SHAKESPEARE’S CLIFF--SAMPHIRE--THE CHANNEL TUNNEL--COAL IN KENT--
THE WARREN
“Dost thou know Dover?” asks Gloucester, in the pitiful tragedy of
_King Lear_.
Aye; and knowing Dover, we cannot but be well acquainted with that--
“Cliff whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully in the confinèd deep.”
It is Shakespeare’s Cliff. “Here’s the place,” says Edgar.
“... Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire--dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice; and yon tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high.--I’ll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.”
[Illustration: SHAKESPEARE’S CLIFF.
_After W. Daniell, R.A._
]
The height of Shakespeare’s Cliff is said to be 365 feet; but it looks
more, owing to the grand outline it presents to the sea. It was once
much taller, but for centuries the waves have been nibbling at it. In
1847 some 48,000 tons of chalk fell, and numerous other falls have
taken place since.
Not even the ugly tunnel by which the South-Eastern Railway penetrates
it can spoil the majesty of Shakespeare’s Cliff, whose bastioned steeps
present so romantic a profile to the surges. It stands boldly out
before you, as you essay the toilsome cliff-walk, by way of Archcliff
Fort, to Folkestone.
Samphire, the gathering of which, as Shakespeare truly says, is a
“dreadful trade,” still grows plentifully here; and is also found
growing amid the shingle by Shoreham Harbour, near Brighton, well above
the reach of high water. It has been much esteemed from early times as
a pickle. Thus we find, in Gerald’s “Herbal,” of 1596, “Rock samphire
groweth on the rocky cliffs of Dover, Winchelsea, about Southampton,
and the Isle of Wight. The leaves, kept in pickle and eaten in salads,
with oil and vinegar, is a pleasant sauce for meat.”
This curious aromatic plant, with the fleshy, glaucous leaves and
yellow flowers, is not uncommon, but at the same time it is very
choice and selective in its habitat. Although to be found in the
crannies of coastwise cliffs, there are few among the great crowds of
holiday-makers by the sea, other than botanists, who have ever set
eyes upon it. Curiously enough, although it looks upon the sea from its
favourite spots, it will only grow in situations well out of the reach
of salt water.
Samphire is said to be “St. Peter’s plant,” and to derive its name from
“St. Pierre.” It is nowadays known in France as “Passe-Pierre,” or
“Christe marine,” and in Italy is called “Herba di San Pietro.”
Samphire-picking is carried on in May, when the leaves of the plant are
young and succulent. One must needs be young or active, and of a good
nerve, to be a samphire-picker, for it is generally only in the more
dangerous and inaccessible situations that it is to be found; and many
have in years gone by lost their lives in the “dreadful trade,” not in
these latter days so greatly followed, although, to be sure, bottles
of samphire pickle are to be purchased at Pegwell Bay. The samphire
nowadays more generally appeals to the collecting instincts of those
devastating persons, the amateur botanists, and enthusiasts in what is
known, in the latest fashion, as “Nature Study,” who are stripping the
country of all its ferns and desirable wild plants; and many must be
the narrow escapes every year of those who climb cliffs in search of it.
The “samphire pickle” sometimes to be bought is not always what it
pretends to be, for here, as so often elsewhere, adulteration’s artful
aid is called in, and the more plentiful and much more easily gathered
glass-wort, which grows on mud-flats, and greatly resembles samphire,
without its aromatic qualities, is bottled with vinegar, to the
deception of a trustful public.
The cliffs along the way to Folkestone are of quite extraordinary
interest, so numerous are the schemes and exploitations they display.
Here, looking over the edge, you see, on a scrap of foreshore where
the railway emerges from the tunnel, a siding with works of sorts and
a smoking chimney. This is the site, not only of the Channel Tunnel
works, but also of the Shakespeare Cliff Colliery.
The idea of a Channel Tunnel, under consideration so long ago as 1867,
was originally received with great favour in both France and England,
and an agreement upon the subject was arrived at in 1876, by which it
was to be begun simultaneously from either side.
It was, however, regarded as a commercial project and in no sense as
a Government undertaking, the respective Governments merely adopting
a benevolent attitude toward the scheme. Some years passed before the
Channel Tunnel Companies on either side commenced operations from
Dover and Sangatte. It was due to the energy of that arch-contriver,
Sir Edward Watkin, that the scheme at last took definite shape and was
translated into action. As chairman of what was then the Manchester,
Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Railway (now the Great Central) and of the
South-Eastern Railway, he was generally credited with a bold plan for
creating a through trunk line from Manchester to London and Dover,
and thence beneath the Channel and so on to France, without change
of carriage. Like many another Moses, he saw his Promised Land, but
could not enter upon it. He brought the old M. S. and L. to London and
lived to see it the “Great Central,” but his Channel Tunnel, begun
so bravely, was stopped by a nervous Government in 1886, when it had
progressed 5,500 feet. A like distance had been tunnelled from the
French coast.
It was an alarmist article in the _Nineteenth Century_ that spoiled
his pet scheme, and although Watkin on several occasions went to the
great trouble and expense--or perhaps it would be more correct to say,
saddled the South-Eastern Railway shareholders with a great expense--
of inviting parties of statesmen and influential personages to inspect
the works and to partake of costly luncheons on this spot, he never
gained any return for his outlay on chicken and champagne.
The plans for the Tunnel had originally provided for starting actually
from the Dover side of Shakespeare’s Cliff, instead of from the present
obscure situation; but the War Office insisted upon the change,
although it is the simplest proposition in strategy that the mouth of
the Tunnel, placed where at first intended, would have been easily
controlled by the Dover forts. The selected spot, supposing the work
ever to be completed, is far more capable of being used by an enemy,
being relatively away from observation and masked from gun-fire by the
intervening shoulders of the hills.
