Rain in Rye

Tuesday, 4 June 2019. After a wonderful day in Hastings the previous day we set off in the car from Eastbourne to Rye.

It was one of the Cinque Ports, standing almost surrounded by the sea where three rivers; the Brede, Rother and Tillingham all converge together. Now the sea has receded somewhat, leaving an ancient seaside town clinging to the river channel for access for its fishing fleet.

The weather was not so kind to us today. It fact it was downright nasty... All the photos were taken in rain and once these featured here were taken it became heavy enough to drench us through and the camera went into its camera bag and stayed there sulking. There are some old buildings to be found here and they make Rye a popular tourist destination, notwithstanding the absence of sea and beaches.

Mermaid Street is one of the main draws for tourist attention. A narrow cobbled street set on a steep hill and with quaintly-named buildings along its length.

The Mermaid Inn dates from 1156 and was one of the meeting places for the notorious Hawkhurst Gang of smugglers in the 1730s-40s. They were so sure of their power that they would sit openly with pistols on the table, defying the authorities to move against them. We are not talking about a small group of men here. They regularly seized goods from ships and warehouses with 30-40 armed men riding in the raid. Some extreme violence was used with one victim, an elderly revenue officer, William Galley, being buried alive in a fox den after being beaten. Another, Daniel Chater, was thrown down a well and killed by dropping rocks on him. By the end of the 1740s the authorities had rounded up most of the gang which ceased to exist. At least 75 gang members were hung or deported and of those hung, 14 were gibbeted - their bodies wrapped in chains and left to hang until they had fallen to pieces. Ah, the good old days...

The building opposite the Mermaid Inn is called "The House Opposite"... Another house is called "The House With The Seat". As we reached the foot of the hill the rain took on the challenge of drenching us properly. On a previous visit we had found a museum of music boxes and automata and we decided to try to find it again, but it defeated us, despite some help given in the local Tourist Information, which had a nice little museum of its own upstairs devoted to penny slot arcade machines. These were mostly the animated scene machines such as The Haunted Churchyard, The Hanging, Reading Of The Will etc. Finally we staggered into a small café, flooded the floor with our run-off and had a bit of lunch before heading back to the car and to Eastbourne.

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Sandwich Weaving

A hand-coloured postcard showing a decidedly ancient lorry is my offering for today. The caption reads "Strand Street and The Weavers, Sandwich".

Which probably means the shops and cottages were originally weavers' cottages from the times when cottage industry was the main source of income for many of England's population.

A sign painted over the window at the near end of the row says "Sandwich Weavers" and that sent my (admittedly weird) sense of humour off on a tangent!

I've only been to Sandwich once. It was during a holiday in 1999 when we stayed for a week in Hastings and toured around the Cinque Ports and the south eastern corner of Britain.

There's a lot of England's history to be found in that part of the country and some lovely countryside too. One of my websites is devoted to that holiday if you want to see what we got up to.

This is one of the few photos of Sandwich that I took and it gives a totally different view and impression of the place. I took it from an old toll bridge that was a controlled way into the town. The gatehouse still exists with a list of tolls for various forms of conveyance.