Tour of the South East: Hastings and Hever Castle

Hastings

After we’d finished in Lewes it was already gone 2pm, and we were starving, having had nothing more than a Nutri-Grain bar all day. So we drove out to find somewhere to get a big, fat-filled, greasy meal, and, chancing upon a Little Chef, I ate my third Olympic Breakfast of the holiday. I honestly believe that, in the unlikely event that I ever find myself on Death Row somewhere in the Deep South of America and am told I must select my last meal, I could do worse than to opt for an Olympic Breakfast from the Little Chef. Would they fly me back over to Blighty to taste it in some
roadside restaurant in the West Country, do you suppose? Or would they fly out one of the Little Chef … er, chefs to cook up my final feast in the dark, dingy prison itself? Maybe it’s like Blackadder and everyone has to have sausages. For my part, I’d like it if those sausages were served with beans and a fried egg or two.

We then headed to Hastings. I was excited about seeing the town in the sunshine, rather than the squalling rain through which we had driven the day before. The place was, if anything, somewhat disappointing given its important place in history. Mind you, I’m not so sure it quite deserves to be as famous as it is. For starters, the Battle of Hastings—surely its most resounding claim to fame—didn’t even happen in Hastings at all, but a few miles inland at a place which is, appropriately, named Battle. (I have it on reasonably good authority that the village was named after the battle, not that the conquering Normans came to a road-sign that read ‘Battle’ and thought, ‘How poetic! We’ll have our battle there.’) Battle’s other claim to fame—or rather infamy—is that it is the place where the pop group Keane hail from. Where are those bloodthirsty Normans when you really need them, eh?

There is quite a big tourist trade in Hastings though; in fact, almost all of the place has a distinctively touristy tang. There are ice-cream huts, mini-golf courses, shops selling sticks of rock and postcards, and—inevitably—a chance to visit the castle. Unfortunately, we had arrived too late to do the castle, So we had a look round the shops and I bought a copy of five of Seneca’s plays for £1 in a lovely little bookshop that had books piled up all over the floor as well as on the shelves and on revolving stands. There’s something charming about such a bookshop, with its smell of musty, rotting paper and the chaos indicative—at least in my own tiny mind—of a stuffy old professor’s rooms in some medieval Oxford college like Balliol or Merton. It puts all branches Waterstone’s, with their clinical OCD-tastic laying out of the books and ‘3 for 2’ stickers, fully to shame. The owner of the bookshop had the facial hair and questionable taste in jumpers which marks the great eccentrics who always run such shops, and he was friendly enough as he served me. Feeling decidedly happier now I had pocketed a souvenir from Hastings which almost made up for the disappointment of missing out on the castle, I walked out into the evening sunshine ready to go in search of ice cream.

We then had a stroll along the parade, before taking on the cold water and harsh shingles of the beach and dipping our feet in the sea. It has to be done on any British holiday where the coast is in view: you could be staying in the height of the Highlands in mid-January, but if you find yourself on a beach, it’s British law that you have to divest yourself of shoes and socks and expose your lower extremities to the biting cold of the mighty ocean lapping around you. After that we had our ice cream, since the rest of our bodies, feet notwithstanding, was warm enough still at this point. After that, we left Hastings—after all, once you’ve done the tourist shops and missed the castle, you’ve pretty much seen all that the place has to throw at you.


Hever Castle

The next day it was time to head home, but we went via Hever Castle, on the Kent border. This was the home of the Boleyn (or Bullen, as many of the plaques and notices had it in the castle itself) family, the most famous scion of which was Anne, the woman who brought about a Reformation in England in the sixteenth century. The face that brought down a thousand monasteries, if you want to get silly about it. We wanted to have a look round the castle and gardens—and they are charming enough, believe me—but you really pay for the privilege. It was overpriced, over-hyped, and overrated—at £13 entry you expect something special—but the gardens were, I have to say, unutterably lovely if you like gravel paths and little ponds and statues of weird fish-creatures and the like. So the gardens were very pleasant, if nowhere near justifying the hefty entrance fee. I was expecting something special from the castle itself.

Hever Castle was—if you’ll excuse the overwrought pun—heaving. This was the height of the summer holidays, of course, and many parents seemed to be of the impression that this was a good place to bring very small children. I’m not questioning the desire to show your children a place of beauty in order to remind them of the wonderful creations of which our species is possible—no, not for a minute. But I did wonder how much the kids were getting out of it. Their most popular and enduring pastime seemed to be running about the place, but unfortunately the grounds weren’t quite that big, or the place anywhere near deserted enough, to make this a viable activity. So, we found ourselves becoming increasingly baffled by the strange urge that had made parents wake up that morning and decide to bring their toddlers and nine-year-olds to this place.

This may make me sound like an old dyed-in-the-tweed fogey, and if it does, well, I apologise. But it seems to be the same with a lot of kids these days. I don’t blame them for a moment, but I do sometimes feel like turning to the parents and asking them if I could quiz their offspring for a few minutes on their knowledge of Anne Boleyn or the Tudors or Hever Castle. Curiosity is supposed to be the great gift with which we humans are endowed, and it is supposed to be present in children more than at any other phase of life. And yet I worry that we have a generation of children coming through—just after my own generation, arguably—who are no longer as curious about the world as we were. I don’t say ‘They’re no longer curious about the world, full stop’, for that would be unfair and untrue. But I think curiosity, that spark of energy which prompts us to ask questions and want to find out about that which is around us, is not so popular as it once was. It’s partly down to schools, I suppose: education is so syllabus-driven and swamped with tests and exams and assessments, that most of the fun is sucked out of a subject. This has always been the case; it certainly was true when I was at school, ten or so years ago, and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve only since leaving school developed an abiding interest in science, through great books on the subject rather than great teachers. I also think that television, too, has played its part. Television is a great medium, don’t get me wrong—arguably my great love of British history was nurtured, if not directly inspired, by my watching of Blackadder and Maid Marian and Her Merry Men as a child of seven or eight. But there aren’t, let’s be fair, many factual programmes aimed at children, aside from the recent adaptations of the uproariously good Horrible Histories series of books. And aside from books like that, kids aren’t directed to the right books which would inspire them to take an interest in a subject—at least I wasn’t, I know. Anyway, maybe this is all rot and I need to shut up. I just think we don’t nurture curiosity enough in our kids, that’s all. But what do I know? I haven’t even got kids.

In short, Hever Castle is worth a visit, just about. But I think its inflated admittance fee probably puts off a few people. The castle itself contains many rooms containing similar things to the stuff contained in other rooms, and they do have a habit of making a big deal out of very small things while almost shushing into a corner some of the more promising artefacts. But anyway, I’ll let you decide, dearest of readers, should you ever go there yourself.

After Hever we continued our journey home. I had a bag full of books and lots of nerdy stuff about castles and the like to write up. Which I’ve done now—at long last, some three months after the holiday ended—and, in its way, I hope this hasn’t been too dull a travelogue. I’m off now to travel to the land of seventeenth-century Europe in the company of the great Jacobean dramatists. Till next time, then, fair reader, I wish you well on your travels.