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.

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.

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.

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!

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:

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.

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.