Canterbury is a very dangerous town to drive through. Its streets are narrow and badly paved, and there are unexpected turnings which bring up a lump in one's throat when he is driving at his most careful gait and is suddenly confronted with a governess's cart full of children, a perambulator, and a bath-chair, all in the middle of the road, where, surely, the two latter have no right to be.
The grand old shrine of Thomas à Becket, the choir built by Lanfranc's monks, and the general ensemble of the cathedral close are worth all the risk one goes through to get to them. The cathedral impresses one as the most thoroughly French of all the Gothic churches of Britain, and because of this its rank is high among the ecclesiastical architectural treasures of the world. Its history is known to all who know that of England, of the church, and of architecture, and the edifice tells the story well.
The distant view from the road, as one approaches the city, is one that can only be described as grand. The fabric of the great cathedral, the rooftops of the houses, the sloping hills rising from the water's edge, and again falling lightly down to the town, form a grandly imposing view, the equal of which one seldom sees on the main travelled roads of England.
Between Canterbury and Winchester ran one of the oldest roads in England, the "Pilgrim's Way." Many parts of it still exist, and it is believed by many to be the oldest monument of human work in these islands. About two-thirds of the length of the road is known with certainty, and to some extent the old itinerary forms the modern highway. Its earliest route seems to have been from Stonehenge to Canterbury, but later the part from Stonehenge to Alton was abandoned in favour of that from Winchester to Alton. Guildford and Dorking were places that it touched, though it was impossible to say with certainty where it crossed the Medway.
Margate, Ramsgate, and the Isle of Thanet lay to the left of us, but we struck boldly across the downs to Dover's Bay, under the shadow of the Shakespeare Cliff, made famous in the scenic accessories of The Tempest.
Dover, seventy-two miles by road from London, has a good hotel, almost reaching the Continental standard, though it is not an automobile hotel and you must house your machine elsewhere. It is called the Lord Warden Hotel, and is just off the admiralty pier head. It suited us very well in spite of the fact that the old-school Englishman contemptuously refers to it as a place for brides and for seasick Frenchmen waiting the prospect of a fair crossing by the Calais packet.
The descent into Dover's lower town from the downs above is fraught with considerable danger for the automobilist. It is steep, winding, and narrow, and one climbs out of it again the next morning by an equally steep, though less narrow, road up over the Shakespeare Cliff and down again abruptly into Folkestone.
Dover is not fashionable as a resort, and its one pretentious sea-front hotel is not a lovely thing—most sea-front hotels are not. In spite of this there is vastly more of interest going on, with the coming and going of the great liners and the cross-channel boats of the harbour, than is to be found in a mere watering-place, where band concerts, parade-walks, "nigger minstrels," tea fights, and excursions in the neighbourhood are the chief attractions which are advertised, and are fondly believed by the authorities to be sufficient to draw the money-spending crowds.
Dover is a very interesting place; the Shakespeare Cliff dominates it on one side and the old castle ruin on the other, to-day as they did when the first of the Cinq-Ports held England's destiny in the hollow of her hand. Sir Walter Raleigh prayed his patron Elizabeth to strengthen her fortifications here and formulate plans for a great port. Much was done by her, but a fitting realization of Dover's importance as a deep-water port has only just come to pass, and then only because of a significant hint from the German emperor.
Shakespeare's, or Lear's, Cliff at Dover is one of the first things to which the transatlantic up-channel traveller's attention is called. Blind old Gloster has thus described it: