Alexander's reference to the Western Heights fortifications immediately brings to mind William Cobbett's "Rural Rides," published in 1830. This is, of course, the publication in which Cobbett famously describes this immense sprawl of brick-lined ditches as "A parcel of holes made in a hill, to hide Englishmen from Frenchmen!"
I acquired a Penguin paperback recently for the section of "Rural Rides" covering "From Dover to the Wen." *
Cobbett travels from Folkestone to Dover along the turnpike-road through the valley and is mightily impressed by the the fact that it is home to eighteen square miles of corn - "It is a patch such as you very seldom see, and especially of corn so good as it is here."
On arrival in Dover, things start off well. "The town of Dover is like other sea-port towns; but really, much more clean, and with less blackguard people in it than I ever observed in any sea-port before. It is a most picturesque place, to be sure."
Unfortunately, he then ascends the Western Heights and there follows several pages of unbridled raging at the profligate extravagance he sees before him, all the stuff I expect you are all familiar with "I went to see, with my own eyes, something of the sort of means that had been made use of to squander away countless millions of money"......"either madness the most humiliating, or profligacy the most scandalous must have been at work here for years......."for a purpose so stupid, so senseless, so mad as this, and withal, so scandalously disgraceful, more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of Kent and of Sussex".......and so on and so on.
After further bouts of righteous indignation about borough-mongers, parsons, et al, he ends "I must get from this Dover, as fast as I can."
As a consolation, adjoining towns do not get off lightly either....."Deal is a most villainous place. It is full of filthy-looking people. Great desolation of abomination has been going on here"......."thence upon a beautiful road to Sandwich, which is a Rotten Borough. Rotteness, putridity is excellent for land, but bad for Boroughs. This place, which is as villainous a hole as one would wish to see, is surrounded by some of the finest land in the world."
* The Great Wen is a disparaging nickname for London. The term was coined in the 1820s by William Cobbett, the radical pamphleteer and champion of rural England. Cobbett saw the rapidly growing city as a pathological swelling on the face of the nation. The term is quoted in his 1830 work Rural Rides: ('But, what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, "the metropolis of the empire?"').
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wen