Book Dover attraction tickets

Few places in England carry the weight of Dover quite so immediately. Stand on the clifftops above the town and the English Channel stretches before you, with the French coast visible on a clear day, a reminder that this narrow strip of water has shaped the course of British history more than almost any other geographical feature. Dover has been a point of arrival, departure, and defence for two thousand years, and that accumulated significance is written into the landscape itself.

The castle is the obvious place to begin making sense of all that history, and it rewards the time given to it. Dover Castle sits high above the town on the Eastern Heights, its Norman keep one of the largest ever built in England. The site layers era upon era, from an Iron Age hillfort and a Roman lighthouse to medieval fortifications and the secret wartime tunnels bored into the chalk during the Second World War. It was from those tunnels that Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay coordinated Operation Dynamo in 1940, the evacuation of more than 330,000 Allied troops from the beaches at Dunkirk. An entry ticket to Dover Castle is, in practical terms, a full day's undertaking rather than a brief stop.