April 23, 2022 - Day 24 - Rye, England

First off, I want to say that we had wonderful weather for the 3 1/2 days we were in Rye, 60's and sunny. Jilly and I both had been watching the extended forecast for days and the prediction had originally been for rain on at least two of those days but then changed for the better, practically at the last minute.

Don and I started out with a hearty breakfast at the Mermaid Street Cafe, which is part of the inn we're staying at, so we get a 10% discount:

I got the full Irish breakfast with bacon, Cumberland sausage (much better than the breakfast sausage we have had so far), eggs, toast, fried tomato, and mushrooms.

Don got smashed avocado on toast with poached eggs and "hash browns". I put that in quotation marks because all of the hash brown potatoes I have seen in N. Ireland are those triangular potato cakes like you get in a McDonalds or other fast food place. We won't be ordering those again.

Don and I had time to walk around and do some sightseeing before we had to meet Jilly and Luc outside of our hotel. We decided to climb the clock tower at the church of St. Mary the Virgin. After the initial first few steps you then have to go through the narrow chamber:

There are signs everywhere to "mind your head" because the passages are short and narrow.

"The Ringing Chamber - this contains the oldest church turret clock still functioning in the UK. It was installed here in 1561-2 and is second hand, coming originally we believe from Hampton Court Palace. It chimes the quarters, and strikes the hour. The pendulum, a much later edition in 1810, is 18 feet long and swings in the body of the church. The exterior clock face and "quarter boys" were added in 1760."

The steep wooden stairs to the bell chamber

 
Good advice for when you come back down from the tower.

Fake owl in the bell tower.

"The  bells, which altogether weigh five tons, were recast from six older bells in 1775. Each is inscribed with a rhyme. The bells were rehung with new cast-iron headstocks and fittings in 1995. For safety reasons the heavy bells (the heaviest weighs nearly one ton) are normally kept in the "down" position. To ring the bells in traditional English style, the bells need to be balance in the "up" position. They are held upright with the vertical wooden strut called a stay resting against the slider, which you will see beneath the mouth of each bell."

One more ladder to the very top where we had to open the outside door to tower roof. We were the first people to climb the tower that day and were told to open the door and just leave it open for other visitors.

The door from the outside.

Here I am, squinting in the sunlight, entering the roof through that narrow door.

Don, happily taking pictures of the view, most of the pictures you see in this blog are his, although some of them are mine.

"The Tower Roof - From here you can see the finest views in Rye, forever changing with the weather, the seasons and the state of the tide.

 After descending the tower stairs we took some photos of the lovely stained glass in the church.

Some museum pieces under glass:

And the outside of the church showing the "quarter boys" that only strike the quarter hour, and the clock face.

Our friends picked us up at 10:30 and we drove to Winchelsea to tour the cellars. "Thirty-three accessible medieval cellars till exist and the sites of another 17 are known. We know at least some of the goods that were stored in them but we have little idea how they were built or who built them. The cellars are all of barrel vault construction."

 

"Each cellar has an entrance from the road for delivery of goods. Some, but not all, have access from the house above". We visited four cellars, three were underneath private homes and one was owned by the National Trust. One was really damp, the rest were dry. "These were probably used as showrooms as well as storage places for incomeing goods; they were places where merchants could meet prospective customers, display and maybe sample goods such as wine".

The cellars keep a very stable temperature - "the maximum/minimum temperature of the cellar below Five Chimneys varied by only 4 degrees between September 2002 and the following March" a good environment for storing wine.

Graffiti from the 1960's when people squatted in the cellars.

Below is a picture of drainage. This is important to archeologists because it indicates the brewing of beer, probably by monks.

The tour didn't end where we had started so we were able to take a few pictures of a land gate while walking back to the car.

 

After a quick lunch of store bought sausage rolls and bottled water (really not bad, these sausage rolls were wrapped in almost a filo style bread, very flaky and tasty, if we had these back in Minnesota I would eat them all of the time, with mustard) we then went on a ride on a steam engine train. It was a lovely day for it, as Luc said, "a real English summer day" in the 60's with the sun shining and very bucolic scenery. We didn't take any pictures of the country side but here are a few pictures of the interior of the train:

We then strolled on the beach.

And stopped to look at a church on the way back to Rye. We were lucky enough to hear someone playing the organ.

That night we had dinner at Webbe's at The Fish Cafe in Rye and it was one of the best meals we've had so far in the UK.  I had an appetizer of bread sticks with taramasalata (fish roe paste, it was so good!). My scallops were so fresh and well prepared, nothing like what I've had before and not a hint of sand or grit, the mashed potatoes were light and buttery, and the spinach was perfect. Don had oysters, and salmon with spinach. I wish I had taken pictures, everything was nicely plated, but the four of us were very hungry and just dived right into our food. We then went back to our hotel and Jilly and Luc drove back to their caravan. Tomorrow is another day.