Rye – A Medieval Town Frozen in Time

(Posing in the picturesque lane leading to St. Mary’s Church)

If there exists one place in England that I could visit willingly on every single trip, it would be Rye. I adore this enchanting medieval town so much that I feel convinced that in a previous life I might have inhabited a Victorian or Edwardian world on this rocky edge of England. Tucked away in what is referred to as “1066 Country”, the settlement is on the tourist track from London that usually includes the coastal towns of Hastings and Battle. Associated with the Norman conquest of England in 1066 when William the Conqueror of Normandy, France, defeated Harold, putting England firmly into French hands, this region is deeply evocative of history. The town of Rye, located in the midst of England’s earliest past, seems appropriately frozen in time, its heart crammed with the quaintest cobbled streets and drooping half-timbered houses.

Located in East Sussex, Rye is the kind of place in which the Past seems to have stopped f0r a fleeting visit never to have left. It is  worth visiting if only for its uneven pebbled streets and its Tudor houses with their exposed beams and leaded glass windows all clustered together in charmingly narrow alleyways.

Perched on a hill overlooking the Romney Marshes, Rye’s winding lanes contain a literary curiosity around every corner, including England’s famed blue plaques that announce the past dwellings of her well-known children. So imagine my delight, as a litterateur, when we passed by the home of John Fletcher, the other half of (Francis) Beaumont and Fletcher, Jacobean dramatists who wrote among other plays The Arden of Faversham, refering to a small town in Kent through which we also later drove. (In the picture above right, my cousin Cheryl and her husband David pose for me outside the tea room that in which John Fletcher once lived).

Or my joy on discovering the red brick home (left) of American novelist Henry James who adored Rye and wrote his novel The Wings of a Dove while living in this delightful enclave. Further rambles took us into Rye’s ancient cathedral of St. Mary’s and its stone-draped castle after we stopped for lunch at a little café, explored a few of the enticing shops and took countless pictures of the quaint Tudor lodgings, particularly those on Mermaid Lane such as the Mermaid Inn that dates from the 16th century.  Cheryl who accompanied to met Rye with her husband David is seen with me in the picture below outside The Mermaid Inn.

But Rye’s ancient history also includes smugglers and secret passages reminiscent of the many Enid Blyton adventures on which I thrived as a child. In more recent years, contemporary novelists like E.F. Benson made this coastal town the setting for a series of novels that featured eccentric upper middle class characters named Mapp and Lucia—later collectively turned into an amusing British TV series starring Penelope Scales and Geraldine McEwan in the lead roles with a charming and utterly funny Nigel Hawthorn playing the supporting male role of Georgie who eventually becomes Mapp’s hapless husband. Though it is called Tilling-on-Sea in Benson’s novels, Rye is the town that the author unmistakably wished to immortalize through his work.

Looking further eastwards you will be reminded of the military activity that resounded in this region during World War II. Indeed, fans of the British detective series Foyle’s War starring Michael Kitchen will find much that is evocative of those war-time mysteries from the strange signals that were beamed off the coast to enemy ships to the smaller homes that hid the clandestine activity of petty crooks.  For though the series is shot in neighboring Hastings, Rye does present the same evocative atmosphere of Britain’s dread of “Jerry” (Germany) across the Channel.

We also visited the harbor that was dotted with colorful sailing craft.  Long known to have sheltered England’s clandestine activity in smuggling and piracy, Rye is a part of the Cinque Ports (pronounced “Sink Ports”) and strolls along the river front upon which small craft laden with contraband once plied, bring the visitor sharply in the presence of her sea-faring past. The banks of the river provide marvelous opportunities for impromptu picnics and when the sun shines as warmly as it does as on the day I was there, few can resist the compulsion to plop down on the grass with sardine sandwiches and ginger beer as the adventurous teenagers in my Enid Blyton books so joyously did.

Do make a visit to Rye. Whether you climb up to the belfry of the medieval church to view the Romney Marshes that surround the town or linger in the tea shops that line the High Street, you will leave with a warm and fuzzy feeling for one of the most beautiful parts of England.