The Crown Receiving Masts

Dover has kept watch on the Narrow Sea for longer than most of the realm has kept books, and a milestone near the town was already cut by about 3922. The aerial masts are a late arrival in that long watch, and nothing posted in the borough gives the year they were raised. What is plain is their rank. These are guarded Crown receiving masts, able to bring a vessel down, make it fast and send it off again, and not a public skyport or a relay yard fit to turn a hull round for another long leg. They stand on the high ground over the western works, fenced off from the private yards of Archcliffe, where graving dock, sail lofts and ropewalk crowd against royal ground, and close beside the Crown magazines.

The masts belong to the garrison that holds Highward on the eastern height, and they are in the keeping of its commander, Colonel Lewis Ingleton, who has the magazines as well. What comes down here is small and dear: Crown dispatches, envoys, inspectors and cargo worth more than a hold can safely carry. Hardly anything Dover lives by goes this way, for timber, salt, wine, grain, coal and the packet trade still travel by hull. Yet each landing stops the port for about an hour while the garrison, the customs house and the harbour clerks agree among themselves who now answers for the passengers and the papers. Kent is ruled by five authorities, none able to command another, and a landing shows it in public.

Ingleton is the figure the town most often sees near the fence. He is famous in the saddle: the March Chase at Harrowgate was his ride in youth, as a junior officer, and at the last wall he came off with a broken wrist. On the eastern height he gathers chalk flowers and presses them for a cabinet whose labels he writes himself, and he has no gift for dancing whatever. Quay-house talk holds that a landing can be read in the town before the vessel is seen, from the customs clerks leaving their desks and garrison runners hurrying down the cliff stair; the garrison neither confirms nor denies it. Sky traffic is also least to be relied on in foul weather, so the masts are busiest when the crossing is easy and quietest when the port most wants speed.

A visitor should watch a landing from well back and save his questions for later, since the men at the fence are not paid to explain anything. A company with real business at the masts should expect to be questioned by the garrison, the customs house and the harbour office in turn, and should carry papers that satisfy all three.