Call 01304 211067 for opening times and entrance costs or click here. OS map 179, 138 TR325419
Dover Castle started as an Iron Age hill fort commanding the spectacular ‘White Cliffs’ of Dover.
The Dover Castle site houses a Roman lighthouse and an Anglo-Saxon church, probably part of a Saxon fortified settlement at this strategic shortest crossing point between England and France. The Castle is a great medieval fortress and, after the Battle of Hastings of 1066, William the Conqueror built a Norman earthwork and timber-stockaded castle.
King Henry II began the great stone castle in the 1160s and, at the medieval castle’s heart, stands the 25m high mighty keep or Great Tower, the grandest of all the keeps raised by the kings of England up to the 12th century.
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The interior of Henry’s Great Tower palace has been breathtakingly recreated by English Heritage historians, artists and craftspeople, presented as it might have appeared in 1184.
A mighty trebuchet siege engine replica sits in the grounds of Dover Castle.
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Dover castle is not just about medieval history. It had a key role in the Dunkirk evacuation, aided troops as a WW2 military hospital and has miles of 200 year old secret tunnels under the cliffs, used throughout the Cold War.
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