A Dish of Cockles Or Whelks With a Pint of Beer in Folkestone
There is much the world knows about the British, they have a strange sense of humour, the weather is unpredictable, if you stand in one place for too long you will experience all four seasons in less than fifteen minutes. The food is terrible, the accommodation worse, the beer is terrible and they have no culture. How wrong can you get, if a strange sense of humour, terrible food, awful beer, rotten hotels and weather is not culture what is?
If you come to Folkestone and choose the right places, you can experience all that and more. You can catch a train from Charing Cross Station and be in Folkestone in an hour and twenty minutes, you may experience the culture of late running trains, delays because a leaf has fallen on the line or a fuse has blown and the signals do not work. Nevertheless, what do you care, you are on holiday.
If you plan your trip at the right time you can make the journey on a 1950s steam train, possibly the Golden Arrow.
Arrive at eleven o’clock in the morning. The sea fog has usually gone out with the tide, the rain clouds are not due for at least another two hours and the sun is breaking through the cloud. Get out the train at Folkestone Central Station, grab a cab and ask for the Fish Market.
Folkestone Harbour is a working harbour with small inshore fishing fleet and the occasional small cargo ship, take a walk along the harbour wall and smell the air, this was once a port that had a history of smuggling that goes back nearly 300 years. Beneath your feet are long lost smugglers tunnels where French contraband was carried to all corners of the town including the church?
In 1860, the headmaster of a local school complained in his book that you could see the smugglers selling contraband openly on the beach. Nearby is the place where Rothschild paid Folkestone smugglers to deliver gold to his family in France who then passed it on to their relatives in Spain to pay the British army fighting Napoleon. However, don not tarry too long, smuggling in Folkestone continued into the 1980s with tobacco, wines and spirits being carried through the harbour to supplement a meagre wage and may still be practiced today.
Take a turn around the seafood stalls, pick a dish of prawns or cockles or even jellied eels, and buy a pint of bitter beer from the nearby pub. There is an art to drinking English beer, do not sip as it will taste too bitter, take a long slow draft on the back of the tongue and swallow and you will discover why the English have kept this fine nectar to themselves for so long.
When you have finished your beer and seafood ask the landlady for directions to the Old High Street. Take a slow stroll up the steep hill, the narrowest public road still open to traffic in England. Look in the art galleries and watch an artist paint a picture. When you arrive at the top of the hill turn left and there is a pub, the Guildhall, or a little further to the British Lion where Dickens is said to have written one of his many books. Make a choice from one of the many selections of real beer, maybe the seafood was insufficient so have a light lunch and at about four o’clock call a cab and return to the Central Station.
As you travel home or to your hotel you may think that was not a bad day out, if you are an overseas visitor you will have seen a side of England and its culture that none of your fellow countrymen will have experienced.
Author: Bradstone Penfold
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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