Here's a fine clifftop walk for you, a chalky hike around England's southeasternmost corner with occasional views of France. From a ferry port to a Cinque Port, from the English Channel to the North Sea, from the south coast to the east coast, mostly at height but with a dip into a culturally renowned village halfway round. It was thus a glorious walk to tackle in glorious sunshine yesterday, even if the biting onshore wind made it several degrees cooler here than back home. To the Kent coast!
Dover is a town most people pass through, a swirl of traffic converging on a mighty seaport, but also a historic town in its own right primed for national defence. I was merely passing through, launching off through the more ordinary side of town where residents buy vapes and 10% of the high street shops are empty. Ducking beneath the dual carriageway brings you to the so-called beach, still lapped by waves despite being inside the harbour, its promenade overlooked by faded Victorian grandeur and an artful curve of postwar flats. If you're heading for the heights rather than the continent you need the backstreet which eventually leads to Dame Vera Lynn Way, an inclined footpath which skims under the A2 viaduct and whose sign confirms "...To The White Cliffs of Dover". And won't you look at that!
The Port of Dover is laid out beneath you, a multi-pronged berth inside a distant rim of breakwaters through which giant ferries repeatedly chug. DFDS reverse in at one end, P&O at the other. A huge concrete apron supports customs checks, passenger terminals and several hundred patiently-arrayed lorries, each feeding in along specially filtered one-way lanes. One can only imagine the collective post-Brexit paperwork that keeps this place operating like clockwork, at least until someone tightens up the regulations again. Even from up here you can hear the tannoy chime before a ferry departs, a signal to its unseen deckfuls that they'll soon be joining the steady stream of international traffic fading away to the horizon. A lot of cliffclimbers walk no further than the National Trust cafe at the top of the incline. The views are spectacular.
Far better to continue along the prescribed path To The Lighthouse. It's a bit like crossing Beachy Head but not as high, and a bit like crossing the Seven Sisters but nowhere near as up and down, and all with the aid of an all-weather chalk path which neither of those enjoy. A skirt around Langton Hole provides an undulating vista with the sheer chalk face of the upcoming headland rising bright above a rock-strewn coastal shelf. These are the white cliffs that welcome you home from the deck of a ferry, a true national emblem, and here you are striding acrossthe top of them amid billowing grassland dotted with stunted trees and gorse bushes. I swear I head a skylark at one point.
The path always keeps a safe distance from the edge but you can wander nearer to the precipitous rim if you choose, and notionally the cattle grazing the slopes above Fan Bay are a greater risk. A flagpole here marks the entrance to the Fan Bay Deep Shelter, a wartime labyrinth whose tunnels burrow 23 feet down and which reopened to visitors for the summer season last weekend. I would have waved my NT card and gone down, saving the £15 entrance fee, but I was aiming for a timed train at the far end of the walk so there just wasn't time. Likewise I'd love to have gone round South ForelandLighthouse again, having fortuitously arrived just before a tour, but had to skip the spiel about Faraday, Marconi and the original 3kW lightbulb in order to stride on into pastures new.
The next five miles are previously unblogged, kicking off with a steady descent into the amazing hideaway of St Margaret's Bay. The original village is safely inland but a separate settlement grew up on the steep slopes above the bay, a string of residential fingers clinging to the contours along which decades of incomers built their dream homes. Some are classic detached, others more ostentatious or resolutely postmodern with a price tag to match. A large central dip contains The Pines Garden, an ornamental treasure which I suspect peaks in summer because the spring blooms were quite muted. Alongside is a tearoom which doubles up as St Margaret's Museum, all free to explore but you might find yourself having to edge round a table of patrons enjoying afternoon tea while trying to learn about wartime gun emplacements or experimental microwave dishes. The beef and red wine pie smelled divine.
A single road descends to the beach, which proves to be a shingle crescent with occasional sandy exposure and a plentiful supply of parking spaces. Cross-channel swims tend to start here, similarly the first Anglo-French telephone cable was laid between St Margaret's Bay and Sangatte in 1891. The village's pub is The Coastguard, a flint-coated lookout with a busy sun terrace whose major disbenefit is that climbing back home after downing your Shepherd Neame must be absolutely knackering. Meanwhile at the not-so-far end of the beach is a dramatic curl of four houses accessed by private road which is where Noel Coward used to live. He bought the last house (called White Cliffs) in 1945, and in seeking artistic seclusion bought the other three under a false name and invited his sister and aunt to move in. Ian Fleming was a regular visitor, as was the English Channel which at stormy high tides lapped against the back wall of Noel's bedroom.
