Travel with Manfred

Travelogues from around the world

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Copyright © 1995 by Manfred P.. All rights reserved.

Oct. 21, 1995

Hastings and the 1066 County

A Weekend on British Battlegrounds

by

Manfred P.

Keywords: England, Hastings, tourist, travel trip report, travel log, travelogue.

Taking A21 southbound from London at night was a relaxing calming experience. Perfect for unwinding after work. My version of unplugging. A21 is a country road slowly meandering through the rural area of Kent. There is hardly any traffic after sunset. Villages and pubs move passed the car windows. After an hour I ended up in Hastings where I asked a couple of women if they know any bed& & breakfast places. Turns out that one of them worked at one. She gave me directions and off I went. It was the nicest B&B I've have been too. Really classy and I got to stay in the Pink Room featuring a pig as a mascot. It was Friday night close to midnight but not too late for a stroll through town. The stroll turned out to be shorter than usual. The cause: cold freezing weather. I just strolled down to the ocean, walked briefly along the beach, passed by a few bars and a disco and went back to the B&B where I immediately slid under the blanket to warm up.

Taking a shower the next morning reminded me of Austria. As soon as you step out of the shower in winter time you shiver. Not too pleasant. After a warm English breakfast with all the trimmings, i.e. sausage, bacon, eggs, toast, corn flakes, and tea, I felt much better. Time to explore the town. Hastings. For Europeans that is a word deeply embedded in their mind. Unerasable. High school has taught us all about it and being quizzed on it several time makes it stick in your memory. Oct 14th, 1066 -- the battle of Hastings where the Normans kicked the Saxons' butt. More than 12 years ago I had an opportunity to make a weekend trip here but I turned it down, primarily due to lack of interest. My historical interest isn't much bigger now but being a famous place it is worth checking out. Surprisingly the Battle of Hastings didn't happen in Hastings but a nearby village called Battle. The guy who named the village clearly didn't have a lot of imagination. But more about that war stuff later.

The sun was shining. Nonetheless it was cold and the wind was blowing in from the Atlantic. A thick sweater was a must. The beach is flanked by two hills. Actually the whole area is quite hilly. Fishing is still being seen as a profession here. Several dozen fishing boats are lying on the beach at the Stade. The daily catch is sold wholesale at 5:30 a.m. at the local fish market. Since there is no harbor the ships or boats are placed on the beach while they are not in use. Little caterpillars are pushing them into the water and pull them out again after they return to the coast. It had the usual fishy smell that you find in places like this. Torn fishing nets and half rotten fish skeletons were littering the beach. To honor their trade Hastings has a Fishermen's Museum just a stone throw from the Stade. The rocky beach dead ends in the East. It turns into cliffs that are part of a Country Park. The lazy one can take the Cliff Railway to the top of the cliffs. I naturally preferred the stairs. The top of the cliffs was a marvelous public golf course with trails running between the green. Kids played soccer on a flat spot on the very top. I watched them for a while and was surprised how often they used the 'f' word. Looks like British English isn't that different from American English after all. From the East Hill the view reached over the town center down on the bottom to the West Hill and beyond to the White Rock Gardens in the far West. The ocean seemed calm with hardly any activities. I would liked to just stretch out on the nicely cut grass and let my eyes wander, but it was too cold for that. Tackleway and All Saints Street to the foot of the hill were the usual narrow streets with crooked wood-frame buildings with stained-glass windows. I also checked out a couple of churches but they weren't too interesting. While strolling through town I ran across a book on computer crime in the late seventies. Late 70s! In computer science terms that's the middle ages. I had to have it just for the fun to find out what geeky stuff they were using back then.

The West Hill has the badly damaged Hastings Castle or whatever is left thereof. Ruins really. The hill is also home to the Smuggler's Caves which I skipped assuming it is a tourist trap. By mid afternoon I had seen enough of Hastings and I planned a little trip through 1066 County. The first stop was in Rye, a wealthy merchant town back in the 15th century. Rye is dominated by St. Mary's from the same period. Little cobble stone roads lead up to the hill on which it is built. Henry VIII and others built many defensive structures in this area to fight off potential intruders coming from Europe's mainland. The nearby Camber Castle is just one of these examples. The former wealth of the town came from trading. With the trading came also smugglers. At one point smugglers were running the whole town and the officials had little to say and could just stand by and watch. Eventually attitudes changed and the area was granted special privileges for joining the fight against smugglers.

Next stop on the tour was Battle. The Battle Abbey is a reminder of the Battle of Hastings and is supposedly built where King Harold was slain. Needless to say that the abbey was financed by the victorious William. It is kind of weird how we make old battle grounds tourist sights of today. I wonder if people will travel to Sarajevo a few hundred years from now to admire the place for its historical reasons. Doubtful at best. 7,000 people died in the Battle of Hastings.

I closed the loop with brief stop-overs in Herstmonceux and Pevensey which are only on the map because they have castles. Sunset I watched from the beach at Bexhill. It was only exciting due to the low cloud cover over the ocean. Some tough kids were actually playing in the shallow knee deep water. I got goose bumps just looking at them. After sunset I had dinner at which I started reading the fascinating computer crime book. Another day of exploring ended when my eyes started skipping lines in the book.