Charles G. Harper

“ Undoubtedly the noblest and most fitting introduction is to proceed down river by steamer to Greenwich, for that way you perceive the greatness of the Port of London, and the majesty of the commercial and maritime interests of the capital; while to come “overland”—thus to dignify the approach by mean streets through Bermondsey and Rotherhithe—is an effect of squalor.
Deptford of to-day is an integral part of London. Not an ornamental part; indeed, no. Rather an industrial and wage-earning place. One does not “reside” at Deptford, and there are not a few who find it difficult even to live. ”

“ Here, too, you see hop-gardens; looking more than a little bare in spring, but with plenty of work going on, chiefly in trimming and tarring the ends of the new ash-poles that are to be planted, thick as forests, for the hop-bines to grow upon. Here and there are the hutches in which the hop-pickers will live in August, and now and again you see an oast-house; the old buildings with their quaint outlines, the new apt to be eye-sorrows for angularity and sheer commonplace ugliness. ”

“ Such men as these were the ancestors of the Deal boatmen of to-day; a race now very much down on its luck. The very town of Deal, one may almost say, is a survival. The causes that conjured it up, or at any rate, brought about its growth from a mere village, along the unprotected stark shingle beach, have ceased to operate, and great ships no longer sit for weeks in the Downs, awaiting a breeze, or in any numbers ride out storms in that once providential anchorage, all immensely to the profit of the purveyors of ships’ stores and to that of the boatmen. ”

“ Immediately at the end of the next hamlet, Court-at-Street, a steep, rough lane deeply sunk between rugged banks and overhung with trees leads down to the Marsh, or rather, to a little plateau or undercliff looking upon it. It is a beautiful view you get hence, a variant of other beautiful glimpses on the way from Lympne to Appledore, taking in the flat Marsh and the Royal Military Canal and the long sweep of coast curving to Dungeness. But something other than a mere view-point makes the spot interesting. It is a little building, roofless and otherwise in ruins, that stands there ”

“ We ought to be, for our situation is delightful, our air is delicious, and our breezy hills and downs, carpeted with wild thyme, and decorated with millions of wild-flowers, are, on the faith of a pedestrian, perfect. In New Pavilionstone we are a little too much addicted to small windows, with more bricks in them than glass, and we are not over-fanciful in the way of decorative architecture, and we get unexpected sea-views through cracks in the street doors ”

“ PEGWELL BAY—EBBSFLEET—THE LANDINGS OF HENGIST AND OF ST. AUGUSTINE—RICHBOROUGH But to have done with Ramsgate. We may perhaps explore to the very end of the West Cliff, where rows of great ugly houses look out seaward from that height, and where the bastioned cliffs crumble and are cobbled horribly with brick and plaster. But one gets no joy of those grim grey buttresses that front the waves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet Deptford’s old naval history and ship-yard associations give it a salt-water flavour, and so we must needs say that the coast begins there. True, it is but the Thames whose murky waters lap the shore at Deptford; but the Thames here is the great commercial “London River,” as seamen call it, the port to which resorts a goodly proportion of the world’s shipping; and sea-going vessels crowd the fairway at all hours of day and night. ”

“ SANDWICH Approaching Sandwich, whose towers and roof-tops rise picturesquely ahead from the level marshes, mingled with the masts and spars of a few vessels lying at the town quays, a belt of spindly trees is passed, stretching away to the left. They are trees of a considerable height and size, but they wear an ill-nourished appearance, as they cannot fail to do when we consider how poor the soil on which they grow. It is, in fact, nothing but sand and pebbles. One solitary residence, Stonar House, stands amid these weird woods. ”

“ There is no appearance of any intention to annoy an enemy. It is a parcel of holes made in a hill, to hide Englishmen from Frenchmen. Just as if the Frenchmen would come to this hill! Just as if they would not go (if they came at all) and land in Romney Marsh, or on Pevensey Level, or anywhere else, rather than come to this hill;283 rather than come to crawl up Shakespeare’s Cliff. All the way along the coast, from this very hill to Portsmouth, or pretty nearly all the way, is a flat. ”

“ The old open stream which dashed down into the harbour has been piped; because, they say, its odour became too strong. That is as may be; but the remark is permissible that the super-smells of Folkestone Harbour at low-water outclass anything possible in streams. Still, enough remains of Old Folkestone to show the inquisitive stranger what the old-time fishermen’s and smugglers’ haunts were like. No one is in the least inquisitive about the new town, because it displays itself most prominently to the view, hiding nothing. ”

