John Burke's Hastings, August 1999
The West Cliff Furnicular |
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Monday 2 August 1999
Well, we have been in Hastings for a couple of days so we thought it was maybe time we
should take a look at where the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Er... no, it didn't
take place in the shopping centre!
In fact it didn't take place in Hastings at all. We had a morning in Hastings itself
before driving out to the battle site in the afternoon. |
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After a quick zoom around the shops we looked at the
castle on top of the cliffs and decided we would have a closer look. |
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There is an easier way to get up there than walking! The West Cliff Furnicular
Railway can be found in George Street.
The idea, the surroundings and even the turnstile may all be old, but the braking and controls
were definitely modern, so the cashier said!
The railway, like most if not all furniculars, has two cars joined by a chain,
which runs through a motor at the top. |
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| The two cars more or less balance each other (the more
or less bit depends on the weight of passengers!) and the motor does not have to do all that
much work.
With our usual luck, we were just in time to see the carriage disappear from the station...
Still, it did give me a chance to take a photo.
The hill is a funny shape - steep, then rounded, so the railway goes through a tunnel on the
steep bit and ends up on top of the rounded bit! |
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There's a good view from the top! |
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The rock is extremely soft. Three strokes with the edge of a coin are enough
to leave your own personal bit of graffiti etched into the face of the rock for future generations
to snigger at your lack of brains.
What? How do I know about the three strokes of a coin's edge? Er... (blush) well... er...
Look it was only my initials, right? And it was in the interests of science. And all that... |
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Oh yes... We came up to look at the castle didn't we? Well, er... this is
as close as we came.
Time was marching on so we just looked at it from a distance... |
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The fault was probably mine... Or maybe Fran's... I was under pressure to do
a bit of sketching - this mainly because Fran kept commenting on how "heavy" the sketchpad was in
her bag...
There was far too much detail anyway from so far up... Not one of my favourites! No - you
can't have a look at it any bigger...! In fact I didn't even sign it...
So we went back to the furnicular station for the downward trip.
There were no queues at the top station as there had been at the bottom and all we had to
do was wait for the car to arrive. |
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We had the car to ourselves going down.
The shot left gives some idea of how long the tunnel actually was. |
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