Thursday, 15th September 2016

Dover Castle’s spectacular site was an Iron Age hillfort many centuries before the medieval castle was built, and it still contains a Roman lighthouse and an Anglo-Saxon church. Soon after the Conquest in 1066 the Normans built a castle here, and this was developed on a grand scale by Henry II and his successors from 1180 until the 1250’s They created one of the most powerful of all medieval castles. Incorporating a square keep at its heart, it was surrounded by concentric rings of stone walls with regularly spaced wall towers, a combination unprecedented in western Europe.

The wartime tunnels are a complex warren of underground rooms and passages adapted from Napoleonic tunnels to play a crucial role during the Second World War. It was from here that Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay inspired and directed the Dunkirk evacuation in May and June 1940. Later in the war the tunnels served both as a large combined headquarters and as a hospital