That is a toilsome road by which one leaves Folkestone for Dover. The chalk—"infinite" indeed, as Dickens said—the blinding glare of the sun upon it, the steep gradients, the rain-worn gullies, the tortuous curves, and the persistent up and up of Folkestone Hill, make the salt perspiration start from the wayfarer's brow and run smartingly into his eyes. But when the hilltop is reached, where a once picturesque but now rebuilt inn, the "Valiant Sailor," stands, grand is the view backwards upon the town. That view is so sheer that the place looks all roof, and seems a squalid huddle-together of ill-arranged streets. No one, gazing down upon Folkestone from this view-point, would suspect the palatial and magnificent nature of its later growth.
It was but yester-year that the five miles length of cliff-top and chalky road on to Dover was solitary and marked by infrequent houses, but no longer do the crows and the seagulls hold undisturbed possession. It has never been a pleasant road, lying open and unfenced upon the roof of the cliffs and along an inhospitable country. Those whose way has lain along it have been grilled in summer and in winter pierced through and through by icy blasts that no hospitable hedgerows or kindly shelter of any description have served to lessen. Now these bleak and forbidding uplands are varied with brickfields, sporadic new houses, and blatant notice-boards offering building-land for sale, and they are not improved by the change. Greatly to be pitied is that cyclist who essays this road from the direction of Dover, for in that terrible continuous climb he affords the best comparison with the state of a good man struggling with undeserved adversity. "Surely," he thinks, "I shall soon come to the end of this rise"; but the white ribbon of the roadway rises ever before him, until, exhausted, he crests the hill at the "Valiant Sailor," where the staggering descent into Folkestone forbids him to ride down.
How different the case of the eastward-bound! No sooner is the climb from Folkestone completed than the long descent into Dover begins. Five miles away, down at the bottom of a cleft at the end of this chute, Dover Castle is blotted against the sky, and the cyclist has nothing to do but sit still and let the miles reel comfortably away, until the electric tramways at the outskirts of Dover are reached.
There is a point on this road between Folkestone and Dover that on moonlit nights makes a picture after Barham's own heart. When the full moon comes sailing up over the Castle Hill and floods the chalky road with light, leaving the town of Dover lost in the darkling valley of the Dour and the downs behind etched in a profound blackness upon the luminous heavens, then you recall those exquisite lines from the "Old Woman clothed in Grey":
Oh! sweet and beautiful is Night, when the silver moon is high,
And countless stars, like clustering gems, hang sparkling in the sky.
Yes; and night is more beautiful than day here, for the aching whiteness, the parching dryness, the arid bareness of the chalk highway and the folded hills are touched to romance by the cold majesty of the moon, whose light softens the austerities of the road, just as the dews assuage the lingering heats of day.
Tom Ingoldsby never, in the whole course of his writings, had much to say of Dover, and the legend of the "Old Woman clothed in Grey," tacked on to this ancient port, is really a Cambridgeshire story, hailing from Boxworth, near St. Ives. The incidents, he says, "happened a long time ago, I can't say exactly how long,"—which is rather vague:
All that one knows is,
It must have preceded the Wars of the Roses
Here he takes occasion to have another fling at Britton, in this footnote, where "Simpkinson of Bath" (whom we have already seen to be intended for that eminent antiquary) is made to confuse these historic campaigns with some family contentions: "An ancient and most pugnacious family," says our Bath friend. "One of their descendants, George Rose, Esq., late M.P. for Christchurch (an elderly gentleman now defunct), was equally celebrated for his vocal abilities and his wanton destruction of furniture when in a state of excitement. 'Sing, old Rose, and burn the bellows!' has grown into a proverb."
And so, indeed, for many centuries past it has, but no one has yet satisfactorily explained its origin. Many amusingly conflicting derivations of it have been given. One, as old as 1740, is found in the British Apollo of that year: