A tour round the Garden of England - Part 3

The next leg in our grand tour took us from Canterbury to Folkestone, via Dover

We had seen on the TV News that the National Trust had just opened the Fan Bay Shelter tunnels - so we decided to pay them a visit

The tunnels and gun battery were built by the Royal Engineers between 20 November 1940 and 28 February 1941

The complex originally included five large chambers with storage space for rifles, a hospital and a secure store, a generator, toilets and washrooms. The gun battery was intended to attack enemy shipping moving through the English Channel. The tunnels were abandoned and later rediscovered by the National Trust who completed restoration work and opened them to the public on 20 July 2015

The shelter was built along with a gun battery sited just 21.5 miles from France after Churchill visited Dover in July 1940 and was enraged to watch through binoculars enemy shipping moving freely in the English Channel. In a memo to the Joint Chief of Staff he said: “We must insist upon maintaining superior artillery positions on the Dover promontory, no matter what form of attack they are exposed to. We have to fight for command of the straits by artillery, to destroy the enemy batteries and fortify our own.” By 10 December the battery and still incomplete shelter were garrisoned by four officers and 118 men from the 203rd Coast Battery of the Royal Artillery relocated from Falmouth, and personally inspected by Churchill the following June

Our guide for the morning telling us about the Sound Mirrors

These were used to detect the sound from aircraft engines

The South Foreland Lighthouse - which warned shipping of the quicksands that are called Goodwin Sands

View of St Margaret's Bay from the lighthouse. In the early twentieth century, the Dover region and specifically the village of St Margaret’s-At-Cliffe established a reputation as an attractive, secluded London getaway. St Margaret's became increasingly popular with well-known, wealthy people who made their homes here or bought summer lodges

The playwright, actor and novelist, Noel Coward lived here from 1945-1951. He sold it to Ian Fleming - author of James Bond novels and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. 

Fleming was so inspired by the dramatic White Cliffs of Dover and the picturesque surrounding region that he used the region as the setting for the Bond novel Moonraker. The 1955 classic is the only Bond novel to take place solely in Britain and Fleming enjoyed using his beloved Dover as the location. The villain of the novel, Hugo Drax, has built his Moonraker rocket just outside of Dover, near the seaside town of Deal. The 1979 Bond movie is not set in Kent however. The film bears little resemblance to Fleming’s novel and the movie is set in the United States, Italy and the Amazon rainforest!

Fleming also used South-East Kent as the location for his other beloved creation: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The car famously flies to the Goodwin Sands where the Potts family enjoy a picnic in the middle of the English Channel.

An interesting (to me, anyway) piece of trivia is that the National Express coach service from Victoria to Deal is numbered 007

For more photos of our time on the White Cliffs click White Cliffs of Dover

Then on to Dover Castle

including the Great Tower

We could easily have spent a lot longer at the Castle - but the weather was closing in and we needed to get to our Folkestone campsite

For more photos of the castle click Dover Castle