“Here reign the blustering North and blighting East;
No tree is heard to whisper, bird to sing;
Yet nature could not furnish out the feast,
But he invokes new terrors still to bring.
“Now mouldering fanes and battlements arise,
Turrets and arches nodding to their fall;
Unpeopled monasteries delude our eyes,
And mimic desolation covers all.”
Passing the flint-faced “Captain Digby” inn, famed in the story of the Northern Belle shipwreck of January 1857, we come to the North Foreland, “the most easterly projection of Kent,” the cape mentioned by Ptolemy, about A.D. 150, as Κάντιον ἀκρον, or “Acantium Promontory.”
The North Foreland light, once occupying a solitary situation on the cliff-top, is now becoming the centre of a number of villas, whose windows at night form lower and of course much more feeble illuminations. But the sea is here spangled with as many lights as the land, for off the shore are those dangerous shoals, the famous Goodwin Sands. Dickens, many years ago, in the course of a sketch of Broadstairs, wrote a good description of them and of the North Foreland light, mentioning “the Goodwin Sands, whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big lighthouse called the North Foreland, on a hill behind the village, a severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and stares grimly out upon the sea.”
THE NORTH FORELAND LIGHTHOUSE.
After W. Daniell, R.A.
But since 1880, when the lighthouse was altered, the light has suffered a complete change, and is not now the steady-going gleam it used to be. It occults every half-minute, displaying a white and red light for twenty-five seconds, followed by an eclipse of five seconds. The effect, compared with the light that Dickens described, is something like that which would astonish the beholder if a Bishop were to wear a red tie, or take to drink.
The first lighthouse on the North Foreland was a wooden building, erected by Sir John Meldrum in 1636. This was destroyed by fire half a century later. A temporary beacon replaced it, and this in turn was succeeded by a flint octagonal tower, bearing an open brazier of coals. This was afterwards enclosed behind glass, and the coals were kept aflame throughout the night by the lightkeeper constantly playing on them with a bellows! Those certainly were the heroic times of lighthouse tending.
The licensee of the first lighthouse was given the right of levying a toll of one penny per ton on all British ships, and twopence per ton on all foreign vessels passing the Foreland, he paying the Crown an annual rent of £20 for fifty years. This grant was renewed to various other persons for other terms of fifty years. The last of these licensees bequeathed the unexpired years of his term to Greenwich Hospital, to which a renewal was granted for ninety-nine years. At the end of that period, the lighthouse was, rather belatedly, taken over by the Trinity House, whose Elder Brethren then paid the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital about £8,000, by way of compensation.