Seven Sisters Cliffs, Sussex

Interesting facts

In 1926 developers planned a new town on the cliff tops, and conservationists, Rudyard Kipling among them, had one month to raise £17,000 to buy the land instead.

Film crews often use the Seven Sisters to stand in for the White Cliffs of Dover, because the Dover cliffs are protected from erosion and are slowly turning green.

The chalk was laid down on the sea floor in the Late Cretaceous, roughly 80 million years ago; the cliffs are a protected geological site for their chalk sections.

Each dip between the crests has its own name too, from Short Bottom and Limekiln Bottom to Flathill Bottom and Michel Dean.

In the stormy winter of 2014 the cliffs at Birling Gap lost about seven years' worth of erosion in only two months.

In 1999 the old Belle Tout lighthouse, weighing some 850 tonnes, was slid 17 metres back from the crumbling edge on greased beams pushed by hydraulic jacks.

The coastguard cottages at Cuckmere Haven were built soon after the coastguard service was founded in 1822; the cliff in front of them has since retreated more than 30 metres.

Until the 1400s a village called Exceat stood where the country park centre is now; it was abandoned after the Black Death, and a single church stone survives.

At low tide the wreck of the Polynesia, a German sailing ship that ran aground in 1890 carrying sodium nitrate, emerges from the beach near Cuckmere Haven.

The cliffs and downland from Seaford to Beachy Head form a Site of Special Scientific Interest of about 1,109 hectares, protected for both rare wildlife and geology.

Why it is worth it

The Seven Sisters are a run of white chalk cliffs on the Sussex coast between Seaford and Eastbourne, where the rolling South Downs meet the English Channel and are simply sliced off by the sea. Seen from the side, the cliff top rises and falls in a series of rounded crests separated by dry valleys, so that the coast looks like a row of sheets hung out on a line. The name promises seven, but count the summits from west to east and there are eight: Haven Brow, the highest at about 77 metres, then Short Brow, Rough Brow, Brass Point, Flagstaff Point, Flat Hill, Baily's Hill and Went Hill Brow.

The cliffs stay dazzlingly white because they never stop falling. The soft chalk retreats on average by a few tens of centimetres a year, but unevenly, in sudden collapses after storms and heavy rain, and each fall exposes a fresh face before grass or weathering can dull it. That same instability is why the best views are from a distance rather than from the crumbling edge.

The classic view is from the west, across the mouth of the Cuckmere at Cuckmere Haven, where a row of former coastguard cottages stands in the foreground and the whole sequence of crests lines up behind. From there a cliff-top walk of about 6 km follows the switchback of summits east to Birling Gap, a break in the cliffs; beyond it the old Belle Tout lighthouse sits on the next hill, and then comes Beachy Head, its lighthouse standing in the sea below the headland. The land behind forms the Seven Sisters Country Park, part of the South Downs National Park. The cliffs have been a film set many times, from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Atonement to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Getting there

The western end of the cliffs is about 4 km from Seaford, which has a railway station; Eastbourne lies beyond the eastern end. London Gatwick Airport (LGW) is about 50 km away. Local buses run from the stations at Seaford and Eastbourne to Exceat, at the entrance to the Country Park, and to Birling Gap.

From the encyclopaedia

The Seven Sisters are a series of chalk sea cliffs on the English Channel coast, and are a stretch of the sea-eroded section of the South Downs range of hills, in the county of East Sussex, in south-east England. The Seven Sisters cliffs run between the mouth of the River Cuckmere near Seaford, and the chalk headland of Beachy Head outside of Eastbourne. The dips or swales that separate each of the seven crests from the next are the remnants of dry valleys in the chalk South Downs which are being gradually eroded by the sea.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Seven Sisters Cliffs, Sussex

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia