Chatham; Sunday, 13 September, 2015

Breakfast completed I checked out of the hotel and headed the short distance over to the historic dockyard to have a look around.

I had originally only planned to spend a couple of hours looking around the dockyard intending on spending the afternoon looking around Fort Amherst just beyond the dockyard, but in the end there was so much to see in the dockyard that I didn’t even do that full justice let alone visit the fort.

On entering the dockyard I was advised by the ticket office to pick up some timed tickets for a couple of the exhibits that can only be visited on tours, so I picked these up and then headed straight up to the Victorian Ropery for the first tour of the morning.

The tour was very interesting with the highlight being the spectacular Victorian Double Rope Walk at the end of the tour. Still in active use today for creating maritime rope the ¼ of a mile long building is incredibly impressive and amazing that the process of making rope really hasn’t changed very much since the Victorian era of sail ships – even if the volumes required have decreased significantly

From the ropery I popped next door to the exhibition on the final century or so of the Docks working life from the rise of the steel and steam powered ship replacing the former wood and sail methods that the dockyard had previously been producing through its time as a builder of submarines to its eventual closure in 1984.

I stopped for a quick lunch near the ropery before heading back through the docks to have a look around the three historic warships – HMS Gannet, HMS Cavalier and the Submarine Ocelot.

Ocelot had to be visited on a guided tour, so that dictated the order in which I did the three ships, and was probably the most interesting of the three, mostly because it’s not every ship based museum that has a full sized submarine that you can walk through.

Having taken in the ships I had a brief look round the other collections in the dockyard, though by now I was starting to flag and didn’t really do them justice. Final stop of the afternoon was the Heart of Oak exhibition that, through a walking film experience takes you through the 19th century process of constructing a wooden ship.

Feeling totally knackered I left the docks and headed back to the hotel to pick up my luggage and then headed back to the station and the train home.