our guide told us that the Victorians painted it when they “had a go” at renovating and decorating the church.
She was a font of information and told us that the richer the church members, the closer to the church they were buried. The very rich could be buried inside but apparantly not buried very well as an odor developed leading to the phrase: “stinking rich”. She also told us that you can tell that a church is very old by mounds of dirt higher than the foundation of the church as bodies were piled up and covered as time went on.

We were just getting ready to leave when she said, “Do you want to see the church bells?”. We did of course and she took us in a locked room with ropes looped up to the ceiling and she took a rope and started pulling it which was when we saw her very muscular arms as the rope was pulled up and down connected to a round wheel unseen up above. she had been a bell ringer for almost thirty years. I think it must be fairly common in England to be a bell ringer. They don’t do melodies but a sort of rythm.

I asked her if her husband would be worried if he heard the bell ringing thinking there was some sort of emergency but she said he was used to it. There turned out to be six bells, four from 1638 , one 14th century, one 1957. She told us many visitors visited from the States looking for graves of the Estes family-there aren’t any-as an Estes immigrated to America centuries ago.
Anyway, it was a fun, unexpected encounter.

After a slow morning Mary and I headed to Dover Castle only to find that the Tunnel Tour wasn’t for two hours. There are four miles of tunnels under the castle used during WWII and we heard the tour of them was very interesting. We headed down to the city to kill time to see a display of Rolls Royces-Mr. Rolls once lived in Dover I believe. There were probably over 50 beautiful cars on view.

The famous hood ornament. The cars were on display there to celebrate the 100th anniversary of when an airplane with a Rolls Royce engine flew from Dover to Calais, France and back.

The interior of a custom made limousine made for a lady whose favorite color was lavender.

A portion of Dover Castle.

Walmer Castle was our next visit. It had a great interior but the gardens were my favorite and I loved how they trimmed and shaped this hedge.

Chairs on a lawn there for resting or a picnic.

It rained while we were there as you can see by the drops on this Calla Lilly.