THE SITE OF CAESAR’S CAMP IN 55, AND OF HIS NAVAL CAMP IN 54 B. C.
I have proved in an earlier article that Caesar landed in 55 B.C. between Walmer Castle and Deal Castle, and in the following year between Deal Castle and Sandwich.[3380] Camden,[3381] who assumed that Caesar landed at the same place on both his expeditions, remarked that ‘for a considerable length under this shore [in the neighbourhood of Deal] are a number of heaps like banks which some suppose to have been blown up by the wind; but’, he added, ‘I rather take them for the fortifications or defences for ships which Caesar was ten days and nights throwing up.’ If Camden was referring to the sand-dunes between Sandown and Sandwich, it is of course unnecessary to discuss his conjecture. Hasted[3382] thought that the camp of 55 B.C. might be represented by ‘remains of entrenchments still visible’, (1) ‘close to the shore between Deal and Walmer Castle’, or (2) ‘within the country round Walmer Church’, or (3) ‘upon a rise ... between Deal and Upper Deal’. But these are mere guesses; and Professor Flinders Petrie, in his ‘Notes on Kentish Earthworks’,[3383] says nothing which can support either Hasted or Camden, except that ‘there is said to be a fosse around Walmer Church’. I can only add that nobody will learn anything by going to look for it. Dowker,[3384] who deluded himself into the belief that Caesar had landed near Sandwich in 55 as well as in 54 B.C., held that he had encamped in the first year between Sandwich and Worth, in the second on Richborough Hill. But Dowker himself maintained that Richborough Hill was isolated at spring tides; and would Caesar have omitted to mention that he had sailed into the Rutupian estuary? I am inclined to believe that he encamped in 54 B.C. on the gently rising ground near Worth.
Last year (1902) I spent two days in examining the coast between Kingsdown and Sandown.[3385] The conclusion to which I came was that in 55 B.C. Caesar must have encamped either on the plateau between Walmer Castle and Kingsdown, or, much more probably, on the rising ground north-west of the plateau which is now covered by part of the town of Walmer. On returning to London, I opened the second volume of Napoleon’s Histoire de Jules César, and found on pages 160 and 161 that Colonel Stoffel had adopted the latter alternative.