On with the Unfinished Business

After a stonkingly good night's sleep and awakening with sunlight pouring into our little cabin, we had some breakfast and plotted a route for the day ahead.

Yesterday's alluded to 'Unfinished Business' consisted of three interwar period Acoustic Mirrors that we did not manage to visit last year, mainly due to underestimating the the task of getting to each one, and a poor signal hampering searching on our phones. So today's task then was to underestimate the task of getting to at least one of them, including struggling to find it & hankering after a better phone signal. No problem ;-D

Babes on Board our bikes, we picked our way along North Downs Way to reach Abbots Cliff, the easiest of the bunch where we could park 200 yards away and have a little stroll to say Hai to a large lump of of concrete with a hemispherical dish concaved into its face, looking at the sky above the English Channel. We had fun there trying to balance our phones and take a picture of us both using the timer! (main blip)

From there it was further along the coast past Dover to roll into a National Trust car park just above the ferry port. Looking out over the activity that was going on below, lovely Bestie pointed out where she thought the old apron was for the cross channel Hovercraft that we saw last year in the museum at Lee-On-The-Solent.

Changed out of much of our motorcycle garb we set off on an expected one mile yomp* up the cliff path, beautiful by the way, to eventually reach a nook in the landscape - aka Fan Bay - with a steep drop towards the sea to the right, and the flattened remains of a fenced off building to the left filled with people in white hard hats & head torches (more shortly)

We couldn't see our sound mirror but reasoned that it might be well placed further uphill, and so off we trotted inland across the fields (extra 2) to find the remains of a WW2 era Gun Battery but little else so we skipped back towards the sea and saw signs of activity in a natural amphitheatre shaped area some way beneath the coastal path. Winding our way down into it on one side revealed the mirror, half way up the other some 20 metres below where we had originally stood. The walk down was easy but reaching the mirror was like climbing a ladder, so after snapping a photo (extra) we found a grassy ledge adjacent and sat for a while to rehydrate & stare out to sea.

It was whilst doing so that we noticed something. One by one our white hard hat & head torch wearing friends started to appear from somewhere near the mirror and bustling around within it's fenced compound, reminiscent of '90s computer game Lemmings! It seems the were on a tour of a network of tunnels set into the landscape at Fan Bay and the sound mirror houses one of its portals. We shuffled across to hear some of the commentary because every day is a school day. And then we continued the ascent back up to the cliff path before catching our breath and headed back to the bikes. 

* Almost four miles if you were wondering ;-D

Babes back onboard, we bimbled off back towards Folkestone to find the perfectly bijou Clifftop Cafe for a hot panini & decaf latte, well earned too. Before mirror no.3 we called at the nearby Battle Of Britain Memorial so see two life sizes replicas of a Hawker Hurricane & Super marine Spitfire, along with an amazingly fabricated stainless steel Stuka in steep descent. The place was appropriately quiet & peaceful. We vacated as gently as possible.

Heading to the southern reach of Hythe and turning right into a little housing eatate, we parked next to a footbridge straddling the Royal Military Canal. Either side were bonus points - a small mirror on one side & a larger on the other with instructions on how to test out the science behind them. It sorta worked although a large clump of nettles in the foreground dampened the effect.

A short way along the the trail behind led us to a farm gate keeping a fieldful of young cattle to one side. This was disheartening as we could see the mirror on the hillside above, but fear not, one by one they slowly ambled & grassmunched their way along the field leaving the way clear for us to pass through and ascend the winding desire-line up through the grass. We found the mirror surrounded by thick undergrowth and being of a much lighter weight construction to the others, deteriorating somewhat (see Besties Blip)

We snapped our pictures, found two aluminium garden chairs someone had handily left behind and sat looking out to sea for half an hour. In the foreground below us could be seen the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway stretching between the latter two, and we saw no less than three trains pass by like our very own N-Gauge model layout in action :-)

We descended past the minecraft-like remains of a concrete bunker and it was only by the time we past one of its narrow high window apertures up close that the sound of dub reggae & aroma of Mary-Jane gave us the impetus to leave them in peace, carry on and head back to base for the evening.