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Perched high above the town on top of the famous White Cliffs of Dover stands not just a castle, but more than 2000 years of British history.

With it's commanding position overlooking the narrowest part of the Channel - the site has been fortified and defended in every era since the Iron Age.

Christine Pascall
Visitor Operations Manager, Dover Castle
We have everything on this site. Whatever era of history you are interested in we can show you something. There are over 80 acres that you can explore throughout the day. We have everything from an iron age fort right up to a nuclear bomb shelter.

Little is left of the Iron Age hill fort here, but the Roman remains are rather more substantial.

Christine Pascall
This is the Roman pharos: this is the highest Roman structure north of the Alps. This was a lighthouse. It was one of three - one here, one on the other side of Dover on the western cliffs ands one in Boulogne. And these would be used to guide the Roman fleet up and down and across the Channel. They were vitally important, so up here at that time we would have had a whole garrison of Roman soldiers all living and working and being part of what was on top of this hill.

The Saxons occupied the hill too, and left the basis of this church.

The Normans were next, taking the site immediately after the Battle at Hastings a few miles down the coast.

But it was in 1179 that Henry II embarked on his most ambitious castle building project, raising the mighty keep and surrounding it with impenetrable walls.

Inside he dedicated a chapel to the memory of the murdered Archbishop, Thomas a Beckett.

Christine Pascall
Of course it was Henry II who said 'who will rid me of this turbulent priest?' and as a result Thomas A Beckett was murdered at Canterbury Cathedral. Henry II was devastated - mortified, so, when this was built he consecrated it and dedicated it to the memory of his best friend.

Plenty of other kings visited Dover Castle including Richard the Lionheart, Henry VIII and Charles I.


Christine Pascall
This is the first of the great halls. This is where you would have waited to have been summoned into the throne room.

So there we are - the throne room. They call it the presence chamber so you would wait next door so when you were summoned you would come in to be met by the King. If you were very privileged. He was very fussy who he saw.

If Dover Castle was defensively important in the Middle Ages, it was no less so in the middle of the last century. From here the evacuation of Dunkirk was planned and mounted when it became a hidden wartime command post.

Christine Pascall
This is a very important part of the Dover Castle experience. This is the wartime tunnel complex. Now these tunnels nobody knew about. They were secret: they were covered by the Official Secrets Act right up until the early 1990s - that's how secret everything was. When English Heritage took over they started to open them up and we now take visitors back in time to the Second World War when this was the combined military headquarters of the Army the Airforce and the Royal Navy.

Guiding visitors through the labyrinth is Peter Knott.

Peter Knott
Tour Guide, Dover Castle
A lot of it has been here since Napoleonic times and a lot of it has been extended. And we have one particular tunnel which I'll show you shortly and that was dug out by miners using pick axes.

Thousands of service personnel led a troglodyte existence down here processing secret communications.

Peter Knott
Over on the left hand side here they are decoder machines where they would receive coded messages then the girls, Wrens, would call runners who would run the messages down to the decoder station where they would receive replies written in code. It would be brought back to this area and the reply sent back to the originating station.

If we were to make our way down this tunnel and turn right at the bottom we would be in the telephone exchange which we saw. So take in and see the amount of equipment we had in the tunnels during the War.

Whether it's from the last century or 20 centuries ago, Dover Castle takes a good bit of maintenance.

Christine Pascall
It's a bit like painting the Forth Bridge, you never actually get to the end of what you need to achieve. As soon as you finish one thing there is always something else you need to be looking at doing so it's always a question of looking at what is most important and trying to do that. And we plan our maintenance so we can do it over various times. We have problems in that we have a lot of visitors. We try to do as much of the major maintenance work that we can actually later in the season so it is less inconvenient for our visitors.

But it's not just the buildings that have to be maintained ...all the artefacts belonging to or on display at the castle also need conserving. And that's where the Museum Stores come in, providing visitors on one day a month with a fascinating look behind the scenes.

Sam Harris
Assistant Curator, Dover Castle
We have changing displays every three or four months. The display we've got on at the moment shows the variety of the kind of things we have at Dover Castle as well as our other sites. We have plans, archives, social history, artefacts, textiles, x-rays - a wide variety of other objects - so we have to take specific measures to care for and catalogue each type of object as well.

There's two full-time members of staff and a part-time and an object cleaner as well. We do have quite a number of volunteers helping out with our work as well. That's how most people start out as well - just by volunteering because you are interested in the subject. So we teach them how to do things like brush hoovering, cataloguing of objects, other methods of cleaning and integrated pest management - checking bug traps and things like that so it's a very, very interesting job.

I started here as a volunteer three years ago then I got part-time work as a consultant and now I'm full-time on a yearly contract. It's a very difficult field to get into and very competitive. So I'm doing a distance learning MA in museum studies while working full time here just to try to get a permanent job because that's the ultimate thing that everyone wants - a permanent job curatorially.

Whether Dover Castle with its many windows on history will be around in another 2,000 years is impossible to tell.

But for the meantime, as they like to say, there's something for just about everybody here.