Birling Gap and Newhaven Fort

Will has a little aromatherpay anti-nausea wristband we got him at a Holland & Barrett in London. It's got a pungent little ginger-scented sachet in it that he can smell when he feels a bit queasy. ("Where's my sniffer?" he says as he gets on the train.) He wore it on Friday's trip to Brighton, and as we drove to Newhaven, and again today.

First thing this morning we put a load of laundry in the little washer in our low-ceilinged kitchen, a little-front loader that's under the counter near the door. It's remarkably comforting, Kate said, to have the laundry machine in the kitchen. It's right there with you, washing away, instead of far away in some other room. We were thinking we'd hang the clothes out on the laundry line in the cottage's garden before we left. Kate set it for "Eco-wash" and "Energy Saver" and oddly enough almost two hours later we were still watching it go round, our knapsacks all packed, and wondering when we'd get out of here. Yes, we were trapped by a washing machine. Finally it ended,and despite the occasional spit of rain from the grey sky, I hung out the clothes.

First stop, Birling Gap: a place where the chalk cliffs get low enough that you can get down to the beach. It's not necessarily a world-famous place, but our friends Mark and Melissa had said it was special, and we needed a beach day after a week in the city. It only took us about 20 minutes to drive there, turning off the winding, narrow, no-shoulder, "main" road (an "A" road), in a small village called East Dean. You haven't really lived until you've been driving along a narrow trench of a road, a hedge on your left and the white line on your right, and suddenly ahead you see a double-decker bus coming towards you in the other lane.

Just be thankful you have a white line!

At Birling Gap we parked in a yard between two forlorn, lonely buildings by the sea, and a small, three-storey, unlovely steel stair led us out over the beach and down to it. It was spitting rain. Between the ocean before us, and the white cliffs towering over the sea in either direction along the shore, there was the beach: black. We descended the stairs and found the beach underfoot to be nearly 100% flint nodules: rounded and fractured lumps of flint, just as they have fallen out of the eroding cliffs. It was the largest pile of flint I had ever seen. Going closer to the cliffs, I discovered how a white cliff produces a black beach: the flint nodules are embedded in the chalk, like grapefruit-sized bubbles, although only along certain strata. From afar the cliffs look pure white; but near you see the lumps of flint that, after sections of the cliffs collapse and the soft chalk turns quickly to powder, are the only things that remain to make up a beach. They fracture in lovely conchoidal faces, revealing creamy grey with purple, blue and orange tints. It is a flint-knappers dream.

It was a clattery, slip-slidey sort of walk along this beach, and as at Brighton the waves rattled the cobbles as they receded. We found a small cave. We could hardly take a step without finding flints broken into beautiful shapes at our feet, glowing because they were wet with light rain. (Unfortunately a sign at the top clearly said we could take no rocks home with us.) There were slipper shells at every step: hardy little single-sided shells with a partition inside; their small ends fold around like the top of a little hood. There were also unfamiliar spearpoint-shaped, white, oval clamshells--although it didn't seem like they could ever have opened. Our seashore nature guidebook revealed them to be cuttlefish bones.

We found an overhang where some of the rocks were dry, and ate our lunch, unsure whether the cliff was likely to collapse on our heads in 5 minutes or five million years. Later we read the cliffs erode an average of a metre per year, so indeed we were temping fate by sitting under one.

It was apparent the tide was coming in, so we made our way back to the stair, and set out for a cliff-top walk east towards a lighthouse. The tops of the cliffs are not flat, but roll gently up to crests and down to troughs as you proceed along the coast. We ascended out of the Gap on a trail across the green carpet of grass that tops them. There was lots of wind off the sea and no fence.

It was a delightful, rolling, close-to-the-sky kind of walk. I saw swifts flying, and Kate botanized up the wildflowers. Gorse bushes and wildflowers grew everywhere that the treadway was not worn. Rabbit droppings were everywhere: so thick on the ground that there are either monster hordes of rabbits here in the night, or the droppings take years to decay. Perhaps both.

After we got to the lighthouse (the track running on clearly ahead of us down into another gap and then up to Beachy Head) we saw a line of rain coming from the west, covering and concealing first distant Newhaven, then in middle distance the mouth of the Cuckmere River, and finally hitting us as we returned to the car. Horizontal rain. Kate, a lover of Weather, was in her glory.

Bought chips at an outdoor wagon for the boys and took shelter within the public house "The Birling Gap" as they ate them. We shared the room with perhaps thirty other refugee walkers. They were a well-equiped lot, with nordic walking poles, nice rain gear and attractive packs. Oddly, for what was essentially a walk along an immense rolling lawn, most were wearing full leather hiking boots.

Before driving off we sat in the car and used its the manual to get straight about how to use the lights and windshield wipers. Clever car: it has a setting that wipes away the rain faster as you accelerate.

We had read that Newhaven had a local museum, so we drove there, but it was closed. So we headed up to the Newhaven Fort: a WWII fortification in the headland between the town and the open sea. No ruin, this was a fully active military installation sixty years ago, and, unlike fortifications that Canada and the US had on the west coast, had not been allowed to deteriorate. The rain had stopped, and the boys were amped as they crossed a bridge over a moat into this fortress in a hilltop. Just behind the crest of the hill everything had been hollowed out and brick walls built, with rooms dug into the hill on all sides. Ramps led up from a courtyard to the gun emplacements, where the wind was howling! The guns themselves were fixed in place, with all the small bits of the firing mechanisms removed, but a boy could still stand behind one and pretend he was firing it out to sea. Galen and Will explored every tunnel and staircase, went down in the magazines and all over the earthworks. Looking down on Newhaven we had a fine view of the Swinging Bridge opening on the Ouse river; a ship came out and dropped his pilot outside the breakwater. Whitecaps everywhere.

After leaving the Fort, we passed a cricket game in a park on the way back into town. We pulled in and watched for a bit. We saw a guy bowling and a batter by the wickets. We don't really know what was happening. Will was quite interested. We need to find someone who can explain the rules to us.

Last stop was a long, perfect, curving, orange beach we had spotted from the fort: on the east side of the mouth of the river. We drive over to Seaford and walked out from there. This beach was all orange: few flints, lots of rusty rocks. The waves were hitting the beach with such force that tiny pebbles would jump straight up out of the wave.

Returned home to find the laundry very wet. Hung it about the cottage and made dinner. Turned on the storage heaters, which would give us heat 12 hours later.