The corner of our room
This is a corner of our little attic room at the Mermaid Inn. For all our grumping, the room was spotless and had, like our host, Grumpy McGrumpy Pants, the most character of any place we stayed in England. The Tudor architecture is authentic, not decorative for tourists, unchanged since the late 15th century. Even older are those large beams you see in the (dark—sorry) photo: flotsam gathered from the wreckage of ships on the beach from the French invasions in the 13th and 14th centuries. Rye was burned to the ground by the French in 1377. Only three structures made of stone survived: St. Mary’s Church, the Landgate, and Ypes Tower. The beams date from the time of the Mermaid Inn’s re-build in 1420.