The Dover Road I Of all the historic highways of England, the story of the old Road to Dover is the most difficult to tell. No other road in all Christendom (or Pagandom either, for that matter) has so long and continuous a history, nor one so crowded in every age with incident and associations. The writer, therefore, who has the telling of that story to accomplish is weighted with a heavy sense of responsibility, and though (like a village boy marching fearfully through a midnight churchyard) he whistles to keep his courage warm, yet, for all his outward show of indifference, he keeps an awed glance upon the shadows that beset his path, and is prepared to take to his heels at any moment. And see what portentous shadows crowd the long reaches of the Dover Road, and demand attention! Cæsar's presence haunts the weird plateau of Barham Downs, and the alert imagination hears the tramp B of the legionaries along Watling Street on moonlit nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans people the streets of the old towns through which the highway takes its course, or crowd in warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and queens, nobles, saints of different degrees of sanctity, great blackguards of every degree of blackguardism, and ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud, or pitiful, rise up before one and terrify with thoughts of the space the record of their doings would occupy; in fine, the wraiths and phantoms of nigh upon two thousand years combine to intimidate the historian. How rich, then, the road in material, and how embarrassing the accumulated wealth of twenty centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest justice in this one volume! Many volumes and bulky should go toward the telling of this story: and for the proper presentation of its pageantry, for the due setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, upon these seventy miles of highway, the rugged-wrought periods of Carlyle, the fateful march of Thomas Hardy's rustic tragedies, the sly humour and the felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added to the whimsical drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To these add the lucid arrangement of a Macaulay shorn of rhetorical redundancies, and, with space to command, one might hope to give a glowing wordportraiture of the Dover Road; while, with the aid of pictorial genius like that possessed by those masters of their art, Morland and Rowlandson, illustrations might be fashioned that would shadow forth the life and scenery of the wayside to the admiration of all. A RUGGED ROAD 3 Without these gifts of the gods, who shall say he has done all this subject demands, nor how sufficiently narrate within the compass of these covers the doings of sixty generations? The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with our journey, is measured from the south side of London Bridge, and is seventy and three quarters of a mile long. An average cyclist can do the journey as comfortably as the nature of the road will permit (which is not saying much) in seven hours; how long the record-making wheelman would take in doing the distance has not yet been discovered, because the record-maker hates the Dover Road, and has not summoned up sufficient energy to grapple with the granite setts of the Old Kent Road, or the hills of Chatham, Shooter's Hill, and Boughtonunder-Blean. Indeed, one might safely say that cyclists would rather cycle to any other place than Dover, which is at once a succinct exposition of the nature of the Dover Road, and an indictment of the cycle from a sight-seeing point of view. It is to the pedestrian that the Dover Road offers most enjoyment, and in these days, unless one is prepared to take a driving tour, walking is the only way to sufficiently explore this route, for since the day that witnessed the opening of the South Eastern Railway, the first railway from London to Dover, in 1844, this old highway has been almost the only one out of London left unexploited by the amateur dragsman in the coaching revival that began on the Brighton Road in the early sixties. To-day, if one is more than usually fortunate, it is possible to travel from London to Dover in an hour and three quarters by boat-express (first and second class only), or in two hours and a quarter by the less lordly and more plebeian ordinary trains. The more usual fortune, however, is to arrive at anything from a quarter to half an hour later. The Dover Road, singularly enough, when we consider how greatly important was this highway to France, was never remarkable for either the excellence or the pace of its coaches. Those who had urgent business here had, as a rule, also the wherewithal (which is Latin for "money") to pay for fleet horses and post-chaises; and so, although we find nothing in the way of coaching annals that can for a moment compare with the performances of the "Quicksilver" coach on the Exeter Road, yet there was in olden days no highway out of London on which the postboys fared so well, nor where the cry of "first and second turn out" rang out so cheerily and so constantly at the stable-yards of the comfortable old wayside inns. Stage-coaching is seen here almost at its earliest in this announcement from the London Evening Post of 1751 * Some trains on the South Eastern Railway have achieved the feat of extending the journey to three hours and three quarters. The South Eastern is the railway referred to in the story of the traveller who accidentally lost his dog at Dover, and had to travel to London without him. However, when he eventually reached home in London, he found the dog anxiously waiting for him on the doorstep. The faithful animal had run home all the way from Dover, and the narrator remarks that he was not a very speedy dog either! N.B.-This is probably a myth. |