Days Out: Rochester – the Castle and Cathedral

To Kent! on the coldest day of the year as an icy blast off the River Medway cuts through five layers of clothing and my warmest gloves. I’m on the battlements of Rochester Castle looking down on what is probably one of the most historic few hectares of land in the whole of the country.

There was a crossing of some sort here in pre-Roman times, an ancient trackway now known to us as Watling Street, and it was around here that the Battle of the Medway was fought in the first phase of the Claudian invasion of 43CE. This was a titanic two day struggle that saw the invading Roman forces overcome fierce resistance from the Brits; their victory allowed them to push on northwards and after the Battle of the Thames to cross that river and to take the surrender of the Catuvellanauni tribe/kingdom at Camulodunon (modern-day Colchester) and gain control of most of south east England.

The line of Watling Street is now Rochester High Street which has buildings dating back to the Tudors (and at least a dozen pubs in a 200m stretch) and on the street or just off it there are plaques to show the city is thick with history. Elizabeth I stayed here (at Satis House), Charles II spent the night here before his progress into London in 1660 (Restoration House) and his brother James II also stayed as he fled the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the invasion by William of Orange (Abdication House). Many of the buildings also feature in stories by Rochester resident Charles Dickens who died in the city in 1870 and expressed a wish to be buried there; as the most famous writer in Britain he ended up in Westminster Abbey instead.

But it is to the castle and the cathedral we shall go, two wonderful Norman buildings that are a stone’s-throw apart.

William the Conqueror built the first castle, constructing it – as with the Tower of London – just within the surviving Roman walls that encompassed the city. This would have been a simple motte and bailey with earthworks and wooden structures and palisades, a fortification to ensure the bridge across the Medway on the road to London could be defended.

After the Conqueror’s death in 1087 and a rebellion against his successor (William II, known as William Rufus) a stone castle was constructed by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester who had built the White Tower in London during the previous decade. The magnificent keep (some 35m tall) was built in the following century during the reign of Henry I, and it is this that provides the biggest thrills of the visit.

That’s because there has been no wholesale restoration of the shell such as you see at the Tower of London or Dover Castle. You’re not walking around recreations of medieval rooms but essentially clambering up some staircases in the skeleton of the building, gazing down into the empty spaces beneath.

It is absolutely great, and gives a much more tangible sense of the size of the place as wells as revealing elements of construction and use of the castle keep, from the interior ‘spine wall’ that bisected the keep, to the square holes in the walls that once held the floor and roof beams.

And as you go up the (dimly lit, uneven) spiral staircase through the (unglazed) windows you look out onto Rochester’s second great Norman building, its splendid Romanesque cathedral.

The church is, in fact, second only to Canterbury as the oldest cathedral in the country, having been founded in 604 during the rechristianising missions to England initiated by Pope Gregory I.

The current building was begun in 1080 by our old friend Bishop Gundulf, consecrated in 1130 and then had to be substantially rebuilt after a fire in 1137. In the late 12th century the Romanesque gave way to Early English Gothic (some pointed arches can be seen in the Nave), and Henry VIII’s Reformation swept away the monastic community based at the cathedral as well as Catholic symbols and images considered idolatrous by the evangelicals of the time. (John Fisher, the then Bishop of Rochester, refused to accept Henry as head of the church and was executed on Tower Hill in 1535. He was canonised by Pope Pius XI 400 years later. Henry VIII is said to have met his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves at Rochester in 1540.)

Like just about every English cathedral you go into, the Victorians set to work on Rochester to restore and ‘improve’ it, with the nearly ubiquitous George Gilbert Scott adding his faux-medieval touches to the High Altar, the Quire and much of the East End. Older traces remain though, including half of the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ 13th century wall painting, 12th century flooring, a doorway from 1343 (named after Bishop Hamo do Hyth who commissioned it) and ‘Gundulf’s Door’ from the 1080s (perhaps the second-oldest extant door in England). The tympanum above the West Door is also well worth a look.

It was far too cold to do the Dickens tour, so after a brief look into the Huguenot Museum we got the train back to the smoke. Dickens’ fans will find references to his works throughout the city (and vice versa, his ‘Mystery of Edwin Drood’ is set in and around the cathedral close) and each December a Dickensian Festival has a collection of characters performing in the streets.

Rochester is around an hour away from central London by train. As with many historic destinations in Britain there is a thoroughly utilitarian railway station that gives out onto a dispiriting dual carriageway and boarded up lots, but try to ignore these and make a beeline for the castle’s keep as it rises up in front of you. And don’t forget the dozen pubs in the High Street. 

---