White Cliffs of Dover
Interesting facts
- Over the past 150 years the cliffs have retreated by roughly 22 to 32 cm a year, several times faster than the 2 to 6 cm estimated for earlier millennia.
- In places the chalk beds behind the cliff face are up to 500 metres thick, laid down at a rate of only about half a millimetre a year.
- In 2001 a section of cliff roughly the size of a football pitch broke away and crashed onto the shore below.
- Ravens returned to nest on the cliffs in 2009, after an absence of about 120 years.
- During the Napoleonic Wars, tunnels were cut into the chalk beneath Dover Castle to house around 2,000 extra soldiers.
- In the summer of 1940 reporters gathered on Shakespeare Cliff to watch the dogfights of the Battle of Britain play out over the Channel.
- Exmoor ponies graze the clifftop as living lawnmowers, keeping scrub in check so that orchids and other chalk-grassland flowers can thrive.
- Around 30 species of butterfly have been recorded on the cliffs, along with peregrine falcons, fulmars and kittiwakes nesting on the ledges.
- Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach, written in 1851, is set on the shore below the cliffs, looking out towards the coast of France.
- Eric Johnson's guitar instrumental Cliffs of Dover won the 1992 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
Why it is worth it
The White Cliffs of Dover stand on both sides of the port of Dover for about 13 km, a wall of chalk up to 110 metres high facing the narrowest part of the Channel. On a clear day France is visible 32 km away, and from France the cliffs are visible in turn. They are made of the skeletons of coccoliths, microscopic algae that settled on the floor of a warm Cretaceous sea between about 100 and 66 million years ago, compacted into soft white rock. Dark bands of flint, formed from the silica of sponges and plankton, run across the face in horizontal lines. The same chalk continues on the far side as the cliffs of Normandy's Alabaster Coast; the two shores were joined until floods from a great ice-dammed lake broke through the land bridge hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The cliffs are the first sight of England from the sea and have been read as a symbol for as long as people have written about them. Julius Caesar, arriving in 55 BC, found them lined with armed Britons and sailed on to land elsewhere. The old name Albion is thought to come from the Latin for white. Shakespeare set a scene of King Lear on a Dover cliff. In the Second World War they were the welcome sight for troops returning from Dunkirk, and Vera Lynn's 1942 recording of The White Cliffs of Dover made them a national emblem; she campaigned at 100 to help buy the clifftop for the nation.
The tops are chalk grassland, protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and Special Area of Conservation, with rock samphire on the slopes, wild flowers on the turf and chalkhill blue butterflies in July and August. The National Trust looks after much of this coast and runs a visitor centre on the cliffs. Nearby are the Fan Bay Deep Shelter, a set of Second World War tunnels opened to visitors in 2015, and the Victorian South Foreland Lighthouse above St Margaret's Bay, which once warned ships off the Goodwin Sands. Between Dover and Folkestone, below Shakespeare Cliff, Samphire Hoe is a nature reserve built from the chalk dug out of the Channel Tunnel. Dover Castle, founded in the eleventh century, crowns the heights above it all.
Getting there
The cliffs flank the town of Dover in Kent; the National Trust visitor centre is about 3 km from the town centre. London Southend Airport (SEN) is about 67 km away across the Thames estuary. The best view of the cliffs as a whole is from the sea, from a ferry crossing to or from France.
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From the encyclopaedia
The White Cliffs of Dover are the region of English coastline facing the Strait of Dover and France. The cliff face, which reaches a height of 350 feet (110 m), owes its striking appearance to its composition of chalk accented by streaks of black flint, deposited during the Late Cretaceous. The cliffs, on both sides of the town of Dover in Kent, stretch for eight miles (13 km). The White Cliffs of Dover form part of the North Downs. The cliffs are part of the Dover to Kingsdown Cliffs Site of Special Scientific Interest and Special Area of Conservation. The top of the cliffs hosts a chalk grassland ecosystem with an abundance of bird, flower, and butterfly species.
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