Winchelsea, East Sussex, UK

On August 24th until August 28th 2009 me and my family went on a little caravan holiday to Winchelsea sands in East Sussex, near to Hastings. We had a brilliant time and the weather was kind to us. We had quite a 'historical' holiday, which the boys loved as much as we did. We checked in on the Monday, but didn't do much other than finding the beach, Winchelsea beach, nice beach, stoney, but still nice, the boys loved throwing the stones in the waves.

Tuesday we got up and went for a day in Hastings, we went up the little uphill railway and went to 'The smugglers caves' which was good, but the younger two didn't appreciate it too much and got a bit scared, so I went through a little quicker than my husband and our eldest did. From there we walked across to Hastings castle's ruins and had a look around, along with watching a 'video' on the castle and history. We went back down the railway to the seafront to find somewhere for lunch, we found a lovely OLDE pub and had lunch, took a while but it WAS BUSY!! Then we went across to the 'Blue Reef aquarium' and saw lots of 'sea life'. We walked back towards the car and came across the Hastings RNLI station, so took the boys in to see the boat and make a donation. We saw the boat was going out on 'practice' around 5pm so decided to hang around a while to see the launch. We walked along the front, where plenty of 'rides and attractions' were and had some lovely hot doughnuts (after we'd just purchased ours, they decided to put the price up!!! Never seen that before, was quite funny to see). The boys wanted to go on the Go-Karts, so we went over and they had a 'deal' where if a child sat on an adults lap the child could go 'free'. SO ALL THE BOYS WENT ON!! They had great fun, other than having my arms full of coats and attempting to take pics I had fun watching them too.

On Wednesday we went to Battle Abbey and the 1066 Battle grounds, we’d had a recommendation to go there from some friends of ours. It was well worth it and a beautiful area, lovely building and the walk around the battlegrounds was lovely. Well worth a visit if you like 'ruins' and historical stuff. The do have an ‘audio tour’ you can pick up and the kids can do a ‘treasure hunt’ of sorts, which they can come away with a certificate at the end.

Then Thursday we went to Tenterden Station for the Kent and East Sussex Railway. Lovely old steam train goes on about 10 miles of track between Tenterden and Bodium Castle. Lovely train ride and the Castle is GORGEOUS. Although more ‘ruins’ than a usable castle these days, the outside is breathtaking and very fairytale-ish. You can go right up one tower and see from the top over the fields and inner sanctum of the castle courtyard. Then it was back on the train again.

Love the places we went, would recommend them, and the kids loved them too.

I made a little video of some of our photos of the historical places we visited, hope you'll watch it.




Good websites for the area we visited:

Visit 1066 Country
Smugglers Adventures
Bodium castle
Battle Abbey
Kent and East Sussex Railway