The plan for tunnelling the twenty-three miles was for parallel
tunnels, each carrying a single line. The original estimate was
£10,000,000, but the work, as it progressed through the chalk, proved
so easy that these figures were reduced to £4,000,000, largely because
it was found that the chalk was watertight and required no casing.
The abandoned works remain quite dry to this day. The scare, shared
though it was by Lord Wolseley and other eminent authorities, does not
seem very creditable, and there can be little doubt but that, sooner
or later, the Government bar upon the progress of the work will be
removed, and the Tunnel become an accomplished fact. Meanwhile the
Channel Tunnel Company continues to hold its annual meetings, and new
Parliamentary Bills are duly promoted. “Public sentiment has been
aroused against the Tunnel,” remarked the chairman recently, “and it
must abide its time and opportunity.”
From railway tunnelling to coal-mining the transition, for the scheming
brain of Sir Edward Watkin, was easy. An idea had long been current
that coal existed under the Kentish chalk. Geologists considered
that the French and Belgian coalfields naturally continued under the
Channel, and that borings would disclose coal-measures, probably at
considerable depths. Many borings were made at various places, among
others at a spot north of Battle, in Sussex, in 1872, where a depth of
1,905 feet was reached, without result.
[Illustration: SHAKESPEARE CLIFF COLLIERY, AND THE COAST TOWARDS
FOLKESTONE.]
The selection of Dover as a likely place was due to the stopping of the
Channel Tunnel works by the Government, in 1886, when the tunnelling
machinery was thrown idle and the employment of it in shaft-sinking
for coal on the same site was suggested. Coal-seeking was thereupon
begun, in spite of the already long-expressed opinion of Sir Roderick
Murchison, one of our most eminent geologists, that the existence of
any _productive_ coalfields in the south-eastern counties was in the
highest degree improbable. The results of some thirty years’ boring and
shaft-sinking at Dover seem to amply justify his view, for since March
1905, when a number of journalists were invited to inspect the works of
the Consolidated Kent Collieries Corporation, little has been heard of
coal at the Shakespeare Cliff shafts. On that memorable occasion the
chairman of the company pointed triumphantly to a small stack of what
undoubtedly was coal, and the journalists gazed, awe-stricken, upon the
sight. It was not coal that would commend itself to a householder, for
kitchen, or indeed any other use, being soft and easily to be crumbled
between thumb and finger. The heap weighed about twelve tons, and was
the sole result, to that date, from one and a half millions sterling
subscribed by the public to the successive companies seeking coal here.
It had thus cost £125,000 per ton; and, being so rare and costly, the
chairman was very properly indignant when it was proposed to burn
some. Since then; notably in 1912, other coal has been raised here and
has been triumphantly exhibited in Dover shop-windows; but, up to the
present, a very great deal more of that mineral has been expended upon
working the machinery of the shafts than has been brought up from them.
There is a vast deal of exhausting up-and-down walking along the
lofty cliff tops on the way from the Shakespeare Cliff Colliery to
Folkestone. The Dover to Folkestone road itself, running somewhat
inland, at first in the lap of these downs, climbs continually for more
than five miles, and is a profoundly wearisome highway. It is an effect
of vastness which obsesses the traveller here, and, where the road
leaves the sheltered, tree-clad hollow, one of stark and uncomfortable
surroundings; horribly bleak in winter, and hot enough to fry you in
summer. 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. The spot is known as Lydden Spout,
from a clear spring which used to gush from the chalk, and, later, was
made to issue from an iron pipe. It spouts no longer; but this is still
a place worth all the trouble of getting at. Gulls down here, screaming
and chorusing like so many party politicians (but much more sincere),
take little notice of the rare stranger. If you like, you can walk
back along the beach, all the way to the Colliery. Which is the more
exhausting, the shingle walk, or remounting those more than 500 steps,
I will not pretend to say.
The pedestrian’s way into Folkestone lies along the Warren, that
ancient, tumbled expanse of wild undercliff, two miles long, which
you see spread out before you on reaching the “Royal Oak” inn, by the
roadside. Resisting the hospitalities of the tankards held out by
the beery votaries of the wayside public, let us descend through the
Warren into the town. On the way down we shall pass by the gorsy hollow
called “Steddy Hole,” a spot of horrific interest a good many years
ago, for here, in the Crimean War period, August 1856, a soldier of the
Foreign Legion, one Dedea Redanes, a Neapolitan, murdered “sweet Maria
and lovely Caroline,” as a stone formerly to be seen here described
them: two sisters, Caroline and Maria Buck. He was duly executed at
Maidstone. The stone is no longer to be seen, and the tragic hollow to
such a degree been forgotten that on summer days happy lovers may be
found in the ill-omened spot, unconscious of its tragedy.
There is a large area of Warren, appearing the larger by reason of its
tumbled nature. The South-Eastern Railway runs through its midst, and
the two most easterly of the old martello towers on the Kentish coast
stand on guard, aloof, grim, grey, and solitary, with all Folkestone
for a background. The Warren is full of wild life, and is thus the very
antithesis of Folkestone’s stuccoesque conventions. I believe, on the
authority of the late Rev. J. G. Wood, that the “rare earwig, _Labidura
riparia_,” is to be found here. The information came to him by way of a
courageous lady who, wandering over these hummocky hollows, discovered
the fearsome thing roaming about in happy ignorance of its Latin
name or its exceeding rarity, and, with a courage beyond her sex in
dealing with creeping objects, captured it and sent it to that eminent
naturalist.