DAY 9: Canterbury (Hampton by Hilton Canterbury)

We woke to blue skies this morning, so decided to go and visit the famous White Cliffs of Dover. 

We drove to the National Trust Visitor's Centre and then had a lovely walk along the cliffs to a glorious lookout point. We had a moment of excitement on encountering a herd of cows in one fenced-in section of the path. They are brought in on a regular basis to keep the grass down. They also bring with them a lot of cow manure, so we had to keep our eyes down - rather than on the view. They were also a little alarming at close quarters!

After our walk, we sat among the other pensioners at the Visitor's Centre drinking tea and eating scones with jam and cream. Very pleasant! Our timing was excellent, because the sky began to cloud over on our drive back to Canterbury.

Our next stop was a visit to the Canterbury Roman Museum, which is located over the ruins of a Roman townhouse - with a lovely mosaic floor. It was quite a simple museum, but with lots of exhibits that they encouraged you to touch. It would be excellent for school children.

From there, we went to Canterbury Cathedral - my main reason for coming to Canterbury in the first place. It was suitably magnificent and elaborate - and enormous! The most interesting things were the hundreds of plaques on the wall in memory of people who had died, some of whom had actually been buried under the cathedral. Sadly, lots of the memorials were to young men who had died in wars over the centuries. Unfortunately, the crypt was closed today - so I'm sure we missed out on some interesting tombs down there. 

One wall had a list of all the Archbishops of Canterbury over the centuries, starting with St Augustine and ending with the current (less famous) incumbent. There were some memorable names listed - including Thomas Beckett, Thomas Cranmer and Reginald Pole. It was interesting to see all the early names were very Anglo-Saxon - with lots of Ethelreds and Wulfreds - and then, after 1066, they began to all be French.

Thomas Beckett's remains no longer reside at the Cathedral. (They all went missing after the dissolution of the monasteries - except for part of a finger.) But there was a lit candle in the middle of the floor on the site of his murder and former shrine.

After all the excitement of the Cathedral, we went back to Restaurant Posilippo for a late lunch. This time I had lentil soup and a delicious home-made fusilli with eggplant and cherry tomatoes. Jim had fried calamari and gnocchi with gorgonzola. We finished up by sharing an apple crumble.

By this time, it was 4pm (and the sun had set!) so we headed back to the hotel to relax.