WALMER CASTLE--KINGSDOWN--ST. MARGARET’S BAY
The low, beachy shore of Deal continues westward through Lower Walmer,
the chief part of Walmer lying inland where the road begins to take its
rise towards the high rolling downs which fill the miles on to Dover.
The beach road runs on for two miles and a half, past Walmer Castle to
Kingsdown, where it abruptly ends.
The historic part of Walmer Castle, which is now under the direct
control of His Majesty’s Office of Works, may be inspected for the
modest fee of threepence, at times when the Lord Warden is not in
residence. The plainly furnished little bedroom in which the great
Duke of Wellington died in 1852, and the room where Pitt and Nelson
planned those naval operations which put an end to Napoleon’s designs
upon this coast, are shown. The approach is imposing, the entrance
by a bridge across the deep, dry moat made more picturesque by the
early eighteenth-century additions of a bell-cupola and an oriel
window above the gateway. Some of the ivy which too thickly covered
the fine old stonework has now been removed. It has never been the
fate of Walmer Castle to fight the enemy, and its castellans for a
hundred years past have been those ornamental officials, the Lords
Warden, who have no duties and receive no emoluments. Thus, as a
residence, it has received certain accretions which rather lessen its
character as a stern, business-like fortress; although, to be sure, the
ingenious planning of the interior, with its massive brick passages and
unexpected turns, would result in any enemy who succeeded in entering
at once losing his way. It is very curious to note, in the construction
of this sixteenth-century castle, the survival of mediæval ideas,
with a difference. Thus, while ancient Gothic castles had projecting
machicolations over the exterior of their gates whence melted lead,
boiling oil, and such-like deterrents could be poured upon the enemy,
here are great holes overhead, _within_ the entrance, for the same
purpose; an exquisite refinement upon the original idea, which was
merely to check the enemy and persuade him to retire. Here you first
caught the enterprising foe, and, having got him within one of the
artfully contrived bastions, you simply overwhelmed him at leisure.
[Illustration: WALMER CASTLE.]
Among the greatest of the Lords Warden was William Pitt, who was here
throughout the Napoleonic scare. The beautiful wooded park owes much of
its charm to his niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, who kept house for her
bachelor uncle, and in particular planted the fine Portugal laurels
which are among its chief ornaments. Pitt’s own avenue of sycamores
has grown to great nobility. Cobbett, who could pen the most wonderful
descriptions of scenery and the most virulent personal abuse, describes
in one of his “Rural Rides” how he came from Dover to Walmer and Deal,
and handles Pitt pretty severely on the way. “I got to this place
(Deal) about half an hour after the ringing of the eight o’clock bell,
or curfew, which I heard at about two miles’ distance from the place.”
This was the curfew, still rung nightly from the Norman church-tower
of St. Margaret-at-Cliffe. From the town of Dover you come up the
Castle Hill, and have a most beautiful view from the top of it. You
have the sea, the chalk cliffs of Calais, the high land at Boulogne,
the town of Dover just under you, the valley towards Folkestone and
the much more beautiful valley towards Canterbury; and, going on a
little farther, you have the Downs in full view, with a most beautiful
corn country to ride along through. The corn was chiefly cut between
Walmer and Dover. The barley almost all cut and tied up in sheaf.
Nothing but the beans seemed to remain standing along here. They are
not quite so good as the rest of the corn, but they are by no means
bad. When I came to the village of Walmer, I inquired for the Castle--
that famous place, where Pitt, Dundas, Perceval, and all the whole
tribe of plotters against the French Revolution had carried on their
plots. After coming through the village of Walmer, you see the entrance
to the Castle away to the right. It is situated pretty nearly on the
water’s edge, and at the bottom of a little dell, about a furlong or
so from the turnpike-road. This is now the habitation of our great
Minister, Robert Bankes Jenkinson, son of Charles of that name. When
I was told by a girl who was leasing in a field by the roadside that
that was Walmer Castle, I stopped short, pulled my horse round, looked
steadfastly at the gateway, and could not help exclaiming, ‘O! thou who
inhabitest that famous dwelling! thou who hast always been in place,
let who might be out of place! O thou everlasting placeman! thou sage
of “over-production,” do but cast thine eyes upon this barleyfield’--
and so forth.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO WALMER CASTLE.]
Onward from Walmer Castle, along the beach to the “Ville and Hamlet
of Kingsdown,” we come at length to the end of the coastwise road.
Kingsdown is a fishing village on a very wide bank of shingle-beach,
with scattered shanties built on it, and old windlasses and a very
abandon of quaint seashore properties. It is perhaps possible at low
tide to scramble along under the lofty cliffs all the three miles or
less to St. Margaret’s Bay but it is dangerous, and there is no means
of climbing its cliffs. Old people still talk of a road that once ran
all the way; but encroachment of the sea has long destroyed it.
It is therefore necessary to climb the exceedingly steep and very
pretty leafy lane from Kingsdown to the high road and the grim bare
downs. Against the sky, as you proceed, is the tower of Ringwould
church, crested with its Dutch-like cupola. Looking backwards you see,
peering over the verge of the naked fields, the little bell-turret of
Kingsdown church, seeming pitiably insignificant; the church so small,
the sea out beyond so immeasurable, and such an aching void.
Passing the beautiful woods of Oxney Court, in a sharp dip of the road,
and coming up to the cross roads called “Martin Cross,” the village of
St. Margaret-at-Cliffe is one mile to the left. It has a particularly
fine Norman church with lofty interior and an enriched western doorway.
Here the curfew-bell is still rung in the winter months; but this is
not the genuine curfew of Norman times; dating only from 1696, when
the income from five roods of land was bequeathed by a shepherd for
this purpose. By the chance ringing of this bell he had been saved from
walking over the cliff in the dark.
[Illustration: WALMER CASTLE, FROM THE SEA.]
From this windy cliff-top village of St. Margaret-at-Cliffe whose
inhabitants appear to live by selling picture-postcards to the stranger
and each other, an amazingly steep road zigzags down four hundred feet
through the chalk and flint to the beach of St. Margaret’s Bay. I envy
the explorer his first discovery of this exquisite little spot, that
rare, nay, almost phenomenal thing along the crowded, over-exploited
coast of Kent--a sequestered and little-known place! Well do I
remember my own first discovery of it; the more delightful inasmuch
it was unexpected. This is the purest joy of journeying without a
guide-book: that you have no certain expectations, and commit yourself
in a complete ignorance to absolute chance. Every explorer knows that
it is sometimes the most joyous thing to wend your way uninformed
beforehand, without map or description. On the other hand, to fare in
this fashion may bring you the most harrowing adventures. Try it both
ways, and see what fortune sends you!
[Illustration: ST. MARGARET’S BAY.]
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. If you glance at the map, it will be noticed that the coastline
at this spot exhibits the merest setback from the bold front between
Deal and Dover; and a bay (this is a dim memory from school-days)
should be something in the nature of a semicircle, large or small,
should it not, with enfolding horns, capes, or headlands? To the
ordinary observer, this so-called bay appears to be just about a
half-mile length of narrow shingly foreshore along a stretch of coast
where the cliffs for the most part descend precipitously to the sea
at high water; and at either end of this unusual selvedge here it is
either impossible to proceed further, or else the doing so is a more
or less difficult and dangerous matter. Hence the seclusion of St.
Margaret’s Bay; which, however, if plans and schemes of the last few
years come to pass, will at no distant date be exchanged, in certain
foreshore reclamation works, for a three-miles undercliff drive from
Dover. Woe the day!
I do not mean to hint, even remotely, that because St. Margaret’s Bay
does not figure forth the typical bay of a geographical primer, it is
any the worse for it. Not at all; perhaps, I am willing to allow, it
is even the better. At any rate, it is entirely delightful as it is.
And what, in detail, is it? Let it first be premised that no one has
ever yet succeeded in conveying the subtle charm of the place. It is
easy enough to describe the surroundings; the South Foreland above,
the little beach below, with its modest selvedge of grass; the cosy,
home-like hotel, the little “Green Man” inn, and the scattered twenty
or so little houses; but the spirit of the place is elusive and refuses
to be captured and written down and printed.
St. Margaret’s Bay claims much: “the air of Margate and the sun of
Torquay, the position of Ramsgate and the quiet of Ventnor,” and I
think all these varied charms may well be conceded. Certainly it is
quiet, and surely it is warm, sheltered, and sunny.
Wild-flowers grow in abundance down here, amid what may at first sight
seem the sterile chalk: St. John’s Wort, feather-grass, convolvulus,
scarlet poppies, hare-bells, the lovely borage, an exquisite blue, the
speedwell, a lighter blue, hawkweed, and many others.
The place is recommended as “a quiet retreat for tired brain-workers,”
and certainly there is nothing here to disturb or startle. Those who
want to be amused--that great desideratum of the brainless and the
uncultivated--will not come to St. Margaret’s Bay, or, if by any
chance they do so, they speedily climb out of it again; that is to say,
as speedily as the extravagantly steep road permits; but to those who
have resources within themselves this untroubled strand has an enduring
charm. I do not think a motor-car has ever been down here, which is so
much to the good; plenty of them fuss and stink along the road above.
No parade, or esplanade, or such formality affronts the dignity of the
sea here, and although the more or less interesting fact may be gleaned
that the London and Paris telephone-cable, completed in March 1891,
lands here from Sangatte, on the French coast, one might well go in
ignorance of it, so far as any visible evidence goes.
One simply idles here, and reads and rests those tired brains--if one
is happy enough to possess any. Almost unconsciously, like Mr. Silas
Wegg, the idler drops into poetry:
“Here spreads a little sheltered bay,
Beneath the tall and windy downs,
All undisturbed by nigger lay;
Far from the clustered seaside towns.
“Here haply by the world forgot
I linger on the pebbly beach,
And seat me where the sun is hot,
And colour like the ripening peach.
“Here workers come to rest their brains,
O’erwrought in search of fame and pelf--
And so would I, to ease such strains,
Did I possess some brains myself.”
They have a saying down here in St. Margaret’s Bay that “the Channel
is as well lighted as Regent Street,” and it is indeed on some dark
evening a striking and a beautiful sight to gaze out across these
waters upon the many lights flashing and sparkling out there; including
not only those of the lightships and the lighthouses, but the lights
of Ramsgate eleven miles away, twinkling quietly, the riding-lights of
vessels at anchor in the Downs, and the brilliant illumination of some
great liner surging past.
Beyond the clustered lamps of Ramsgate flashes the occulting North
Foreland light; and out to sea the position of the Goodwin Sands is
marked by the Gull Lightship, with its recurrent flash every twenty
seconds; the North Goodwin Lightship, with three flashes in quick
succession; the brilliant South Goodwin, with its double flash every
thirty seconds; the South Sand, visible ten miles; the East Goodwin,
easily distinguished from its fellows by flashing a green light every
fifteen seconds; and the Varne Lightship, far away in the south-west,
a crimson flash. To these add the electric beam of the South Foreland
lighthouse overhead, the distant radiance of Dover town; the similar
every five seconds’ flash of Cape Gris Nez and the more frequent gleam
of Calais Harbour, and you have an extraordinary galaxy, not easily to
be matched elsewhere.
[Illustration: WESTCLIFFE.]
The South Foreland lighthouse has always been used more or less
experimentally. Here magnifying lenses were first installed, in 1810,
and here Faraday, in 1853, experimented with the electric light. In
1862 lime-light was tried. It now displays from its height above the
sea of 374 feet a powerful electric occulting beam distinguishable at a
distance of twenty-six miles. The lower lighthouse, used in conjunction
with the upper light before the installation of the present brilliant
flash, was discontinued in 1905, and the building has since been let
as a private residence.
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.