Dover’s waning white cliffs
High summer, and from the Langdon Cliffs Visitor Centre, cross-channel ferries resembled great lumps of chalk, cut loose from the cliffs. The White Cliffs of Dover is a bit of Britain we all think we know, a symbol of England so frequently deployed in image, song and advert that we no longer really see it.
A walk along the clifftop is a subtle challenge to our expectations. The hazy view into Dover was unprepossessing: the clank-clank of cars entering ferries; an enormous warehouse containing bananas; and, in the far distance, the nuclear hulks of Dungeness A and B. Turn east, however, and industrial vistas were replaced by a thyme-scented sward of scabious and sun-bleached grasses.
On a quiet night, these high cliffs above a calm sea may spark the melancholia of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Or they could trigger a bombastic admiration for this fortress built by nature, this precious stone set in the marvellous moat that is the English Channel, as Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt would have it. But, on a bright summer’s day, the aquamarine sea, turning milky close to the cliffs, encouraged another realisation: small, chalky chunks of England are constantly dissolving into the ocean.
This towering, white edge looks like an impregnable barrier from the ferries, but perhaps it is a more porous place, of meetings, mixings and migrations. Supping nectar from a knapweed’s purple flower was a Clouded Yellow, a muscular, migratory butterfly of canary-coloured wings and green eyes, which flies in from France and Spain each summer. Another more exotic, Mediterranean arrival, the Long-tailed Blue, is pitching up here with increasing frequency, laying eggs on the lurid flowers of everlasting pea.
The edge of England is a frontline for ecological change and, probably, human change, too. How many of the dozens of foreign number-plated cars in Langdon Cliffs car park contain dreams of England?
These cliffs may contain pointers to the future but, a few summers ago, I discovered a vivid portal into the past. Beside a scruffy tuft of elder and blackthorn in Fan Bay, there was a hole in the ground like an oversized letterbox, edged by an old slab of concrete.
I was taken here by a young archaeologist who was a fervent enthusiast for things like holes in the ground. The hole didn’t look big enough to squeeze inside but he’d fixed a rope dangling into the blackness, and we swung in. A torch showed a tunnel twisting downwards, nearly 150 steps into the White Cliffs. Dark, wet and not very welcoming, here was Fan Bay Deep Shelter, an underground hospital and sleeping quarters for 180 men, part of a mazy network of secret tunnels dug all along Kent’s chalk coast, where our countrymen hid and waited for war.
Secret holes are vivid time capsules, particularly on the Kentish coast, where so many of the surface-level wartime buildings were bulldozed by a post-war eyesore-clearance programme. This tunnel – which the National Trust has since opened for guided tours – is a peep behind the curtains, revealing the human scale of the conflict. By one arch of hooped metal, used to prop up coalmines in peacetime, a piece of wire had been twisted into a hook by a soldier to hang his cap by his bed; a pools coupon and a needle and thread were also discovered down here. Graffiti, rhymes and noughts and crosses were chalked on the walls, showing how conflict mostly killed time.
I strolled on for tea and cake at South Foreland Lighthouse and, as the haze lifted, France shimmered into view. It looked absurdly close. Even my mobile phone thought I was in France. Many significant distinctions have been built upon a small strip of water and a fine chalk cliff, but even our grandest coastline is more liminal than we usually believe.
Walk east from Langdon Cliffs Visitor Centre, Upper Road, Dover, Kent, CT16 1HJ. The teashop at South Foreland Lighthouse is one-and-a-half miles away.