THE FOLLY OF SHEERNESS

Once he acquired his Ariel Motorcyle, flamboyantly red in colour which gave it a dynamic appearance, my father became fond of weekend jaunts to local places of interest. They were usually places he recalled from his childhood years growing up in the children's home in Chatham.   The boys, if the ensured they had been of good behaviour, were frequently taken on trips with an educational edge to them financed by local philanthropists keen on doing good in the community.  He recalled these outings fondly and sometimes I wondered why.  My mother tolerated these trips down Memory Lane just as long as they involved an afternoon picnic and my brother was too young for his opinion to count.  I wasn't expected to harbour opinions in the first place and in any case I was quite keen on picnics.

I remember well the Saturday when we visited The Folly of Sheerness because it rained quite heavily causing us to surreptitiously picnic in the Family Room of the nearby pub called The Ship of the Shore, though it didn't particularly resemble a ship.   We were the only family using the room at the time and because my father ordered half pints of Mild for himself and my mother and lemonades for me and my brother, plus two packets of crisps, the woman beind the bar kindly turned what my mother said was a Blind Eye to our egg and cress sandwiches.  We had of course abandoned the idea of making tea on a camp fire but the lemonades made up for that.

I wasn't altogether impressed with The Folly but I listened politely to the story behind it because the crisps were not going to be distributed until I did.   Apparently in the late 1850s a ship called The Lucky Escape ran aground nearby carrying a cargo of cement in barrels which a day or two later floated to shore by which time the contents were wet.  Before long an enterprising local broke open the barrels and used the cement blocks to build the Folly which probably was quite a good way of putting them to some use.  

There was a great deal of confusion as to where the cement had come from in the first place although there was in fact a cement works along the coast at Queenborough Creek which survived in business into the next century.  It might have been sensible to have simply made an enquiry with them.

Whatever the truth of the matter, I couldn't help thinking that Rochester Castle was a great deal more interesting overal and not such a long trip in the sidecar of the Ariel either!