← All articles ·

Dover

Dover Castle in July 2010: working the switchboard in the secret wartime tunnels, then long grass beside the Roman pharos and St Mary-in-Castro.

July 2010, the summer Kent was our back garden. Dover Castle got a proper day: down into the wartime tunnels dug through the chalk, then back up into the sunshine among some very old stones.

Inga plugging a cable into a vintage wooden telephone switchboard in the wartime tunnels exhibition at Dover Castle, framed wartime posters on the wall behind
Hello, operator? Inga getting hands-on with the switchboard in the secret wartime tunnels, under the watch of the posters on the wall.

Up on the hilltop the timescale changes completely. The Roman pharos, a lighthouse pushing two thousand years old, stands shoulder to shoulder with the Saxon church of St Mary-in-Castro as if they were always a set.

Inga sitting in long golden grass at Dover Castle in front of the ruined Roman pharos lighthouse and the flint church of St Mary-in-Castro
Inga in the long grass between two millennia: the Roman pharos on the left, St Mary-in-Castro on the right. July 2010.

Dover was one stop in a summer of Kent days out: Canterbury was another, up the old Roman road, and the same county saved its biggest moment for Leeds Castle a month later.