“ Therefore, a ship in difficulties is a godsend that is worth a good deal of cruising for, and worth a good deal of hardship endured and bitter disappointments suffered. But when that ship is picked up there are no more savage and determined men to be found than these. They are embittered by much fruitless quartering of violent seas, and spurred by the thought of weeks of enforced idleness ashore, and by the spectre of empty cupboards at home. A shipmaster in peril out there is their legitimate prey, and they bear down upon him out of the driving spindrift as saviours, at a price. ”

“ Every man should be his own discoverer. It matters nothing to me that numerous others must either intentionally or by chance have come down here into St. Margaret’s Bay—seeing that there is an hotel on the beach: an hotel with a singular name, whose meaning, although I have stayed there myself, I by no means fathomed. It is called the “St. Margaret’s Bay and Hotel Lanzarote.”
There is not, I think, so much actually of a bay down here below the towering cliffs of the South Foreland, which rise to a height of 500 feet. ”

“ The explorer who pushes manfully into these sandy wastes will scarce find that they repay him for his trouble and fatigue. A squalor pervades them, in addition to their essential melancholy; and when a kind of golf club-house has been passed and you come upon a small stone with a barely decipherable inscription, set upon a bank that marks where the sands and the marshes begin, and are told that it marks the site of a murder done there, long ago, you feel it to be a fitting place for such a deed. ”

“ I do not think any stranger has ever been known to find his way through Sandwich without making one or two false turns, for its streets are winding and deceptive. The houses of the middle ages are not represented in them at all, and it is a sixteenth and seventeenth-century Sandwich you see, not the mediæval port. It is, in general, a Dutch effect, as if those settlers under Elizabeth had imported their views upon domestic architecture and had successfully imposed them upon the town. ”

“ Such are at those times the men you will see lounging the summer days on Deal beach and suggesting to visitors that it is a “fine day for a sail.” It looks a lazy life, this lounging, with hands in pockets, day after day, varied by an occasional turn with the tar-brush or paint-pot upon boat or timbered shanty; but it is really a life of one long waiting for something to turn up, and there is nothing else for it but to lounge hands in pockets. And to do the Deal boatmen the merest justice, they lounge extremely well. ”

“ The castle is a rambling, grey-walled fortress with a series of rugged, cylindrical towers facing the waters of the Medway and looking over to the Chatham Dockyard Extension. Upnor was built in the time of Queen Elizabeth, as a defence of Chatham and Rochester, and seems to have justified itself in the reign of Charles the Second, during that inglorious war of 1667, when the insolent Dutch with sixty vessels took the fort at Sheerness, sailed up the Medway, burning and destroying, and later ascending the Thames to Tilbury Fort, humbled the ancient pride of the Mistress of the Seas. ”

“ It is exquisitely true that other people’s misfortunes are their opportunity, and a ship likely without the aid of their expert knowledge of these waters to come to grief on the Goodwins, or other shoals, to say nothing of getting under the unkindly cliffs, is like a choice bone to a hungry dog. ”

“ Of the sea one observes nothing until the grassy embankment is climbed, hard by the “Old Sportsman” inn that stands sheltered under the lee of it, but from the top is seen the entrance of the Swale, dotted with many small vessels, with Sheppey about three miles across the channel and the pink-washed houses of the coastguard shining out yonder on Shellness Point. ”

“ To a landsman, the launching of one of these heavy, lug-sailed, undecked boats off such a beach as this, in a raging surf such as these shores alone can know in time of storm, is a marvel. The breakers are coming in snarling and screaming, in cruel, curving walls of water from whose crests the wind whips off the stinging brine that flies through the hurrying air in particles half in the likeness of sleet and half in that of fog. ”

“ In the marshes of Seasalter the hedgerows die away, leaving the flat road open and unfenced and bordered by watery dykes, in which last year’s reeds, rubbing together in the wind, keep up a rustling murmur, looking sere and wan until with the coming of June they are replaced by newer growths. The dykes quarter the marshes in all directions, and keep the pastures efficiently drained, but the sight of men busily engaged in digging thick slab-mud from them proves that they require constant care. ”

“ DEPTFORD AND PETER THE GREAT The seaboard of Kent, and indeed the south coast of England in general, is no little-known margin of our shores. It is not in the least unspotted from the world, or solitary. It lies too near London for that, and began to be exploited more than a hundred and fifty years ago, when seaside holidays were first invented. ”

