Dower

“ There is no more impressive view in England than that from the Castle Hill of Dover, with the green fields and white chalk headlands stretching far away on either hand fringed by the breakers, the hills and harbors faintly seen across the strait in France, and the busy town of Dover lying at the foot of the cliff. This is half watering-place and half port of transit to the opposite coast. Its harbor is almost entirely artificial, and there has been much difficulty in keeping it open. ”

“ When one is snugly inside the breakwater, things begin to assume greater distinctness. There is the Castle and pharos still, but in the serried rows of houses, the Marine Parade along the front, the pier on which are numerous trains made or in the process of making up, and the air of bustle, one begins to realize that Dover’s greatness has not entirely departed, and that one has come to a prosperous and not a decaying port, a lively garrison town, a naval depôt of consequence, a commercial centre for miles round, and a popular holiday resort. ”

“ Placed at a sufficient elevation to enable him to embrace a wide extent of land and water, he is still sufficiently near the town to secure that distinctness of detail which adds so much to the effect of a landscape. One of the chief points of attraction in Dover must always be the Castle, but as we shall have another opportunity of referring to that structure, in connection with our view of Dover from the Beach, we purpose now to devote our attention to the town itself. ”

“ While the harbours, piers, and the fortresses were rising at Dover, an ancient hermit tottered night after night from his cell to a chapel on the cliff, and the tapers on the altar, before which he knelt in his lonely orisons, made a familiar beacon far over the rolling waters. The men of the rising world cared little for the sentiment of the past. ”

“ It is not sufficient to be floored with such heavy slabs of historical information as those by which we learn that the name of Dover has been arrived at through a long series of British, Roman, and Saxon forms, originating from the little stream called anciently the Dour, that flowed, once upon a time, through the chalk valley of Temple Ewell and Buckland, tinkling cheerfully through the old town and falling into the waves over the pebbles of Dover beach ”

“ Dover is in the county of Kent, and lies about seventy-two miles south-south-east of London. The town is situated in a valley, having on one side the cliffs on which Dover Castle is built, and on the other the eminence called the Heights; these are strongly fortified, and form the principal defence of the town and harbour. The greater part of the town lies on the western side of a small stream, called the Dour, which there discharges itself into the sea. The view in the Engraving is taken from the beach, on the eastern side of the harbour, looking towards the north-east. ”

“ It seems, then, that when Cæsar came off here, the site upon which almost half the present town of Dover is built was under water. The peculiar site of Dover can perhaps most readily be noted by one who climbs the bare chalk hills that bear on their summits the defences known as the Western Heights. Keeping to rearward of the Citadel, and walking round the shoulders of these hills, one sees that a deep and narrow valley runs down to the sea-beach, contracting almost to the likeness of a narrow gorge where the old town commences, and widening again where it meets the sea. ”

“ It is high water at Dover pier at sixteen minutes past eleven on the full and change of the moon; and the rise of the water at spring-tides is about twenty feet. Dover is much frequented in summer as a watering-place; and for the convenience which it affords, and the beautiful and interesting scenery in its neighbourhood, it is surpassed by no other town on the coast.
At a short distance from the entrance to Dover Castle is mounted the long brass gun, usually called Queen Elizabeth's pocket-pistol, which was presented to her Majesty by the United Provinces. ”

“ Dover, Tuesday, July 11th.—We walked to the Castle before breakfast. The building, when you are [Pg 164] close to it, appears even sublime, from its immense height and bulk; but it is not rich or beautiful in architecture. The old warder stood in waiting upon the hill to lead us forward. After ascending above a hundred stone steps, we were greeted by the slender tinkling of a bell, a delicately wild sound in that place. It is fixed at the top of a pillar, on which is inscribed a poetical petition in behalf of the prisoners confined above in the Castle. ”

“ Two entrances, one 800 ft. and the other 600 ft. in width, with a depth of about seven fathoms at low water, are situated at either end of the detached breakwater. The plan also included the reclamation of the foreshore at the foot of the cliffs, between the castle jetty and the root of the eastern breakwater, by means of a massive sea-wall. The construction of three powerful forts was undertaken in defence of the harbour, which was opened in 1909.
Besides the mail service and harbour trade, Dover has a trade in shipbuilding, timber, rope and sail making, and ships’ stores. ”

“ Dover Castle is in most respects, with its pierced and honeycombed cliffs, an up-to-date fortress, but it was realised over a hundred years280 ago that the corresponding cliffs on the other side of the town required to be fortified; and thus the gun-galleries, the barracks, and the many military developments of the “Western Heights” came into being. One reaches these lofty altitudes most conveniently, but up infinite staircases, by that extremely dirty and dismal specimen of engineering skill, “the Shaft,” in Snargate Street. ”

“ The road now grows suburban to Dover, and the valley commences to open out toward the sea. Where the Dour flows, all the vegetation is luxuriant, and there are lovely ponds decked with water-lilies beside the Crabble meadows, below the highway to the right and near the prettily named village of River; but as the hills rise on either hand they grow barren again and stretch for miles right and left. ”

“ Dover is an horrible place—a nest of fishermen and smugglers: a noble beach is hampered by rope-works, and all the filth attendant upon them. I never saw an excellent and beautiful natural situation so miserably spoilt. ”

