I Fort So

As so often happens, one of JoJo's posts has inspired me to revisit a time from my earlier life. This time it was some slimey rocks in one of her beach photos.

When I was a child, we holidayed a couple of times at a place called Reculver, on the Kent coast. It was situated on top of a cliff from which large lumps had fallen on to the beach below over the years - actually, as it turned out, over the centuries. Near the cliff edge were the remains of a 12th century church, which had been moved inland early in the 18th century. Much of the stone was robbed out, but the towers remained, which always suggested to me that they'd been a bit premature in their removal of the church.

Behind the towers there were the remains of a Roman fort. It was great for a child to explore these ruins and climb all over them. I doubt you can do that today. Health and safety, you know.

The lumps of cliff on the beach became covered in seaweed and were very slippery and slimey. If you lifted them, there were little crabs and other sealife in the pools underneath.

A postcard from the 1930s shows that for some time there were makeshift wooden spires atop the towers. These were long gone by the time I visited in the early 1960s.

In the summer of 1999 my mother was in a care home run by the Salvation Army, and they took their residents on a trip to the nearest town of Herne Bay. I went with her. We used to spend at least one day there when we were at Reculver, but on this trip I saw something I'd never noticed before - a fort, not from Roman times, but from World War II, its legs firmly planted in the sea.

That very weekend there was an article about these forts in a Sunday newspaper magazine. Quite a coincidence. Wish I'd kept it.

Just as a footnote, to get from Reculver, which is not easily accessible, to Herne Bay or, indeed, anywhere else, you have to go through the village with (I think) the prettiest name in the English language - Beltinge.