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DoverEngland Dover is a major channel port in the English county of Kent. At the 2001 census, the town of Dover proper had a population of 28,156 inhabitants, while the population of the whole urban area of Dover, as calculated by the Office for National Statistics, was 39,078 inhabitants. The town is the administrative centre of the Dover district. It is the closest English port to France and continental Europe being only 21 miles (34 kilometres) from the French port of Calais. The French name of Dover is Douvres. It is famous for its white cliffs, which are made of chalk. The cliffs gave Britain its nickname of Albion, meaning "white". The town's name derives from the Brythonic word for water. Due to its closeness to continental Europe, Dover is one of the busiest cross-Channel ports of the United Kingdom, with 18 million passengers passing through every year. Regular ferry services operate from Dover to Calais and Dunkerque. A regular catamaran service to Boulogne recommenced in May 2004. History Dover has been an important port for millennia. In 1992, a waterlogged boat was discovered in a depth of 6 m that dates to the Bronze Age and is one of the oldest seagoing vessels ever recovered. It has been dated by the radiocarbon method to ca. 1550 BC. The Langdon Bay hoard, discovered in 1974 off the Dover coast contains bronze axes of a French type and may represent the cargo of a sunken vessel, thus demonstrating cross-channel trade already for the Bronze Age, if not earlier. Both finds are on display in the Dover museum in market square. The Romans built a lighthouse in the grounds of what
is now Dover Castle in around AD 50 which still survives,
making it one of the oldest buildings in Britain. On May 26, 1670 Charles II of England and Louis XIV
of France secretly signed a treaty here which ended
hostilities between their kingdoms. This page was retrieved and condensed from
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover) November 2005 Sarolta and I visited this place during our trip around the British Isles in 1978. You can click on
these photos for an enlargement.
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