Vivienne Crow embraces the summer breeze at the Seven Sisters
SEASIDE TOWNS aren’t really my thing – unless it’s a cold, windy day out of season. So it was with some trepidation that I headed to a potentially busy Eastbourne on a warm, sunny day in the half-term holiday. The sea was a flat calm, almost silent; the local people walking their dogs along the seafront were relaxed, friendly. Any concerns about the day melted away. The Isleys’ version of Summer Breeze was playing in my head.
All was good...
From the south-western side of the town, whilst most other walkers followed the South Downs Way on to Beachy Head, we kept to
the quieter trail along the top of the cliffs. The throng of sightseers on the headland itself, the highest chalk cliff in England, came as a shock after our chilled start to the day so we didn’t hang around.
We passed the Belle Tout Lighthouse, which made the headlines at the end of the last century when the entire structure, now a B&B, was moved back from the cliff edge. Scientists had calculated that, for the preceding 150 years, the coast here had been receding at a rate of between 22 and 32cm each year. For decades, the lighthouse had been teetering perilously close to that edge. Then, in early 1999, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chalk cliff collapsed into the sea at Beachy Head, and the need to stop the lighthouse from disappearing forever became even more pressing. Using an innovative system of concrete runners and computercontrolled jacks, engineers ‘slid’ the 850-tonne building 17 metres back from the precipice, hopefully securing its existence for some time. The story goes that it was such a smooth operation that not a single glass or plate in the kitchen broke.
The ever-changing, transient nature of the cliff faces was brought home to me by the existence of several gashes – all the way along this section of the coast – cutting down into the close-cropped turf, sometimes several inches back from an overhanging edge. The land on the seaward side of these tears would probably survive only a few more winters. My usual desire to peer ‘over the edge’
(any edge!) was absent, but a few visitors seemed sure of their abilities to resist gravity.
After lunch at the chaotic café at Birling Gap, we made our way along the top of the Seven Sisters. I had been expecting Beachy Head to be the highlight of the day, but I was wrong.
The chalk of the Seven Sisters was dazzling. There’s little opportunity for vegetation to gain a hold on these sheer, ever-crumbling cliffs, so there’s not much here but bare, almost-white rock. Topped by the luxuriant green of the calcareous grassland, fringed on one side by the surprisingly turquoise sea and all crowned by the beautiful azure sky, it was a tremendous sight.