History of Dover Castle

                                            Dover Castle, seen from the North East

DOVER is a giant among castles. It has the longest recorded history of any major fortress in Britain. Yet few legends are attach to the castle, and only once was it seriously at risk. Dover is neither romantic nor a place of Gothic horrors. It has long been a barracks than a royal residence. Dover began before history itself. Its earliest rampart defenses date to the prehistoric Iron Age. Then the Romans built a Pharos (lighthouse) here in the first century AD, with another on the facing western Heights. The same tall headland, already partially defended, was re-settled in the tenth century or earlier by the Anglo-Saxons. They built a burh, a fortified town, of which St Mary-in-Castro was the church. Both Pharos and church still remain. The bulk of Dover Castle, as we know it today, post-dates the Norman Conquest by a century. Soon after the Battle of Hastings, in the autumn of 1066, Duke William spent eight days at Dover strengthening fortifications, which had only recently been rebuilt by the defeated Harold. Yet neither William's works nor those of Harold are identifiable today, and what the visitor now sees of the masonry of Dover is all of the twelfth century or later. Most monumental is the great square tower, or Keep, built in the 1180s for the Angevin King Henry II (1134-89). Every visit should begin at this point. Also of the 1180s are the walls of the keep's surrounding court (the Inner Bailey), as is a stretch of outer 'curtain' wall towards the east. The remainder of this substantial outer curtain, with its sophisticated gatehouses and many flanking towers, is chiefly the work of Hubert de Burgh, Constable of Dover (1202-32), and of his successors under Henry III (d 1272).After the thirteenth century, little of substance was added to Dover before the present barracks were built and the defenses remodeled, starting in the 1740s.It was then that Dover, after years of neglect, entered a new lease of life. Georgian and Victorian military engineers stripped Dover bare. The castle lost its patina of age. Yet their achievement has an importance of its own. After Henry II's Keep and Hubert de Burgh's curtain, the artillery defenses of eighteenth and nineteenth-century.
During World War Two the Castle became the center of operations (Hellfire Corner, used by
Sir Winston Churchill) and new underground workings were added to existing ones and these
are now open to the public having remained secret for many years.