Here we may conveniently pause; the building is substantially
completed, the great keep, the two enclosures, the Inner and Outer
Ballium. Subsequent changes are all within these, and we shall have
occasion to notice them at later dates, but now that we have seen the
fortress completed, and used, partly as a Royal residence, partly as a
State Prison, we will survey the whole in detail. And I ask attention
to the Plan opposite p. 104, which will make each point clear. I
propose, then, first to take a walk round the outside and start from
the bottom of Tower Hill by the main entrance, where the visitors are
busy buying their tickets of admission. The modern building where they
are doing this is the site of the old Lion Tower. Facing us is the
Middle Tower, the gateway which leads over the Moat into the fortress
itself. But as I am keeping outside I pass this and ascend the hill.
To-day the whole of the bank of the Moat on the western and northern
side is laid out as a flower garden, and the many seats among the trees
are well occupied with loungers, mostly poor, some asleep and some
reading the newspaper. The Moat, which is as old as the Tower itself,
was deepened by Bishop Longchamp while he held the place for Richard
I, and again by Henry III, the water of course being supplied from the
Thames, which flowed in at what we call Traitors’ Gate. Its greatest
width is about a hundred feet. It is said that bathing in it in the
days of the Plantagenets was a capital offence, but some one suggests
that this simply means that it was so unsanitary as to be likely to
prove fatal. There can be no doubt that the water splashing upon the
walls and bastions added greatly to the picturesqueness; you see
that in all the old pictures, but the changes of Time put aside its
usefulness, and after eight centuries of its ebb and flow, the Duke
of Wellington, when he was Constable, had it filled up to its present
level and the communication with the river cut off. So now we look
down upon a smooth level, on the west side gravelled, a place for
recreation, and sometimes also a drying-ground of the Tower laundry. On
the other sides, when we get to them, we see great portions laid down
for garden ground. On the other side of the Moat is the Outward Wall,
built by Henry III. Surveying it from this western side we see first
the Byward Tower, which, as a glance at the plan will show, is opposite
the Middle Tower, and forms the land entrance into the fortress. On the
opposite end of this western side is the “drum bastion,” segment of a
circle about 80 feet diameter, called _Legge’s Mount Battery_, probably
after George Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, who had charge of it in the
seventeenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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