Exploring Kent's Past

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Monument details

Summary

The North Entrance to the Western Heights was situated at a narrow point of the ridge towards the north-eastern end of the fortress, where the North Military Road completed its more moderate ascent from Dover town. The earliest phase of works on this entrance dates to the Napoleonic period, but further work on the North Entrance to complete and modernise it began in in March 1860 and it was finished by February 1864. This created a more elaborate defensive scheme and perhaps reflects a greater concern with a potential assault from the north. A new inner entrance and guard room was constructed as part of the 1860’s work. (location accurate to the nearest 1m based on available information)

Monument Types

• WATER TANK (Disused, Post Medieval to Modern - 1815 AD? to 1945 AD?)
• GATEHOUSE (Disused, Post Medieval to Modern - 1860 AD? to 1945 AD?)
• GUARDHOUSE (Disused, Post Medieval to Modern - 1860 AD? to 1945 AD?)
• PRIVY HOUSE (Disused, Post Medieval to Modern - 1860 AD? to 1945 AD?)

Full description

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Summarised from report:

The North Entrance to the Western Heights was situated at a narrow point of the ridge towards the north-eastern end of the fortress, where the North Military Road completed its more moderate ascent from Dover town. The earliest phase of works on this entrance dates to the Napoleonic period, but further work on the North Entrance to complete and modernise it began in in March 1860 and it was finished by February 1864. This created a more elaborate defensive scheme and perhaps reflects a greater concern with a potential assault from the north. A new inner entrance and guard room was constructed as part of the 1860’s work.

The inner entrance is set back to form the end elevation of a deep cutting, together with the adjacent entrance to a casemated guard house. The cutting is retained by high, curving, revetment walls in English bond brickwork, with the same rolled sandstone coping as the inner entrance elevation, although topped with a square-section wrought-iron balustrade. The entrance elevation comprises two semicircular arches of three orders with sandstone plinths and polychrome brickwork in buff, red and cream. The right-hand arch is the entrance to the tunnel, while the left-hand arch contains the guard house. The southern revetment contains the entrance to the guard house latrines, located in a small, brick vaulted room. Inside are two WC stalls, a urinal and a sink. Immediately east of the latrine entrance, a set of steps with stone treads and another, similar wrought-iron balustrade, climbs to a higher level where a Royal Engineer’s Yard, a chapel, school and other buildings formerly stood. The front wall of the guard house is set back in the archway and contains a door and window with arched and chamfered heads in imitation of tracery. The guard house is a semicircular vaulted casemate built parallel to the road tunnel. It is unusual in having no direct communication with the tunnel, the place it is guarding. It is also unlike the other entrance guard rooms on the Western Heights - at the Citadel and the Grand Shaft - since it has no detention cells or orderly room. Behind and parallel to the northern revetment of the cutting is a semicircular vaulted gallery, reached through two doorways in the revetment and another in the tunnel. Each doorway leads down steps onto the stone-flagged floor of the gallery, to face doorways in the opposing wall; these open onto three huge sunken water tanks. These replaced two earlier tanks which had been built during the Napoleonic phase to serve the Western Heights garrison. The tanks are identical segmental vaulted casemates, water-proofed with a hard cement or render up to the springing point. Although partly filled with silt and brick debris, the floor of each tank is sunk at least 3m below its entrance and was reached by metal handholds descending from the doorway. There is clear evidence that the tanks pre-date the construction of the rest of the North Entrance complex. Firstly, doors were provided opposite each tank rather than having a single entrance to the gallery. Secondly, there seems no other reason for the different floor levels between the gallery and Centre Road. Thirdly, there are double rows of headers in the revetment wall above the semicircular heads of the external doorways, which suggests that the upper section of the revetment wall was added to a pre-existing, external wall of the water tanks. This situation clearly resulted from the necessity to build and secure the new tanks before demolition of the old ones, and before construction of the rest of the new North Entrance. A roughly-hewn passage is depicted on the 1861 plan, driven into the chalk from the south end of the gallery. This passage descends steeply downwards and contains a brick-built set of steps, before turning abruptly to the south-east. The last section is now blocked but a plan published in 1900 shows that this passage connected with the main pipe gulley below the Centre Road, suggesting that the passage served as access for maintenance. (1)

A plan dating to 1861 shows the inner gate, guard room and water tanks of the inner entrance shortly after they were constructed. (2)

Further information about the historical development of this entance to the fort is available within the Built Heritage Conservation Framework for Dover Western Heights. (3)

<1> RCHME, 2000, The Western Heights, Dover, Kent. Report No 6: The Entrances to the Fortress: 19th-century artillery fortifications (Unpublished document). SKE17501.

<2> Office of Works, 1861, Plan and section of the North Centre Bastion and the North Entrance of the Western Heights. (Plan). SKE51621.

<3> Liv Gibbs, 2012, Built Heritage Conservation Framework for Dover Western Heights (Unpublished document). SKE17708.

Sources and further reading

Related records