Folkestone; Sunday, 26 January, 2025

The forecast for the day wasn’t looking great, though overnight the starting point of the rain had drifted back from 10am to about 1pm so I had a couple of hours to be able to do things. I had a quick breakfast, packed my bag, checked out and headed up to the bus stop to catch the bus out of Folkestone up along the cliffs and onto Dover.

I hopped off the bus a couple of stops before the centre of town to take the quick, but very steep, route up the hills to the fortifications high above the town and harbour. However, I wasn’t heading to the Norman Dover Castle, instead I was heading up the cliffs on the opposite side of the town centre to the much later Napoleonic era Western Heights fortifications.

Built as part of the works that included the Martello Towers the Western Heights was a major fortification designed to protect the vital sea port at Dover from attack, with a massive fort hidden away inside the cliffs. Today the fort isn’t usually open to the public, but there is access all the time to the hidden moat that runs around the base of the redoubt from where you can take in the sheer size of the fortification and, once round to the side overlooking the harbour, a stunning view down the main firing line that would have ensured anyone trying to invade Dover harbour would have a very unpleasant time.

After spending quite a bit of time wandering round Western Heights I headed down into Dover town centre itself to grab a coffee and a quick bite to eat, and it was whilst I was in the café that the weather started to take a turn for the worse, with a combination of moderate to heavy rain combined with very strong winds.

Despite the weather I decided to press on to my next stop which was to hop back onto the bus and catch it part of the way back to the small village of Capel-le-Ferne high on the cliffs between Dover and Folkestone and home to the Battle of Britain Memorial. I’d visited here many years previously when I’d stayed in Hythe, but at that time it was just the memorial and nothing else. Since then a small museum and several sculptures and other memorials have been added to the site so I wanted to pop in and have a look around – thankfully most of what I wanted to see was indoors as, whilst the rain had subsided, the wind was particularly strong – not great on a cliff top site!

I had a look around the museum and wandered out into a gale to look around the memorial site before retreating back into the museums café to warm my hands back up as trying to take photos in the wind they were getting very cold. Despite having appropriate clothing that meant I was warm and dry it was clear that this was pretty bad weather.

I caught the bus back down into Folkestone town centre and on to the hotel as it was clear the wind was settling in for the rest of the day and I decided it was probably wiser to start making a move back towards home now before the railway lines became littered with tree limbs and trampolines.

It actually turned out I’d already left it too late as after grabbing my bag and catching the bus back to Folkestone Central station I had to wait for quite a while as the train I was aiming on catching ended up being delayed by nearly a quarter of an hour because something had blown onto the line in front of the train and the driver had had to stop the train, remove it and get going again. A check later showed that things only got worse as the evening progressed, so I was pretty glad to have got away with only a short delay that in the end just reduced my wait at St Pancras from 25 to 10 minutes for the train back down to South London and then onto home.