252 THE DOVER ROAD 



survival of six hundred years of strife and change, is 

 being very slowly but very surely undermined. And 

 thus it goes round our coasts ; turn away the currents 

 that eat up particular strips of the land or choke up the 

 havens with sea-drift, and they set with additional fury 

 upon the next unprotected place, presently to be, at 

 great cost, referred elsewhere. It is a game that never 

 ends : a game of General Post of which the sea, at 

 least, never tires. 



XLIII 



Dover Castle possesses the longest and most 

 continuous, if not quite the most stirring, military 

 history of any fortress within these narrow seas. 

 Described picturesquely by ancient chroniclers as " the 

 very front door of England," or, as " clavis Anglise 

 et repagulum," it is, and in very truth has ever been, 

 since its foundation, the main bulwark of Britain 

 against foreign foes. At what precise period a Castle 

 was first raised here is a question that has never yet 

 and probably never will be settled. The Romans 

 built their lighthouse here, with another on the 

 topmost point of the Western Heights, but the first 

 Castle is not supposed to have been built before the 

 time of Edward the Confessor, and the first reference 

 to it is found in that oath which Harold swore to the 

 Duke of Normandy, that he would yield up to him 

 both the fortress and the well which was contained in 

 " castellum Dofris.'^ Of this building nothing now 

 appears to be left, and the earliest portion of the 

 present Castle is Henry the Second's Keej). 



But whatever the size and strength of the Castle 

 that stood here in Harold's day, it would seem to 

 have been formidable enough to induce William the 

 Conqueror to seek a landing elsewhere. He landed 

 at Pevensey, and it was not until after Hastings and 

 the fall of Romney that he turned and took Dover from 



