Some day in the near future, when St. Margaret’s Bay is joined to Dover by the foreshore road at the foot of the cliffs—a road now in the making—it will be a magnificent route of some three miles between those now sundered places. But again, woe the day! At present to climb up out of the bay and up across the foreland, and so along the coastguard path, and past the Convict Prison and by the North Fall Meadow behind the Castle, to Dover is a weariful business. Less weary, perhaps, but longer, and along by-roads, is the way past the tiny secluded village of Westcliffe; and then down the main road, past the Duke of York’s School, and still steeply down Dover Castle Hill, into the town, lying there, seething populously in the constricted valley of the Dour.
CHAPTER XIX
DOVER—THE CASTLE AND ROMAN PHAROS—“QUEEN ELIZABETH’S POCKET-PISTOL”—THE WESTERN HEIGHTS
The great and growing town of Dover looks forward to a greater fame than even the historic past has conferred upon it. The measure of Dover’s greatness is not the usual measurement, that of population, for the town numbers only some 44,000. Rather does it lie in its defensible and strategic situation. Dover has ever, from Roman times, been a place of arms, and was, an old chronicler tells us, the “lock and key of the whole kingdom.” That being so, it has always behoved us to make it one of the most strongly fortified places on our coasts. On either side of the deep and narrow valley in which the town lies, the great chalk downs and cliffs rise steeply and massively, and all are in military occupation. The morning drum-beat reverberates from the Western Heights to welcome the rising sun, and the Last Post from the Castle sounds the requiem of the departed day; and in between them the tootling and the fifing, the words of command, the gun-firing, and all the military alarms and excursions of a garrison-town help to convince even the most timid that we are being taken care of.
Dover offered more opportunities for the artist in those far-away days when Hollar made his view of it from near the castle heights. At that time the river Dour flowed visibly into the sea, through a valley so sparsely settled that the ancient church of St. Mary, now almost hidden amid the clustered houses of the thronged town, stood out with a cathedral-like prominence. Hollar shows us the ships clustered at the river mouth, but at an earlier time they ascended far up the valley and anchored where the busiest streets are now found. Leland, somewhat earlier than Hollar, speaking of the Dour and the ancient inland haven, says, “The ground which lyeth up betwixt the hilles is yet, in digging, found wosye”—by which he meant “oozy”; and in modern times there have been discovered, in the course of excavations, relics of Roman occupation, when the inhabitants of the Dour Valley crossed the river and the marshes by boats and wooden causeways.
DOVER CASTLE.
After W. Daniell, R.A.
No one who has not viewed Dover from the sea can have a full appreciation of the majesty of its site. But you must not merely glimpse it from the pier-heads or from a boat. Nothing less than the home-coming from continental travel, when the sentiment of “home” gives an added value to the impressive scene, will serve.
The “white cliffs of Albion” have rightly been the subject of comment and description from the earliest times, for there is nothing in the rest of the whole wide world in the least resembling them. Except for a little of the same chalk formation on the other side of the Channel, at this narrow pass, we in England have a world-monopoly of chalk, and a brave show of bastioned chalky heights the Kentish coast makes. Nowhere else are they so stately as at Dover, for here military art has crowned and set a seal upon the defensible works of nature. But to see those white walls at their best, in whiteness and in rugged grandeur, you must see them from the Channel. Coming across from France, they do indeed gleam milk-white, and the Castle and the Roman pharos beside it seem to be neighbours almost with the clouds. But, examined close at hand, the cliffs of Dover have been plentifully smirched, and I think, from personal observation, that the chalk cliffs of the South Coast are actually at their natural whitest at Seaford, in Sussex.