Tourism

If you have ever visited Brussels you may have even visited an attraction called "mini Europe" its nothing more than a succession of well-constructed world famous replica structures from different European countries. What's interesting is when you get to the British part of the park, of the principle structures they chose to reproduce was Dover Castel! Not Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, or the Tower of London, so why? Perhaps the answer to this lies in visiting Dover Castle because what this towering eminence was throughout history was the very frontier to nearly all of Britain's wars with europe. This was brought home to us on a tour of the Castle's secret war time tunnels.
It feels like a very different part of the Castle, its closer to the sea than the main Tower and of course has no connection to the medieval royal lineage and acts as a superb history lesson to our entry to the War in 1939.
You start off queuing outside of the tunnel entrance for some minutes as the tours are all guided and carefully timed, also they only permit a certain number at a time (roughly 20 would be our guess) so you spend an anxious few minutes wondering if you are going to make the cut. Once you are ushered inside you begin a steep and dark walk into the bowels of the cliffs and then you essentially experience the conditions and the history by a succession of basic cinema projections. You don't really learn a great deal that you didn't know before but you are drilled in the importance of Dover in the war as it represented the end of the initial part of the second world war as Germany took Europe and beat Britain and the squeeze point that the Germans had Britain under (between Dunkirk and here). I didn't realise that the Germans could actually shell Dover from the Dunkirk beaches, but it is so. Anytime you can wonder though a piece of history so perfectly preserved as this is a special occasion, akin to time travel, and if you like this sort of thing we highly recommend Chislehurst caves in Kent, a very similar experience as they were also strategic bunker facilities for the war but with the advantage of being only 20 mins away.

Postcode: CT16 1HU
Check out more of Dover Castle and Chislehurst caves