Introduction
In late July R and I took a week’s holiday in Rye, a small town near the south coast of England. This was a last-minute pick for various reasons, but it turned out well.
Rye has an amazing collection of historic buildings: it got invaded by the French in the 14th century and they burned the whole place to the ground, but what got rebuilt after that is mostly still there. It’s quite a strange place and worth a visit.
Saturday: Rye
We got settled in to our holiday flat, which despite being reasonably priced was part of a 16th century building in a very convenient location on West Street (perhaps it’s discounted to make up for hitting your head on ceiling beams). Then we went out for a short walk around the town.
Sunday: Camber Sands
The nearest actual seaside is a popular beach called Camber Sands, several miles southeast of the town. We walked there along public footpaths, slightly varying my planned route because one right-of-way shown on the map went across a treacherous-looking marshy area.
We took a bus back to town.
Monday: Lamb House, Ypres Castle, and the church tower
We went to see Lamb House, a National Trust property which was occupied at various times by the famous American writer Henry James (whose books I’ve never read) and the significantly less famous English writer E. F. Benson (whose books I had also never read before this trip, although I‘ve read some since). It would have been rude not to visit, since it was about a one minute walk from our flat.
After that we took an only slightly longer walk to Ypres Castle, which was a town fort build to defend against the French (not very successfully).
Next we climbed the church tower, which is open to visitors, although not the fat ones.
We took another walk around Rye in the evening.
Tuesday: Winchelsea
On Tuesday we took the first of two full-day walks. It wasn’t a very long walk but given the rather un-British temperatures, I was quite grateful for that!
We first walked along paths and roads paralleling the River Rother toward the sea.
The path ran along the edge of what is now Rye Harbour Nature Reserve. At one point, ominous signs of the ‘don’t drink the water, don’t breathe the air’ variety warned that land off the path was contaminated. The signs weren’t very specific but I eventually managed to find an online reference to ‘pollutants such as oil, phenols, cadmium, arsenic and others’. (We didn’t drink the water.)
We passed through the settlement of Rye Harbour, which has a couple of pubs, a shop, and a caravan park.
Our route then entered Rye Harbour Nature Reserve (another, less toxic, part of it). We first continued south to the point where the river meets the sea, then turned west along the sea for a couple of miles.
We finally reached the large shed I mentioned above, which turned out to be the Mary Stanford lifeboat house, and was related to a memorial we had seen in the graveyard of Rye Harbour church. The lifeboat was lost with all 17 crew in 1928.
We turned inland along a footpath to Winchelsea, which is another old town that (like Rye) used to be a harbour and is now a few miles inland at the top of a cliff.
The church at Winchelsea is interesting; originally huge, it was badly damaged by the various French invasions. Rather than rebuild all of it, they just kept a part.
We also saw the small but interesting town museum, and then had rather a long wait for a bus back to Rye.
This is the first part of the Rye pictures. There will be a second part...