The New Murrey and Blue blog

As you may have gathered by now, I have done a lot of poking around (ahem, research 🙄) concerning Westenhanger Castle in Kent.⁽¹⁾ My concern has been what went on there in the late 14th century.⁽²⁾

Well, there are times when the Internet is a double-edged sword for an amateur in search of accurate history. Just how, after a LOT of research, is any self-respecting writer supposed to cope with the never-ending flow of NEW information? I’ve been striving to pinpoint everything in the relevant area and period, and I thought I had it sorted….until a few days ago when I learned of a lost causeway leading to the castle from the south. Its very existence overturns a lot of what I’d believed hitherto.

This newly discovered causeway is now thought to have been the original MAIN access to the castle, which is in the distance in the photograph at the bottom of this article, below the downs and across the now disused Folkestone Racecourse which you can see clearly in the aerial photograph at the beginning.

It makes a great difference for me. Almost as if I’d learned that Old London Bridge had a much earlier stone predecessor downstream at the Tower! Well, perhaps not of that magnitude, but writers have plots, and sudden vital new access roads make one helluva difference to the ease—or otherwise—with which characters can be moved around the board! At this moment I don’t know where to start with the rewriting, but start I will.

Maybe Westenhanger and its causeway are not of particular concern to you, but both are to me and in writing this now I’m using the new information to demonstrate that we can never be smugly certain we’ve uncovered everything. Sooner or later your trusty browser—and busy bands of archaeologists and historians—will happily dig holes in that silly notion! 😠

⁽¹⁾Previous posts based around Westenhanger are:- https://murreyandblue.org/2024/08/18/once-the-second-largest-house -in-kent/  and https://murreyandblue.org/2020/06/05/the-mystery-of-the-vanished-manor-of-ostenhanger/ and https://murreyandblue.org/2021/02/03/the-story-of-the-crutched-friars-in-london/

⁽²⁾ My attention was first drawn to Westenhanger when I read Terry Jones’s excellent The Medieval Python. The particular chapter was by the late W. Mark Ormrod, and was entitled “Needy Knights and Wealthy Widows: The Encounters of John Cornewall and Lettice Kirriel, 1378-1382”. You can read part of it here https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137075055_12.