The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

The last witch eloped with the ultimate smuggler, full seventy years since, but Romney Marsh remains, a beautiful open expanse of wide horizons, clear skies, and succulent pastures. The coastwise road runs across its levels, seven miles to New Romney, with the village of Dymchurch in between, Dymchurch Wall keeping out the sea. This, viewed from the inner side, is a lofty grassed earthen bank, faced seawards with a masonry “apron,” as engineers style it; while at regular intervals the martello towers of an olden scheme of coast-defence are features of the way. Cobbett, writing in 1825, was very severe upon them:

“I had baited my horse,” he writes, “at New Romney, and was coming jogging along very soberly, now looking at the sea, then looking at the cattle, then the corn, when my eye, in swinging round, lighted upon a great round building, standing upon the beach. I had scarcely had time to think about what it could be, when twenty or thirty others, standing along the coast, caught my eye; and, if any one had been behind me, he might have heard me exclaim, in a voice that made my horse bound, ‘The martello towers, by ——!’ Oh, Lord! To think that I should be destined to behold these monuments of the wisdom of Pitt and Dundas and Perceval! Good G—! Here they are, piles of bricks in a circular form about three hundred feet (guess) circumference at the base, and about one hundred and fifty feet circumference at the top. There is a doorway, about midway up, in each, and each has two windows. Cannons were to be fired from the top of these things, in order to defend the country against the French Jacobins!

“I think I have counted along here upwards of thirty of these ridiculous things, which, I daresay, cost five, perhaps ten, thousand pounds each; and one of which was, I am told, sold on the coast of Sussex, the other day, for two hundred pounds! There is, they say, a chain of these things all the way to Hastings! I daresay they cost millions. But far indeed are these from being all, or half, or a quarter of the squanderings along here. Hythe is half barracks; the hills are covered with barracks, and barracks most expensive, most squandering, fill up the side of the hill. Here is a canal (I crossed it at Appledore) made for the length of thirty miles (from Hythe, in Kent, to Rye, in Sussex) to keep out the French; for, those armies who had so often crossed the Rhine and the Danube were to be kept back by a canal made by Pitt, thirty feet wide, at the most! All along the coast there are works of some sort or other, incessant sinks of money; walls of immense dimensions; masses of stone brought and put into piles. Then you see some of the walls and buildings falling down; some that have never been finished. The whole thing taken together,” he concludes, “looks as if a spell had been, all of a sudden, set upon the workmen; or, in the words of the Scripture, here is the ‘desolation of abomination, standing in high places.’”

The martello towers seem to have thoroughly obsessed Cobbett, for he presently bursts forth again, to tell us how they were “erected to keep out the Jacobin French, lest they should come and assist the Jacobin English. The loyal people of this coast were fattened by the building of them. Pitt and his loyal Cinque Ports waged interminable war against Jacobins. These very towers are now used to keep these loyal Cinque Ports themselves in order. These towers are now used to lodge men, whose business is to sally forth, not upon Jacobins, but upon smugglers. Thus, after having sucked up millions of the nation’s money, these loyal Cinque Ports are squeezed again: kept in order, kept down, by the very towers which they rejoiced to see rise to keep down the Jacobins.”

Seventy-six of these martello towers were erected along the flat places of the Kent and Sussex shores in the first years of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon threatened us with invasion. They cost, according to their size, from £10,000 to £20,000 apiece, and were constructed of such a thickness of brick, with a vaulted brick roof, that they were thoroughly bomb-proof. The thickness of the brick walls varies from six feet on the rear, or landward, side, to nine feet facing the sea. The interior consists of a base, intended to serve as the magazine, with two rooms above, for the garrison. On the roof was mounted a swivel-gun, while on either side of each tower a howitzer was planted, as a flank defence. The martello towers are said to have been introduced from Italy, on whose Mediterranean coast, we are told, they had first been built for the purpose of defending the seaboard against the pirates who once infested those seas. It is even said that their name, “Torri di Martello,” derives from the warning to neighbouring villages sounded on the approach of a pirate ship by striking a bell with a hammer, in Italian martello; but another derivation is given from a circular fort on the seashore at Martella, in Corsica, reduced only after severe fighting in the time of Nelson.

At any rate, they do not deserve the ridicule that has been showered upon them, from the time of their building until the present day. They had never an opportunity of being put to the test, for Napoleon thought better of his projected invasion; but time has been on the side of these much-abused forts, for Lord Kitchener’s blockhouses on the African veldt, not altogether remotely resembling them, were largely instrumental in bringing the weary and inglorious great Boer War to a close.

The history of the martello towers during the last few years, forms an interesting footnote to Cobbett’s denunciations. Some, near Hythe, have been undermined and split in half by the sea, and others have been, at great labour and expense, demolished. Others yet have been let by the War Office at modest rentals to romantic people on the look out for something unconventional in the way of a seaside bungalow. Should any romantic reader of these pages desire to do the like, I have no doubt the War Office will be quite ready to let others of these forts that have never fought the foe. Indeed, now and again official advertisements may be seen, inviting tenders for renting some of them, for twelve months. The Department has by no means extravagant notions as to the value of them as “desirable residences,” and an offer of £4 or £5 is pretty sure to win acceptance. It is not an extravagant rental, but, on the other hand, there are obvious drawbacks from a residential point of view. It is not every one who would be content with a home that looks externally like a gigantic pork-pie and has the defects of possessing but three rooms, one on the ground-floor (originally intended for a powder-magazine) with no windows, and two above, dimly illuminated by loopholes in the walls. Indeed, in the winter months life in a martello tower must be almost as gloomy as in a prison. But summer, to be sure, brings compensations, for the interior is then apt to be delightfully cool, and the concreted roof, originally designed to hold a swivel-gun and other ordnance, forms an ideal platform for deck-chairs. Nor need this open-air life on the roof be at all exposed to the gaze of the public, for a four-foot parapet runs round, screening it from too great publicity.

We shall, however, better judge what Romney Marsh is like by mounting to the high lands that overlook it; that ridge which is crested picturesquely by Lympne Church and Castle on the right, marking the ancient coast line in the times of the Romans. What is now the Marsh was then a shallow lagoon where the Roman vessels rode at anchor; and to this day the remains of the Roman seaport of Portus Lemanis, called “Studfall Castle,” strew the tumbled grassy slopes beneath Lympne Castle, in fragments of massive masonry. It is an excessively steep climb, past Botolph’s Bridge, up to Lympne; that “Lymme Hill, or Lyme,” of which Camden wrote. He tells us, truly enough, that this “was sumtyme a famose haven, and good for shyppes that might come to the foot of the hille. The place is cawled Shipway or Old Haven. Farther, at thys daie the lord of the V ports kepeth his principal court a lytil by est from Lymme hill.”

The Court of Shepway, to which Camden thus alludes, was the chief legislative and executive body of the Cinque Ports. It made the laws governing that confederacy of ports, and pronounced decrees.

A subsidiary court of the Cinque Ports, inferior to the Court of Shepway, was in remote times held in the open air on Dymchurch beach. This was the “Court of Brodhull,” and was later removed to Romney.