Dover's Immovable Object

For millennia, the Channel Coast has been the gateway to England for a host of seemingly irresistible enemies, and for centuries, Dover Castle has withstood the onslaught.

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by Jim Hargan

At its closest point, England lies only 17 miles from France. Nowadays this short distance separates two allies, but for most of the preceding 20 centuries the Straits of Dover represented an all-too-narrow moat on a hostile military frontier. In the past five centuries alone, England’s enemies have attempted cross-channel invasions on 12 different occasions and made serious preparations for at least nine more. Before then, Britain’s history is punctuated by a continual succession of invaders, raiders, and pirates attacking across the narrow straits, going back as far as the invasion of Julius Caesar in 55 BC.

And for as long as Britain’s enemies have set their sights on this coast, there have been fortifications at Dover designed to repel them. Dover is a natural harbour cut by the River Dour in the middle of a chalk cliff 13 miles long. In prehistoric times, Dover’s Celtic inhabitants crowned the rugged hill on the north-east edge of the harbour with a large fort, encircling the entire hilltop with high earthen ramparts. Since then, the hilltop has been constantly fortified, with each age making its own contributions to a vast and astonishing military site–Dover Castle.

Julius Caesar was the first invader to deal effectively with Dover’s intimidating fortifications; when he saw the hillfort protecting the harbour, he simply sailed on and landed seven miles to the north, having decided of Dover: ‘It was clearly no place to attempt a landing.’ Later, the Romans established one of their most important sea forts at Dover, flanking it with two tall pharos, or lighthouses. The Romans used their Dover fleet to control Saxon pirates, but after the Empire withdrew, the Saxon pirates became the Saxon invaders. They settled within the hillfort, prospering enough to eventually become a burgh, a fortified town. Around the year AD 1000 the Saxons built a beautiful church in their burgh, St. Mary-in-Castro, using the ruined pharos as its bell-tower. Both the church and its pharos-belltower still stand in the grounds of Dover Castle.

William the Conqueror built Dover’s first Norman castle, a small affair inside the burgh walls. Henry II, however, realized that this fortification wouldn’t stop a future invader any better than the hillfort had stopped Caesar, the Saxons, or William the Conqueror. A future invader, like these great invaders of the past, could simply land elsewhere and take Dover from the rear. Henry wanted a Dover Castle that was so vast and intimidating that it could deny its harbour indefinitely even to an enemy that surrounded it. To do this, Henry II planned a castle on a grand scale, so huge that he had to move the entire burgh of Dover to make way for it. On the old fortified hilltop Henry erected a giant keep, surrounded by two concentric curtain walls, each extraordinarily high and bristling with towers–an unchallengable fortress.

No one had ever built a castle like this before. Archers on the tall outer wall’s 30 towers could rake the entire wall’s length from above. Should the outer wall fall, archers on the still-taller inner wall, with its 14 great towers, would rain death on anyone bold enough to attempt to cross the outer bailey. This inner wall protected the heart of the castle, the inner bailey, where the garrison lived and the king slept when he was in residence. In the middle of the inner bailey, in isolated splendour, stood the final defence: the magnificent keep, a tower 80 feet tall and a hundred feet on a side, with walls 20 feet thick, heavily defended and with enough provisions to withstand a prolonged siege even with the rest of the castle in enemy hands. Every inch of the inner wall, including the towers, lay exposed to the arrows of archers on the keep roof.

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