Deal Castle – Kent Day 3 | sloppy joes with the queen

Wednesday 31 July:

My sister Jennifer is a marine ecologist who works on oysters and intertidal dynamics on the coast of Washington state. Turns out our family junket to coastal Kent was a bit of a “busman’s holiday” for her; a colleague hooked her up with Ramsgate resident Willie McKnight who’s working to prevent non-native Pacific oysters from establishing on the chalky intertidal rocks around Pegwell Bay. (Native Whitstable oysters from further up the coast are regionally-renowned.) She spent a happy morning walking the coastline with him, smashing invasive oysters and talking shop.

Meanwhile, Andy and I took the girls south to Deal Castle — a defensive artillery castle built in 1539 as King Henry VIII sought to protect the coast against invasion by European Catholic powers (this after pissing them off by divorcing Catherine of Aragon and declaring himself head of a new Church of England). The squat, rounded bastions were designed like a Tudor rose….and also to deflect incoming cannon balls. It’s equipped for close-quarter defence, with 145 embrasures for firearms. Later the castle saw hard fighting during the English Civil War. In 1648 it was taken by forces from the rebel Royalist fleet, twice besieged by Parliamentarians, and finally surrendered after the bloody repulse of a relief attempt. We tried to imagine the castle’s dramatic past as we explored the battlements under gorgeous sunny skies and then wandered the long, dark passages and massive dank basement underground.