XLII
SHAKESPEARE CLIFF
Since we are in the way of it, it comes naturally to include Shakespeare Cliff in this little survey. You reach it from here either by a hideous contrivance called the Shaft, fashioned in the cliffs that frown down upon Snargate Street, or by Limekiln Street beyond. Here, on the way, is Archcliffe Fort, between the Citadel and the sea. They say, who should know, that it is heavily armed, but it is not at all impressive: old boots, tin cans, brick-bats, cabbage-stalks, and rusty umbrella-frames rarely are; and of these there are rich and varied deposits lying in the fosse, amid the scanty grass where industrious sheep endeavour to earn a living. Indeed, this is the most eloquent picture of mild-eyed Peace I have ever seen, and Landseer’s painting which shows a sheep snuffling in the mouth of a dismantled cannon is quite weak beside it.
Looking over the cliff’s edge, just beyond, is a view of the beach below, where the South Eastern Railway runs on a wooden viaduct, entering a double tunnel through the chalky mass of Shakespeare Cliff, rising sheer from the sea to a height of three hundred and fifty feet. A narrow footpath leads to the breezy summit, surmounted by a Coastguard Station, and here you may gaze, if you have good nerves, over the brink of the precipice, and listen to the hissing of the pebbles far down below, as the waves drag them back and forth:
... Here’s the place: stand still.
How fearful
And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight; the murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high; I’ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
How eloquent is that passage from King Lear!
Just past Shakespeare Cliff come the twin workings of the Channel Tunnel and the coal-mine, those notorious fiascos which have cost the South Eastern shareholders so much, and have afforded journalists so large an amount of good “copy.” From the cliff-top, a steep and winding stairway cut in the chalk leads down to the beach and the Dover coal mine and the beginnings of the Channel Tunnel. Much money has been sunk in both. Some day the Tunnel will be completed; but no one expects coal ever to be commercially mined here.
Turn we, though, from these projects to the Admiralty Pier, that centre of interest to visitors and Dover folks alike. Some one—I know not whom—has styled the Admiralty Pier “the pier of the realm,” and truly, though you search these coasts, you shall find nothing to compare with it, as a pier. Plymouth Breakwater is a great deal more impressive, but then, it is not a pier, but is set down in midst of a tempestuous Sound, where no one can get at it without risk and trouble. And the Admiralty Pier owes its very great fame largely to the ease with which you can reach it and promenade up and down its almost interminable pavings. Crowds come to see the boats off or in, and people are always sweeping the seas with telescopes and field-glasses, finding a perennial joy in so doing, difficult to be understood. The boats come in, the tidal trains run out along the huge stone causeway; passengers pallid and cold, muffled up in overcoats, glancing around with lack-lustre eyes, crawl miserably from the decks and cabins of the Channel steamers under the amused scrutiny of the callous crowd, and seat themselves thankfully in the waiting train. Other steamers wait impatiently, shrieking intermittently; and other trains bring down intending passengers for the night crossing to France. Sometimes strange scenes are witnessed on the night mail, when passengers are streaming from the boat-express across the gangways. Quiet gentlemen with little luggage and a marked disinclination for the society of their fellows are discovered, as they lurk in remote corners of the deck, seeking to sneak quietly out of the “very front door of England,” by other gentlemen—gentlemen with broad shoulders and square-toed boots—who tap them on the shoulder with an equal absence of fuss or demonstration, and these quiet gentlemen usually say—not without a certain start of surprise, you may be sure—“Oh! I’ll come quietly.” Then the three (for they are usually two who thus accost one of these undemonstrative and retiring passengers) step again on to the Admiralty Pier, and apparently abandon their Continental trip, for they go up to London by the next train. Sometimes a quiet gentleman refuses to “come quietly” when his shoulder is tapped, and then those who do the tapping are obliged to resort to the painful, not to say humiliating, process of snapping a pair of handcuffs on his wrists, much to the surprise of the passengers. But whether gentlemen elect to go quietly or to take it fighting is not much matter: the result is the same. Sometimes these quiet ones came back to Dover after a while, and were accommodated in free quarters on the Castle Hill; presently revisiting the harbour as masons under Government employ. They come here no longer, for the convict prison on the hill is deserted, and the harbour-works are now carried on with paid labour.
And Britain is proceeding with some energy to rule the waves at Dover, for the Harbour of Refuge is completed; to the end that the battle-ships, the merchantmen beating up and down Channel, and the fisher-boats may ride in some degree of safety, protected from the north-easterly gales that nowadays strew the Downs and the Goodwin Sands with wrecks. For centuries this project had been discussed—and shelved in the dusty pigeon-holes of the Admiralty offices. Raleigh reported in the reign of Elizabeth that “no promontory, town, or haven in Europe was so well situated for annoying the enemy, protecting commerce, or sending and receiving despatches from the Continent;” and works were commenced to replace the pier begun by Henry the Eighth that had been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin. But when Defoe was here the Harbour had fallen back into its old state, half-choked with shingle cast up by the set of the tides from the westward, and the piers decayed. “Ill-repaired, dangerous, good for nothing, very chargeable and little worth,” those were the epithets the author of Robinson Crusoe applied to it, and thus it remained until 1847, despite local and half-hearted attempts to prevent the accumulation of shingle. In that year the Admiralty Pier was commenced. Meanwhile, the sea, and the tides, thrust out from Dover Harbour by this mighty arm, are setting in strongly upon the Castle Cliffs, and that Castle, the survival of six hundred years of strife and change, is being very slowly but very surely undermined. And thus it goes round our coasts; turn away the currents that eat up particular strips of the land or choke up the havens with sea-drift, and they set with additional fury upon the next unprotected place, presently to be, at great cost, referred elsewhere. It is a game that never ends: a game of General Post of which the sea, at least, never tires.
DOVER CASTLE, FROM THE FOLKESTONE ROAD: SUNRISE.