As the Romans Found It

I. AS THE ROMANS FOUND IT. 

When the Romans attempted to land at Dover, B.C. 55, the valley, where the Town now lies, was the only place on the South-Eastern Coast where the sea flowed in between the hills. The "Commentaries of Julius Caesar" make it quite clear that when he arrived with his invading forces his ships, or some of them, sailed in between the hills. The "Commentaries" thus describe the arrival of Caesar and his hosts: — "He reached Britain with the first squadron of ships about the fourth hour of the day, and there saw the forces of the Britons drawn up in arms on all the hills. The nature of the place was this: The sea was confined by mountains so close to it that a dart couM be thrown from their summit upon the shore." There have been differences of opinion as to whether Cnssar, after quitting this haven lietween the hills, went round the South Foreland, or westward, but there is no question but that it was between the Eastern and Western Heights at Dover that he first sought to land. 

The haven, between the hills, in the estuary of the River Dour, which the " Commentaries " so graphically describe, appears to have been a port into which the Roman vessels entered at low water; therefore, at high water it would have been possible for vessels to sail as far up the estuary as Charlton, where traces of an ancient sea-bed have been disclosed in excavations. 

Manuscripts of ancient date mention that this landlocked haven was lost owing to a revolt of the Britons about the year A.D. 43, when Arviragus, a tributary British King, '• hired a multitude " to block up the haven's mouth to keep out the Roman ships. It would not be safe to treat this statement as an unfounded tradition. However, it does not seem as though there was an effective blockade of the haven at that time, or Aulus Plautius, the Roman General, would not, immediately after, have built pharos light towers on the Castle Hill and the Western Heights to guide their ships into this haven. Traditions are usually founded on some fragments of fact, and the probability is that an attempt to block the haven's mouth was made, but did not succeed; yet some of the artificial obstructions may have remained, and in the course of centuries the attrition carried down by the river may have settled around those obstructions and, during the Saxon period, formed a delta, giving the two mouths of the River Dour, the one emptying into the sea under the Castle Cliff and the other on tlie western side of the Bay. Such was the form that the Dover Haven assumed in the Saxon time. 

In the late Saxon period probably some remains of the old haven lingered inland, where the main stream of the Dour then divided into two branches, leaving a delta of dry land between them, on which, in later years, the principal part of St. James's Parish was built. On diai delta there was a shipyard owned by burgesses of Dover, vvho built ships there to work the Passage, including the twenty ships supplied for the King's service by this Port in the reign of Edward the Confessor. For the small ships of that period, probably both Eastbrook and Westbrook (as the two branches of the river were called) were navigable; but soon after the Conquest it appears that the navigation of Westbrook was obstructed by a mill which Odo, Earl of Kent, permitted to be built, and as there seems to have been a mill there ever afterwards, that may have been the reason why navigation was confined to Eastbrook, and why the earliest harbour, after the haven in the estuary was disused, was at the mouth of Eastbrook under the Castle cliff.