Days 5, 6, & 7 – Battle of Hastings, Seven Sisters, Driving to Dorset

It appears I've fallen behind! 

DAY 5

On Wednesday, we left the cottage in Kent and headed west for our next destination, Alfriston. Along the way, we stopped in the town of Battle, famous for the 1066 Battle of Hastings. I've wanted to come here for many years, so this was an important stop for me.

Reader's Digest version: This was the place where William the Conquerer (aka William of Normandy, for those with a kinder, gentler view of the last successful invasion of England) defeated the English King Harold. 

For me, as a language person, the significance of that moment is almost entirely about what the result was for the English language: we went from a  largely Germanic, earthy language to one inflected with French and Latin (and much more as the centuries passed). The joke I tell my creative writing class when we do the history of the English language is that everything changed with an arrow through the eye. It may be an apocryphal story, but the legend has always been that King Harold took a Norman arrow through the eye, died, and the Anglo-Saxon era came to an end more or less simultaneously. You can see it depicted above in the Bayeux Tapestry (a future travel destination).

I'm fascinated by this epochal moment, so it was pretty incredible to finally walk around the site of this bloody battle and to see the very spot where Harold is thought to have died.

. . . 

We spent the night in the village of Alfriston, across the street from the B&B where I stayed while walking the South Downs Way 3 years earlier. Narrowly escaped a drunk woman who latched onto us on the sidewalk and wanted to tell us her opinion on everything—she went to run an errand then came to look for us in the pub (where I was grading papers), then appeared not to even notice us. Fine with us!

Excellent beers (Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter), so-so food. The pub, by the way, dates to 1397. 

DAY 6

Very nice traditional English breakfast to start the day at Wingrove House, then a 20-minute driving to Birling Gap to begin our walk of the Seven Sisters. We went about 3 miles along the coast, stopping at Beachy Head briefly, then heading back along the same path. Much of it is very close to the cliff edge and increasingly perilous due to erosion; we stayed well back from the edge. 

Hard to show just how steep some of these rises are, but here's one attempt, followed by that rarest of all photo experiments, the Fredandbetsyselfie.

Once we finished the walk, we drove a mile down the road to the Tiger Inn, where we had half pints and sausage rolls + small salads. 

Next, it was about an hour's drive to the village of Amberly, to stay in a place I loved three years ago, the Sportsman Inn. Weather was perfect, so we had a beer on the terrace overlooking this incredible "plain" (not sure what to call it, but it was wide and flat and had many cows, a few deer). This is the view from the room:

Which brings us up to today. The drive to Dorset (a county that begins what is called "the West Country") should have taken about 2.5 hours, but we hit heavy traffic around Chichester and Southampton, so it ended up being about 3.5 hours. In any case, now we're here in Cattistock, a very small village where unfortunately the ONE pub is under renovation for a longish stretch. Very disappointing, especially since so many people raved about it.

It was too early to check in at 2 p.m., so we drove to the nearest town, Cerne Abbas, which also happens to be the site of the (in)famous Cerne Giant, a chalk "sculpture" in the hillside that's 180 feet tall. Explicit image warning! Picked up some dinner provisions and headed to the Airbnb cottage, a really handsome rowhouse in the middle of the village of Cattistock. 

Tomorrow, Betsy's co-worker and friend Anna arrives for an overnight visit. It'll be great to have her here—she first visited us in . . . 2005(?) when we lived at Grant Street—and we stayed with her and her parents in Suffolk 5 or 7 years ago.

That's it for now....