Dover Castle

After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror took a roundabout route to his coronation via Romney, Dover and Canterbury. William of Poitiers records that Dover "had been reported impregnable"; while the inhabitants prepared to surrender unconditionally, Normans "greedy for money" set the castle alight and much of it was soon enveloped in flames. William paid for the repairs and spent eight days adding fortifications of his own. In 1088, eight knights were appointed under tenures to guard the castle — among them William d'Albrincis, Fulbert de Dover and Hugh Crevecoeur.

The castle took recognisable shape under Henry II, whose inner and outer baileys and great keep — the work of Maurice the Engineer — cost over £6,500 between 1179 and 1188, against an annual royal revenue of perhaps £10,000. In 1216, during the First Barons' War, the future Louis VIII of France besieged Dover twice, breached the walls, and still could not take it; the English defenders tunnelled outwards and attacked the French. The vulnerable north gate was afterwards converted into an underground forward-defence complex. In 1642 the castle changed hands without a shot: a local merchant, Richard Dawkes, and ten men scaled the cliffs, took the porter's lodge and the keys, and were inside before the garrison could be summoned.

The Napoleonic Wars brought William Twiss's great bastions and the barracks tunnels, first occupied by troops in 1803 and later used by the Coast Blockade Service against smuggling before being abandoned for more than a century. They were reopened in 1939 as an air-raid shelter, then a military command centre and underground hospital. In May 1940 Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay directed Operation Dynamo — the evacuation of French and British soldiers from Dunkirk — from his headquarters in these cliff tunnels. His statue stands outside them today.

We'll be straight with you: for all its age and depth, Dover Castle comes to us with no ghost stories we can stand behind, and we would rather say so than invent them. The nearest thing to folklore in the record is a name — the scant remains of Dover's second Roman lighthouse, on the Western Heights across the town, are known as the Bredenstone or the Devil's Drop of Mortar, though no tale we can verify attaches to it. Event companies do run organised public ghost hunts at the castle, which is how most visitors come to spend a night in the tunnels. If you go, it is worth remembering that the wartime levels were a working command centre and hospital in a real war, and are best walked quietly.

Dover Castle is in the care of English Heritage, which spent £2.45 million between 2007 and 2009 recreating the castle's interior; in 2019 some 368,243 people visited. Allow a full day. Inside the grounds you'll find the Royal chapel within the keep, dedicated to St Thomas Becket, and St Mary in Castro, a Saxon church rebuilt in the Victorian era, alongside the Roman lighthouse that was converted into its belfry around the year 1000. The Queen's & Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment Regimental Museum is also here. Of the tunnel levels — Annexe, Bastion, Casemate, Dumpy and Esplanade — only Annexe and Casemate are open to the public. Dumpy and its esplanade are closed, and Bastion is simply 'lost', though investigations continue to locate it and gain access.

Organised public ghost hunts are held at the castle by event companies: book ahead, and dress for chalk tunnels rather than a summer clifftop. If the castle looks oddly familiar before you arrive, it has stood in for a good deal of history on screen, from Wolf Hall and The Hollow Crown to The Other Boleyn Girl and Avengers: Age of Ultron.