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Victoria
County History of Kent Vol. 3
1932 - Romano-British
Kent - Military History - Page 50
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Elizabethan dream, in which Julius Caesar and
Arviragus characteristically figure.78
A second pharos seems to have stood opposite to the one
just described, three-quarters of a mile away, on a spot now covered by
the Drop Redoubt.79 To the earlier antiquaries this
pharos was better known than its neighbour on the Castle Hill. Indeed,
Leland, Lambarde and Camden mention the former and ignore the latter.
Old views of Dover show that as late as the end of the seventeenth
century this tower stood high above ground, a |
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FIG. 11 SKETCH MAP OF DOVER, SHOWING THE SITES OF
THE CASTLE PHAROS, THE WESTERN PHAROS, AND APPROXIMATELY THE ROMAN
FORT (Reproduced from Arch.Journ. lxxxvi, 30)
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prominent mark on the bare Western Heights. The
Canterbury antiquary, Thomas Twyne, told Camden that in his youth he had
seen it nearly perfect, and that it was a pharos. He was probably right.
It must at least have served as a seamark; and it is but a slight step
further to imagine that Roman Dover was flanked by twin lights which
would serve not merely to ‘bracket’ the harbour but would form a
distinctive feature amongst the coastwise signals. By the first half of
the eighteenth century the western tower had fallen into an advanced
state of decay. It was then known alternatively as the Bredenstone or
the Devil’s Drop, and here, from the middle of the seventeenth century
onwards, the |
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Lords Warden of the Cinque Ports were sworn in. After
further vicissitudes the foundation of it was buried, in 1861, in the
present redoubt, in which a small and formless fragment of it is still
78 For the pharos see
Leland, vii, 128; Stukeley, Itim. (ed. i), p. 121, the first
attempt at a real survey; Wheeler, Arch. Journ. lxxxvi, 29, a
full account. On ancient phari generally, see H. Thiersch, Pharos (Leipzig,
Teubner, 1909). For the church—often, but absurdly, ascribed to the
Roman period—see Gilbert Scott, Arch. Cant. v, 1—18;
Micklethwaite, Arch. Journ. liii, 327; Baldwin Brown, Arts in
Early England, ii, 292, 308. Canon Puckle’s Church and Fortress
of Dover Castle (Oxford, 1864) contains useful details, but is
written with little knowledge of Roman history or archaeology. The
author thinks that British Christians built the church about the end of
the Diocletian persecution, ‘when their weakened masters were on the
point of abandoning the colony.’ This ignores the 100 years which
intervened between Diocletian and the withdrawal of the Romans from
Britain; and it also mistakes the relations of Romans and Britons at the
time. Cf. Peck in Brit. Arch. Assoc. N.S. xx, 24B; and Haverfield
in Brit. Acad. Suppl. Papers, ii, 1914, p. 3.
79 For a full
account of the history of this ‘ pharos’ since the sixteenth
century, see Wheeler, Arch. Journ. lxxxvi, 40. |
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