I'd been warned this might happen, but while down on the beach at St Margaret's Bay my phone chirped into action with a text message saying "Welcome to France". I checked and sure enough my phone was now connected to 'Orange' rather than EE, no British mast having line of sight over the chalk rim. More worryingly it informed me "While you're here you'll automatically pay £2.59/day to access your UK plan", which after all the hassle I've been having with data back home was almost the last straw. Climbing a few streets brought the ridiculous response "Welcome back to the UK, we hope you had a great trip!", and I hope EE recognise it's impossible to visit France and come back in the space of 18 minutes so don't overcharge me.
Continuing along the coast has to be done at height, climbing the greensward to a gentle summit at the top of Granville Road. Here we find the Dover Patrol Monument, a stone obelisk erected to remember the sailors lost in the Straits during the First World War and later rededicated to similar sacrifice in the Second. Alongside is a small coastguard's lookout strategically located at Leathercoat Point, a minor headland that officially marks the spot where the English Channel becomes the North Sea. I walked carefully to the edge and tried to identify the French mainland in the haze on the horizon, and think I spotted a white stripe that was a beach rather than a ship. Closer to my feet I spotted a shrivelled bouquet of yellow and orange lilies, narrowly on the North Sea side, and stepped back rather more carefully after that.
The path ahead crosses undulating downland, again reminiscent of Beachy Head, with adjacent fields of grass rippling in the strong wind. A lot of weekend walkers and daytrippers were striding alongside me, the coast path being understandably popular on a bright spring day, most of them hiking in packs and the majority less than half my age. I let them pass while I scrutinised a tiny patch of purple orchids, although I suspect they'd have overtaken me anyway. And then the houses started, a single track of isolated homes with clifftop out front and farmland out back, one or two of which looked like they must have featured in either Grand Designs or Country Life. This continued for a good half mile before a golf club inevitably intruded, branded The Course On The Cliffs, after which the chalk finally faded away and the path descended to beach level.
The village ahead is Kingsdown, a classy enclave with a weatherboarded pub and widespread fury that developers want to turn local farmland into 70 new homes. No matter that the beachfront is lined by long private roads whose architects prioritised dawn-facing balconies and big-windowed breakfast rooms - the beneficiaries of that first landgrab don't want another. The beach here is ridged shingle with intermittent grasses, like a tamer version of Dungeness, and would be just as awkward to walk across were it not for a promenade laid all the way from here to Deal. The dogwalker count really ramped up when I reached Walmer Castle, most attractive of all the Napoleonic defences, and also previously blogged which meant I was finally back in familiar coastal territory.
Walmer has a less exclusive waterfront, and also one of England's busiest lifeboats which RNLI volunteers were keen to show off because their craft has been replaced this very week. The new one goes by the peculiarly inshore name of 'Hounslow Branch' in memory of Lorna Newman, a former resident of Heston in west London who left her entire estate to the charity. A plaque in Upper Walmer marks the supposed location of the first Roman invasion of Britain, i.e. Julius Caesar was here, and when you look at how easy it would have been to lay up a war fleet on the shingle beach it all makes perfect sense. Alas he arrived two millennia too early to enjoy a pizza from Roman's Retreat or "cakes, baps and offensively large Scotch Eggs" from Hut 55.
Deal has been visible for several miles, or at least its taller towers have if not its squat ugly castle. It's also rightly popular as a destination in its own right, the smart daytrip Dover can only dream of being, thanks to its quirky backalleys, browseable boutiques and foodie haunts. I'd love to have lingered but only had time to walk partwaydownthe pier before my timed train home, a £5 bargain as part of Southeastern's inaugural Network Weekend. I needed the sitdown but was also smiling because that was a much better walk than I was expecting and also another gap in my circumnavigation of the Kent Coast filled in. I'm sorry I can't yet bring you photos to show you what it looked like, but if I'd been faffing around with images and links I'd never have managed to write a dozen paragraphs before tumbling into bed so you're actually getting a good deal.
