Vole Explosion

Saturday 12^th November 2022

   I’m not doing any walking today. I’ve factored in a couple of sightseeing days over the weekend. This is one of the reasons this coast walk is taking so many years – lots of faffing around when I should be walking. Today I’ll visit the Battle of Hastings site. Earlier in the year I joined English Heritage for a year or so because it works out cheaper than paying separately for all the places I want to visit. Castles mostly – I love a castle, me.

   After breakfast at the hotel I catch a train to Battle, have a quick look around the town centre, then enter the Battle of Hastings site. A few years ago, after reading a gripping book about the Norman Conquest, I was inspired to go over to Normandy and visit places connected to William the Conqueror – Falaise Castle, the two abbeys in Caen, the Bayeux tapestry, that sort of thing – so I’m already right across 1066 and all that.

    My inner history nerd is thrilled to stand up on the ridge where King Harold’s troops lined up and imagine the battle unfolding in front of me. So much at stake on that day. I follow the audio tour around the ruined abbey that William built to atone for the bloodshed of the conquest. He demanded the alter should be placed at the exact spot where Harold died. However, as the site is on a steep hill, the architects decided to take the easy option and build it on some flat ground nearby. William was furious and ordered them to take it down and put it back where it was supposed to be. Which is obviously brilliant. Anyway, here are some photos from the day:

   On leaving the site in the early afternoon I decide to skip lunch and hurry back to the station to travel one stop and spend the last couple of hours of daylight visiting the small RSPB reserve of Fore Wood. I didn’t need to rush as it’s Southern Rail and the train is half an hour late (the one after that is cancelled, obviously).

   After a couple of hours of peace and quiet in this woodland reserve I head back to the station, where the train back to Hastings is only ten minutes late this time. In the evening I go to Jasmine Thai restaurant in Hastings for dinner and have chicken satay and a massaman curry. It’s a modest-looking place from the outside but the food is superb, so I’d like to give them a big plug.

   On the walk back to St Leonards I complete the full set of seafront pubs. First The Albion, then The Carlisle, a heavy rock bar and music venue. When I walked past here last night it was, well… rocking. A band was playing and metalheads were spilling out into the street. There’s a band on tonight but not for another hour and a half.

   The next pub is The Pig – another music venue (more Indie this time) with a band on later again. A bit further along I visit a LGBTQ bar called Forbidden Fruit. The nearby White Rock Theatre is hosting The Rocky Horror Show and many of the matinee crowd, in their best Transylvanian transvestite outfits, are packing the bar. It’s fun trying to figure out who has just come from the theatre and who is genuinely gender fluid. Outside, an eerie mist has descended on the seafront.

   I walk a bit further than my turn-off to the hotel for a drink in The Twisted Bunny, a slightly chic bar containing a few more Rocky Horror refugees, and then a final nightcap in The St Leonard, an unimaginatively named pub on the way up to the hotel with a very mixed crowd and a very fun atmosphere.

   And so to bed.

OYO Eagle House Hotel, St Leonards (£40)