Before 1815 if you wanted to travel anywhere you options were, walk, ride a horse, a horse drawn vehicle, a rowing boat or a sailing boat.
OK for short distances but slow, unreliable, uncomfortable, tiring for longer ones, the exception being sea going ships using the trade winds. Travelling some distance for leisure was only for the wealthy, of course the poor walked long distances for work.
The first paddle steamers arrived in Margate in 1815 and soon changed Thanet's economy into tourism for all social classes
There were issues.
one being that there was no pier at Margate that went out into deep enough water so getting ashore dry involved rowing boats and barrows. there was enough depth of water at the end of the piers that form Ramsgate Harbour, but the early paddle steamers weren't up to going round the North Foreland.
I think this is the first of Margate's Jetties
A few photos of our Paddle steamers next.
With the season of Allhallowtide just around the corner. Hallowmas season
Halloween (31 October).
All Saints' Day (1 November)
All Souls' Day or the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed or Commemoratio omnium fidelium defunctorum (2 November)
I am trying hard not to let the Halloween Mask slip. While in Canterbury today doing my bookbuying and Chocolate Cafe stuff I remembered to photograph some of Canterbury Cathedral's Grotesques.
Since it started sprouting drain pipes in the mid 1700s (the oldest dated ones are stamped 1755) the gargoyles became endangered and are now pretty much extinct.
These of course are not really visible from the ground
handheld zoom photography is a bit hit and miss
Plenty of building work going on there
On the book front
We bought a few in Canterbury, we had a busy October in the bookshop so need to keep buying quality general stock.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.