We had another slow start on Monday before driving down to Hastings at around 10:30. After parking the car near the station, we made our way down towards the beach, only realising as we got there how windy it was! There were lots of charity shops on this end of town, so we had a poke around in a couple of them on our way down the street. A favourite gallery of Peter’s is not far back from St Leonard’s On Sea beach so we did a walk past the window, although it was closed on Mondays, and then made our way to the waterfront. It was extremely blustery and the water was very choppy, with spray splashing across the pebbles and up to the footpath where we were walking. Luckily the wind was at our back though, so we just pulled our jackets a little closer and headed up towards the centre of Hastings.

The Victorian waterfront was very cute, complete with townhouses all along the waterfront – although it was quieter than one would expect for half term, whether that was because of the weather or Covid. The pier was closed and was quite eerie! At a certain point we looked up towards the point where we’d been heading because the castle was marked on the map there and realised that the castle was actually up on the clifftops above, which meant our walk was going to be a bit more strenuous than planned! We wiggled through some streets and found ourselves in the Old Town, which had very cute old shops with lots of cafes and quirky charity/trinket shops. At the Ye Olde Pumphouse (which looked exactly as it sounds!) we turned up a staircase and climbed up to the hilltop above the Old Town. This gave us beautiful views over the town and beach and an easy stroll up to the castle.

Disappointingly, the castle was owned by ‘Smuggler’s Adventure’ (a local tour operator in the caves) and it was closed! This hadn’t been flagged at all in the research I’d done so we were quite disappointed. At least we had the views though, so we took a few more photos before heading back down the hill for a bit more of a wander around the Old Town. We found a fantastic junk store (junk yard?) that seemed just like one shop but opened out into a full collection of buildings, sheds and yard out the back. After an explore of their extremely varied collection, we made our way back up the waterfront and along to a café called Goat Ledge that I’d read about online. There we were able to get two fish rolls (mine gluten free) for lunch, which were absolutely delicious!

From Goat Ledge we headed back to Battle and settled in for a quiet afternoon. We played our escape game, made some hot chocolates that we’d picked up in Rye and then cooked steaks for dinner before watching the last two season 1 episodes of Dark. Definitely a show to watch if you like crime and sci fi, we’re totally hooked!