Dover Cliffs & Pines Garden
Saturday. We met at nine in the Borrow Pit car park in Walmer on a morning that had not yet decided what it wanted to do. The rain had been falling since before we arrived — light but persistent — and the sky sat low over the Channel, grey from horizon to horizon. The four of us pulled up collars and packed rucksacks, and set off south along the seafront with the sea to our left and the wind, already from the south at a steady ten miles per hour or so, pressing quietly against us.
The Borrow Pit takes its name from the excavations dug along this coast to extract chalk and earth for construction and coastal defence works — a common practice along the Kent shoreline. Walmer Castle, which sits just south of the car park, was built between 1539 and 1540 as part of Henry VIII's chain of artillery forts defending the Downs anchorage, alongside the castles at Deal and Sandown. Julius Caesar is traditionally held to have landed at or near this stretch of beach in 55 BC, one of two landings he made on the Kent coast in the same season. Since the eighteenth century the castle has been the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. William Pitt the Younger was Lord Warden from 1792 and shaped its gardens; the Duke of Wellington considered it his favourite residence and died there in 1852, aged eighty-three; the Queen Mother held the position in the twentieth century.
The seafront path runs straight and flat from Walmer down to Kingsdown. The rain had mostly stopped by the time we reached the village, clearing to a low overcast that gave decent visibility. Kingsdown is a small, self-contained place, its shingle beach backed by white cliffs with houses perched above on the brow. The cliffs here form part of the Dover to Kingsdown SSSI; 207.7 hectares of chalk cliff significant not just for the fossils embedded in the rock but for the role these exposures played in the early development of geology itself. Many of the foundational principles of stratigraphy were tested and refined against these Cretaceous sections, laid down as marine sediment between 99 and 86 million years ago. The coast here was also, for a long stretch of the eighteenth century, notorious for a different kind of commerce: smugglers ran French brandy, lace, and tea through these coves with considerable efficiency and rather less accountability.
At the southern end of Kingsdown beach the cliff steps rise sharply — a fairly steep climb of around eighty metres that takes you from the shingle foreshore to the open downland above. It is an abrupt transition. One moment you are on the beach with the chalk looming beside you; the next you are on the clifftop, the Channel spread out below, and the path running ahead towards the horizon.
The path follows the England Coast Path along the chalk ridge where the North Downs meet the sea and are cut clean by the Channel. The Strait of Dover below is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, with up to five hundred vessels passing through on a typical day; even in the grey of a March morning, tankers and container ships were visible at intervals, moving steadily against the pale water. On a clear day the French coast at Cap Blanc-Nez is visible from the clifftops. On this particular morning, with a strengthening southerly and cloud sitting on the horizon, it was gone. On the inland side, Walmer and Kingsdown Golf Links edges the downland plateau — a course laid out by James Braid in 1909, occupying some of the most exposed golfing ground in Kent. The wind that was now picking up to around seventeen or twenty miles per hour would not have troubled players accustomed to this stretch of cliff, but it kept us honest on the open sections.
We dropped down into St Margaret's Bay along Beach Road. The bay is a narrow shingle cove enclosed between chalk headlands, and it is one of the recognised starting points for Channel swimmers, who have been entering the water here for the crossing to France for the better part of a century. The bay has other associations. In 1851, the first commercially successful international submarine telegraph cable was laid from South Foreland to Sangatte in France, establishing communication between Britain and the continent for the first time — a cable just 25 nautical miles long that marked the beginning of something considerably larger in scope. The White Cliffs cottage complex at the bay was later home to Noël Coward from 1946 to 1951, and then to Ian Fleming from 1951 to 1957; Fleming drew on the location for the setting of Moonraker, in which the villain constructs a nuclear missile on the Kent coast.
The Pines Garden on Beach Road was our stop for a cream tea — a six-acre garden created in 1971 by the Bay Trust, a charitable body founded by Frederick Cleary CBE, a chartered surveyor known as "Flowering Fred" for the green spaces he established in bombed-out areas of the City of London after the war. The garden has a lake, cascade, grass labyrinth, and kitchen garden, with a small museum whose exhibits include material on Coward and Fleming. The tearoom was warm and the cream tea was the right decision at the midpoint of a sixteen-kilometre walk in a March wind.
From St Margaret's Bay we climbed back up to the clifftop and continued south-west to South Foreland Lighthouse, the halfway point of the walk. Mrs Knott's tearoom was closed at this time of year, as it often is through the winter months — it is a regular stop for us in the warmer seasons, and its absence was noted. We turned at the lighthouse and began the return.
The outbound leg had the wind largely behind us, which we had not especially registered. The return made it plain. Walking back into a twenty-mile-per-hour southerly on an exposed chalk clifftop is not unpleasant, but it is noticeable — the kind of wind that keeps conversation intermittent and requires a degree of leaning forward to make progress. The windswept grass on either side of the path showed what the place is like most of the time.
We came back down the cliff steps at Kingsdown as the afternoon weather was brightening up — the cloud thinning a little, the visibility opening out. The temperature had risen to twelve degrees or so. The seafront back to Walmer was flat and quiet, the shingle above the tide, the castle visible ahead on the landward side. We had covered sixteen kilometres and two hundred and fifty-seven metres of ascent.
Thanks to Tina, Sophie and Vanessa for coming along on the walk today.
