Here, along this coastwise road, between this point and Hythe, we make close acquaintance with the Martello towers. A ready way of describing the shape of one of these towers is to picture it as an inverted flower-pot. The proportions of height and circumference are very nearly the same, and what architects and builders would call the "batter"--_i.e._, the narrowing slope of the sides--runs at very closely the same angle.
They are just upon a century old. Built solidly, of honest brickwork through and through, in the days of the Great Terror, no enemy's fire has ever been directed against them, but several have been used as targets for the heavy ordnance and high explosives of the modern gunners of Lydd and Dungeness, and, with a great deal of labour and at huge expense, at last destroyed. Some few, also, have been undermined and ruined by the encroachments of the sea. There were originally seventy-six of these towers, costing from _£_10,000 to _£_20,000 apiece, according to size. The usual size is thirty feet in height, with a diameter of forty feet at the base, diminishing to thirty at the top. They are in two storeys, with a bomb-proof roof formerly surmounted by a cannon mounted on a swivel-carriage. The walls vary from a thickness of nine feet on the seaward side to six on the landward, which would not be so greatly exposed to assault. Their name is said to derive from that circular fort at Martella, in Corsica, captured only after a long and desperate resistance in the time of Nelson. It has been left for modern times to thoroughly vindicate the plan of the military engineers who designed this first line of defence along an unprotected coast. Fortunately, there has never been any occasion to put these to the test, and it was not until the same blockhouse principle was introduced on the veldt in the second Boer War, that the weary campaign was brought at last to a close.
This tower, standing at the entrance to Dymchurch, behind the famous Wall, has been put to a whimsical use, for it is in occupation by a poor family, whose rent of half-a-crown a week, due to the War Office, is guaranteed by the vicar. A Martello tower makes a squalid home. Very little light can struggle through the deep and narrow embrasures, and the interior is grimly suggestive of a mausoleum. The ragged duds drying from flaunting clothes-lines, the position of the tower planted in a scrubby waste, with domestic refuse strewed about, and the stark nakedness of the brick, combine to make an inglorious and repellent picture.