Deal 34k & Route One Cafe
Three weeks out from the London to Brighton, the training walks had settled into a particular rhythm: leave before first light, cover the distance, be home before the afternoon. The walk on Sunday 7 May 2023 followed that pattern, departing Whitfield at 05:43 with a route that would take in the lanes through Pineham, Guston and East Langdon before swinging north to arrive on Deal seafront just after 9am. From there the return leg would follow the coast south through Walmer and Kingsdown, climb to St Margaret's Bay and loop back via East Langdon and Forge Lane. In total, 34.42km and 286 metres of elevation — a gentler profile than the Whitfield 33k loop, and considerably more scenic on the coastal section.
The early morning had the particular quality that late spring mornings sometimes produce in this part of Kent: a ground mist lying across the fields, the air damp and still, the light arriving slowly under a layer of high cloud. Weather records from Manston show partly cloudy conditions at 5am, briefly fair by 6am, then back to overcast through the morning — the mist did not lift fully until the afternoon, when the day eventually delivered the warmth it had been promising. Temperature at 12°C at the start, reaching 17°C later in the day.
The initial stretch along Forge Lane runs through arable fields on the edge of Whitfield before the route drops down through Pineham and rises again to Guston. At this time of year the crops were well established, the fields a deep even green, the footpath cutting a narrow line through them. The mist gave the further distance a soft quality, the tree line at the far end of the field fading into a pale grey. By the time the route reached the lane between Pineham and Guston, the sun had found a gap in the cloud and was sitting just above the horizon, low enough that the barbed wire fence along the roadside was almost exactly at eye level with it.
The outward route through East Langdon and out towards Ripple followed the same ground as the Whitfield 33k loop a fortnight earlier, the landscape unchanged in the intervening weeks except that the rapeseed in the fields near Martin had now peaked and would begin its decline towards harvest. From Ripple the route turned north, crossing into the broader agricultural plain that runs towards Deal, the ground flattening as it approached the coast, the sea eventually appearing as a pale grey line at the edge of the fields.
Deal seafront at 9am on a May Sunday had an unhurried quality. The mist was still lying on the water, thinner than it had been inland but persistent enough that the pier was visible rather than sharp — its 1,026 feet of reinforced concrete dissolving at the far end into the haze. The current pier, which opened in November 1957 after being completed in 1954, is the third on this site. The first, a wooden structure of 1838, was destroyed by storms in 1857. The second, an iron pier of 1863, survived until 1940 when the Dutch vessel Nora collided with it, destroying two hundred feet of ironwork; it was demolished in 1943. Prince Philip opened the current structure, and remarked at the ceremony that he had a personal connection with the town: the pier master, Captain Arthur Vyvyan Harris, had been aboard a tanker hit by a mine in 1943, and the then-Lieutenant Philip had helped haul him up scramble nets to safety. The pier is the last surviving open leisure pier in Kent.
A solitary fisherman was on the beach, his rod planted in the shingle, the pier in the mist behind him. He was not fishing the pier but the open beach, facing south, apparently unconcerned with the probability of catching anything. It was a good composition and it held still long enough to photograph.
RouteOne sits on the seafront at 70 Beach Street, next to the pier, and after 15km of walking it was an easy decision to sit down for twenty minutes. The name comes from the address rather than the street number: Sustrans National Cycle Network Route 1 runs along the seafront directly past the cafe door, traffic-free between Kingsdown and Deal. The route continues north to Sandwich, Canterbury and eventually the length of the eastern coast of Britain — 1,264 miles in total, terminating at Tain in the Scottish Highlands. South from Deal it follows the clifftop path through Walmer to Dover, the same coastline the return leg of this walk would cover a couple of hours later. The cafe has positioned itself as a stop on that route, serving cyclists heading in either direction, as well as the usual complement of seafront visitors. On a May Sunday morning it was quiet enough. The tables outside face directly over the sea wall and the pier, the view exactly what the view from a seafront cafe should be. The latte came in a tall glass. A herring gull appeared in the frame at the right moment and stayed long enough to be useful. The mist was still on the water, the pier still dissolving into it at the far end. At some point between ordering coffee and finishing it, the London to Brighton felt like a manageable proposition.
The return leg followed the coast southward, through Walmer and then Kingsdown. Walmer is best known for Walmer Castle, the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports since the eighteenth century, which featured in the Walmer to South Foreland walk in March. Kingsdown is smaller and quieter, a fishing village that expanded in the Victorian period when cottages were built along the shore to house the local fishing community. The steeply shelving shingle beach required fixed capstans along the shoreline to haul boats clear of the water, and several of the older sheds and houses from that period remain. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle — the first woman to swim the English Channel, then nineteen years old — made landfall at Kingsdown after a 35-mile crossing in record time. There is no particular monument to this, which seems like an omission.
South of Kingsdown the footpath climbs away from the shore and up the chalk cliffs towards St Margaret's Bay, a long steady ascent that by this point in the day was earning its rest at the top.
The horses in the field at the top of the ascent were doing nothing in particular, which given the gradient of the climb was an arrangement I found it easy to envy. The valley behind them opened out across the rolling downs, the chalk escarpment dropping away to the coast in both directions, the cloud that had been hanging over the sea all morning now beginning to break in the distance. It was the kind of view that justifies the climb.
The Smugglers Inn at St Margaret's-at-Cliffe dates to 1674 and was known for most of its earlier life as the Carriers Arms. The village sits at what is genuinely the closest point in England to France — the continental coast visible from the clifftops on a clear day — and its connection with the smuggling trade that gave the pub its current name was not merely decorative. St Margaret's was, through the eighteenth century, a centre for the importation and distribution of illicit rum through the cliffs and lanes of this coastline. A diet coke on the terrace, after 28km of walking, was a considerably less dramatic transaction but served its purpose.
The remaining 6km back through East Langdon and along Forge Lane to Whitfield passed without incident, the day having by that point produced enough of both landscape and history to be going on with. Total moving time: 6 hours 30 minutes. Total elapsed time: 8 hours 12 minutes. Steps: 43,810.