“ Many were doubly eager to quit a nook of ground now become their prison, which appeared unable to resist the inroads of ocean's giant waves.
When we arrived at Dover, after a fatiguing day's journey, we all required rest and sleep; but the scene acting around us soon drove away such ideas. We were drawn, along with the greater part of our companions, to the edge of the cliff, there to listen to and make a thousand conjectures. A fog narrowed our horizon to about a quarter of a mile, and the misty veil, cold and dense, enveloped sky and sea in equal obscurity. ”

“ Shut your eyes to the big cliff and its imposing fortress, forget the harbor with its ships and men of war, quit observing the narrow streets and crooked lanes which run up and down the side of the hill, and live with the people that Dickens made so real that to most of us they surely existed. That is Dover, a different Dover from the red-coated, fish-smelling, quaintly architectured place in which people are buying and selling, and a Dover which will live as long as the English language is read. ”

“ The rock is throughout chalk, containing flint. These flints are much employed in paving roads and streets, to the great injury of the hoofs of horses; some houses in Dover are also built of them. We turned back again towards the corvette, highly gratified with our excursion. We saw two steam-boats arrive at Dover, one from Calais and the other from Boulogne. A water spout was pointed out to me at a distance. At one o’clock the wind began to blow fair, the anchor was weighed, and we stood onwards with fine weather, delighted with the continuous view of the English coast. ”

“ 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.
COLTON’S TOWER, DOVER CASTLE.
Dover Castle, that “great fortress, reverend and worshipful,” sits regally on the lofty cliffs and looks (what it has several times proved not to be) impregnable. ”

“ We are now again in the region of doves, whose presence in large numbers affects the architecture of the villages in a most curious manner. Every house has, or rather, is, a dovecot, the chief corps de bâtiment being a tower, or several towers, of which the whole upper part is exclusively affected to the doves. ”

“ They used to be quite a feature of the countryside. When you crossed our petrifying stream, for instance, you beheld a horde of them scattered over the slanting field below the road, and some were of prodigious size, bearing bushes and little trees on their backs. Not one of those is left; I know of only a single remaining block which is decorated with timber; you will never find it, though you may certainly pass a spot, not far from Jordan castle, where twenty-three can still be counted lying about—dwarfs, mostly, or half submerged in the earth. The peasant makes war on these things ”

“ Meanwhile, the hillside showed but few signs of life; the winds of heaven blew over it, the rains descended, or the sun shone. Birds hopped about, and people came and went. Often there was hardly a sound to break the silence of the hill. A visitor who had climbed the heights could gaze over the town of Dover and the hills and valleys behind it, or look right across the Channel to the coast of France, quite undisturbed by human voice or sound of busy life. ”

“ The upper part of the gate is a modern restoration in woodwork.
Sandwich originally possessed five gates, but those described are the only two which have survived.
Dover Castle.—For the last seven and a half centuries Dover Castle has been justly considered a fortress of paramount importance in the defence of England. Its site is remarkable for more than one reason. The steepness of the chalk cliffs towards the sea, and the abruptness of the other slopes, natural and artificial, which encircle it on the land side, give a peculiarly difficult, indeed, impregnable character to the fortress. ”

“ Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw.
Around were heaps of ruins piled between
The Burn o' Sorrow and the Water o' Care;
And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls
One pillar rose up dark against the moon. ”

“ Gower’s business—lies not [6] among the wharves, but across the river and beyond. If the wind lies in the east, you may set your nose toward it and sniff the air—is there not already a faint smell perceptible, a smell other than that of the salt water, a smell artificial and complex? As we cross the river it increases. We thread our way among the tug-boats, the scows, the flat-ended ferry-boats and other land-lubber craft ”

“ Possibly I had taken no step since I had been upon the moor which had not been observed and reported. Always there was this feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realised that one was indeed entangled in its meshes.
If there was one report there might be others, so I looked round the hut in search of them. ”

“ At last, one evening, as it grew dusk, and he was well-nigh spent, he saw the mouth of a great river, and steered the skiff in. What a difference between this river and the river of his vision! They were not the same, and yet they were. The waters and the shores of that river had shown no trace of man. No vessel had swum in that stream, no house or hut had stood upon its banks. The waters of this stream were crowded with craft of every size and build. The shores were lined with houses and wharfs, and stores of every height and kind. ”

“ It is a most interesting sight when it comes at last, and well repays the watching. The water is pouring through a five-foot break in the dam; the roof of a house is in ruins. You have rubbed yourself all over with fir boughs, to destroy some of the scent in your clothes, and hidden yourself in the top of a fallen tree. ”

“ The dove's hole, near the village of Cong, in the west of the county Mayo, is a deep cavity in the ground, and when a stone is thrown down into it you hear it rumbling and crashing from side to side of the rocky wall, as it descends, until the sound becomes too faint to hear. It is the very place to be connected with the marvellous. ”

“ As we ascend the valley, looking down into emerald green pools or wreaths of foam, we light on curious domed structures by the water. These are ancient mills, vaulted over with stone as a protection against floods that sometimes cover them many feet with rolling water, and in one place is a tower beside them up which the millers might fly for refuge when the torrent came rolling down unexpectedly. ”

“ There is a point on this road between Folkestone and Dover that on moonlit nights makes a picture after Barham's own heart. When the full moon comes sailing up over the Castle Hill and floods the chalky road with light, leaving the town of Dover lost in the darkling valley of the Dour and the downs behind etched in a profound blackness upon the luminous heavens, then you recall those [Pg 194] exquisite lines from the "Old Woman clothed in Grey":
Oh! ”