“ He saw only the beginnings of the lordly and exclusive pleasure-resort on the lofty cliff-tops, one hundred and twenty feet above the sea; and the people who made holiday at Folkestone in his time were frankly people who “went to the seaside” and descended to the beach, and sometimes even paddled in the sea, and did the like undignified things. Now the Folkestone that in these times centres upon the Leas does nothing of this sort. It notices sometimes that the sea does, in fact, incidentally stretch away out and down there, and it knows—ah, yes—that there is a harbour. ”

“ Standing here, on the insignificant little bridge that now spans the shrunken Wantsum which in times gone by spread where the grass now grows and the cows graze, it is difficult to realise those mediæval days when Sarre was a favourite port of embarkation for France. ”

“ But at a point a mile and a half along the cliffs’ edge, where they rise to a great height beside a coastguard-station, the explorer on foot may, at the cost of another considerable output of exertion, descend to the beach in a very fine, romantic, and absolutely secluded nook. Rarely will you find any one down here: the spot is too little known, and the effort of descending and climbing up again is too great. No fewer than 530 steps lead, roughly, and with many zigzags, down the face of the cliffs to the beach. ”

“ It is fitting in the completest degree that Dover should have figured in the quarrel that sent the patriot Englishman Earl Godwin, into revolt and exile. The true story of Godwin and his stand for the rights and liberties of Englishmen is well known to history, but it has never been made sufficiently intimate, and the memory of that great man, blackened by lying Norman monks, suffers to this day. The fame of the weak and alien-loving King Edward the Confessor, has, on the other hand, been well cared for, and he has long been regarded as a saint. ”

“ That is to say, here are cliffs; and there, ahead, is an illimitable horizon; also indubitable sands. It is true they are not cliffs on the heroic scale, these chalky bastions. They begin at Birchington and are continued round to Westgate, Margate, and Ramsgate, with a toylike, artificial effect; rather, you know, as if some enterprising Earl’s Court exhibition syndicate143 had erected them. They are strangely unconvincing to those who have been used to the great red cliffs of Devon, or the mighty granite heights of Cornwall. ”

“ The flimsy old stone and black-flint archway is liberally cobbled with brick, and valerian and grasses grow on its mouldering walls.
Down along the jetty Broadstairs looks its best. Here is the “Tartar Frigate” inn, flint-faced, and here, too, the lifeboat-house, with the Mary Barton lifeboat, presented in 1897, whose chief exploit was the saving of ninety-three lives on July 14th, 1911. So, you see, Broadstairs knows something else beside holiday sunshine and calm days. The old figurehead of a Highlander here, built on to the side of a sail-loft, hints as much. ”

“ They have nothing in the nature of a shop, and thus the “General Stores” at Lower Stoke fulfils the enviable position of a central emporium. At Lower Stoke, turning left, we come along a marsh road, bordered with deep ditches, across a narrow bridge, into the Isle of Grain, with the railway to Port Victoria running companionably alongside. Port Victoria is glimpsed a mile or so away on the right: all you see of it, across the marshes, being the big funnels of the steamships, some huge oil-tanks, and the great lonely bulk of an hotel. ”

“ There are more imposing coastwise walks than this: there cannot well be many duller. Imagine the dun-coloured waters of the Swale, bordered all the way by a continuous grassy embankment, raised to protect the land from being drowned; and further imagine this protective bank carefully winding along the configuration of the shore, so that you progress with painful slowness: there you have the route from Shellness to Harty.
Harty consists of a solitary farm, close by the little church. There is no village, and almost the only other house is the “Ferry Inn” by the waterside, half a mile away. ”

“ But where the chalk begins at Westgate, and the sea, ceasing from washing the clay and receiving the contaminations of the Thames and Medway, becomes more cleanly, the coast, grows by degrees more striking.
As for the history that lies in the landings and embarkations, all along the coast of Kent, why, there was never such another coast as these storied shores. The fame of them begins at Gravesend, to which those foreigners who did not by any chance land at Dover generally came in the dangerous old days of the road between Dover and London. ”

“ Down below it, indeed, and in direct communication, is the railway station, on the sands, beneath the cliffs. There is a forthright, downright manner about the railway company which rather challenges admiration, even if the slowness and unpunctuality of its trains and the filthiness of its carriages evoke our disgust. The Company seems to say, “You want to go to the seaside at Ramsgate?” ”

“ Personally, I am much more impressed with the curious old market, and with its fine display of flowers, fruit, and vegetables. The market, and (one must not forget these) the extraordinary number of public-houses facing the harbour, are sufficient to attract even the most casual notice. I knew a person with a bent for philosophical inquiry who was greatly struck by never seeing any one enter these places of refreshment. He commented upon this curious fact to one of those broad-beamed fishermen which only the coast of Kent seems able to produce. ”