Cathedrals, Cliffs, Seacoast and Shells: Four Days in Kent County, England

Cliffs and Cathedrals. We visited Dover Castle and the White Cliffs on one day and visited Canterbury Cathedral on another. Both are worth their own posts, which you can find in the hyperlinks above.

While visiting Canterbury, we also detoured up to Thanet Island, which is not an island anymore but was once separated from mainland England before silt settled into the sea. We had originally planned to stay in Ramsgate, where a pretty little coastline and seawalk hugs the ocean. While it looked like a good spot to stay if you are visiting the area, we were glad to be able to unpack for a while as we made our homebase in Rye instead. Our main destination on Thanet was to visit the Shell Grotto in Margate.

Enroute, we stopped in Sandwich, for a sandwich of course. We chose the No Name Shop on No Name Street, a cute little French bakery. We ordered a piece of quiche and the chicken sandwich thinking that would be light. It was not. I suppose in the midst of mayonnaise-land (England) a mayonnaise loving French bakery shouldn’t be your choice. Light it was not, delicious it was. Sandwich is a really quaint little medieval town, and we took a few minutes to wander around before jumping back in the car for Margate.

Seacoast and Shells. The Shell Grotto is in the middle of a somewhat rundown neighborhood in Margate. I’d read that Margate wasn’t really a place to stay and based on what we saw of it, I’d agree. We rolled through the industrial park and big box stores on our way into town and then navigated through what looked to be somewhat rough neighborhoods before arriving at what appeared to be a small shop, selling shells. I thought, surely there is a store to which we navigated with the same name as the tourist sight, hoping to entrap tourists and their GPSes. I’d pictured something along the shoreline by a beach with a little cave adorned with shells on the walls. Wrong. This is the place. Inside the shop, you pay your admission fee to descend into the subterranean cavern below the cash register.

Despite all the signage asking you not to, the woman behind Melissa and her friend insisted on rubbing their hands all over the shells in every room. Some people….

Discovered in 1835 and opened shortly after as a tourist sight, they continue to be unsure as to who built it. Based on this source (History Channel, so seemingly reliable), it is not a hoax. The walls are lined by 4.6 million shells, all of which are believed to be locally sourced except for some from India and others from the Caribbean.

The date of the grotto cannot be placed with carbon dating. When the site was opened to tourists in the 1830s, tourists would visit using gas lamps whose oils left chemicals on the shells and frustrating the ability to now place its age. As such, scientists are unsure who built it and when. We learned that the 18th century British aristocracy loved to build shell grottos, but this one had no documented record of it being built, had to have taken years to create and was not on the property of a manor or estate, so it is doubtful that a lord or lady had it built for their fancy. Some believe, and the predominant theory now is, that the grotto was built by pagans in Roman times, a theory supported by the dome in the middle of the grotto, into which the sun directly shines on the summer solstice.

If you find yourself in Ramsgate, or Canterbury or Margate, add the shell grotto to your list of sights. You’ll impress the locals at the pub, as we did, that you even knew about it.

Kent County has a lot to offer. Between less famed sites like the shell grotto, the summer home of Winston Churchill, which we tried to visit but was run amock with others with a similar idea, the home of Charles Darwin or the massively popular ones like Canterbury and Dover Castle, we found our time there to be educational, inspiring and lovely.