Dungeness

Today's journey was to get all the way down to Dungeness.  We started off at a viewpoint above the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone followed by a stop at the crypt at St Leonard's Church in Hythe where there is a large collection of bones piled up (first extra).  They're not sure where they came from but they've been there for 100s of years with the first recorded note about them being from the 1600s.  They've done analysis on the bones and many of them are women, and they're often not obviously injured, so they're not from a battle.

From there we drove down to the end of the road at Dungeness where we had lunch and then had a walk to the sea (second extra).  It was a bit wild out there but there was a good pile on stones along the edge from which to watch the waves crashing.

We went back to the cafe from a cuppa and found out that it was actually a station on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway and there was a mini steam train in the station (third extra) so we had a good look at it.  The driver (who was covered in soot) was polishing it and offered to let us help, but we reluctantly declined.

We drove a bit back along the road and walked out towards the boats.  We found lots of textures for future use here, but it was difficult to create any well composed pictures.  Last extra is an example of the sort of thing we found.

We then tried to walk to some wartime sound mirrors, but couldn't work out how to get there.  The path we thought would be the route in had a "strictly no access" sign on it.  We gave up.

Our final photographic stop of the day was at the St Thomas Becket church at Fairfield (main blip).  This is a lone church in the middle of a field.  We needed to cross four bridges over drainage ditches and navigate a field of cows to get there.  One of the cows blocked our way back into the field on the way back out, we had to encourage it to leave us alone!

Finally we stopped off at Stubbs Restaurant in Ashford for a lovely dinner on the way back, before returning to our cottage.