- The Cliff Coast, and What It Is Made Of
- The Caves and Caverns, and Which Ones Are Entered
- The Rocks, the Stacks, and the Three Isles
- The Wind, and Why It Is Never Out of the Reckoning
- The Storms, and What a Bad One Does
- What Is Kept in the Caves
“The county faces the water and has written almost nothing down about the shore itself. We have a wreck law, a pilot roll and a customs house. We have no survey of our own cliffs, and the last man who tried to make one was told by three corporations that it was not wanted.”
The Cliff Coast, and What It Is Made Of
“Chalk to the east, shingle to the south, and nothing at all to the north but wall and water. Three coasts in forty miles, and a man who has worked one of them is a stranger on the other two.”
Kent has three coasts and they have nothing in common but the sea. The eastern shore is chalk, standing between two hundred and four hundred feet, running in a series of great white faces from the port northward to where the land drops toward the estuary. The southern shore is shingle: the ness, the level behind it, and a beach that moves. The northern shore is the estuary saltings, which is wall and creek and is described with the marsh because that is what it is. A company that has been told Kent is a coastal county has been told something true about three different places.
The chalk is not one wall. It is a run of faces separated by dry valleys that reach the sea and open as gaps, and every gap has a village in it, because a gap is the only way down. There are eleven such gaps on the eastern shore. Each holds between forty and three hundred people, a beach, a capstan, and no harbour of any kind. The boats are hauled up the shingle by a winch and are hauled up every night of the year, which is the single most laborious arrangement in the county and has never been improved on because there is nowhere to improve it to.
What the chalk does that inland chalk does not is fall. A cliff face loses a piece of itself every winter somewhere along the run, usually a few tons, occasionally a great deal more. The falls are not random. They come after a wet autumn followed by a hard frost, they come at the bottom of the face rather than the top, and every beach man on this shore can name the four or five places where the next one will be. The corporations have never marked any of them. Asked why, they say that a mark would have to be moved.
The largest fall within memory took about nine acres of the face down in a night. It left what the county calls the Warren, which is a mile and a half of tumbled chalk between the foot of the new cliff and the sea. Nothing has been built on it. It grows scrub, it is grazed in summer by two flocks, and it moves a little every year, so that the paths across it are redrawn by whoever walks them. It is also the only stretch of this coast where a party can get from the beach to the cliff top without using a gap, which is a fact the free trade worked out long before anybody wrote it here.
The practical shape of all this is that the eastern shore cannot be worked along its length. There is no path at the foot of the chalk except at low water, there is no road along the top except the one that keeps half a mile inland, and the gaps are the only places where the two meet. A party that wants to be somewhere on this coast at a particular hour must name the gap, go down it, and come back up it, and must know the tide before it starts down.
The one thing the shore has that the county does not discuss is what the falls uncover. A face that loses nine acres exposes whatever the face was standing over, and the chalk behind this coast is not solid: it holds voids, some of them cut and some of them not. Two of the four caves this coast is careful about were opened by falls, one in 4428 and one in 4566, both remembered in the gap and neither written down anywhere the county could find it. Neither was reported to anybody. Both were known to the nearest village inside a week, and the second of them is the Walled Hole, stopped at its mouth by that village within the week, at its own cost, without a word to the corporation whose ground it is.
The Caves and Caverns, and Which Ones Are Entered
“A sea cave is honest. It fills, it empties, you may know to the minute when to be out of it. What is behind the chalk is not a sea cave and does not fill, and that is the whole of why we are careful about the second sort.”
There are two kinds of hole in this coast and the county is exact about the difference even where it will say nothing else. A sea cave is cut by the water at the foot of the face, is open to the beach, fills at every high tide, and is empty of everything that is not bolted down. A cavern is in the chalk behind, is reached from a sea cave or from a fall or from a shaft that somebody sank, is dry, and holds whatever has been put in it. There are a great many of the first and the coast knows of nine of the second.
The sea caves are used and are not thought about. Boats shelter in two of them in a sudden squall. Gear is left in three between tides, never overnight. The beach men take children into the biggest one at low water in summer as a matter of local pride, it being a hundred and thirty feet deep and roofed like a nave. Nothing is stored in any of them below the spring tide mark, and the mark is known within a hand at every gap on this shore.
Cadman’s Hole is the cavern the coast is easiest about and is the one a company is likeliest to be taken to. It runs back about two hundred feet from a sea cave at the fourth gap, is dry the whole way, has a floor of rubble and old sand, and has been used for storage by four generations of a trade that does not write things down. The corporation at the nearest town has known about it for longer than that. It has never inspected it, on the stated ground that it has no officer whose business it is.
The Bellows is a sea cave that runs into a shaft, and in a heavy swell from the east it breathes: air is driven up the shaft and out of a hole in the turf four hundred yards inland, with a noise that carries to the village. The hole in the turf is fenced. The fence is maintained by the parish and is entered in the vestry book as the fence at the blowing hole, which is the only place in any Kentish parish book where a natural feature is treated as a thing to be kept enclosed.
The Long Gut is the one the trade will not use and the reason given is a good one. It is a sea cave that narrows and keeps going, does not obviously end, and does not fill evenly: the water comes up the back of it before it comes up the front, so that a party a hundred feet in is cut off from the mouth while the mouth is still dry. Two men were lost in it, one in 4531 and one in 4578, and neither was recovered. The gap above it has never asked anybody to close it and will tell a stranger exactly what it does.
And there is a fourth, which the coast will name and will not describe. It is behind a fall, it is the Walled Hole, it was stopped at the mouth by the village nearest it within a week of being opened, and the wall has been renewed three times in two hundred years by people who were not asked to and did not discuss it. What is known is that it is dry, that it goes further than a lantern shows, and that the air in it is wrong in a way two separate accounts describe in almost the same words. The parish keeps a lamp on the wall from October to March, on the parish account, under oil.
The Rocks, the Stacks, and the Three Isles
“Three pieces of ground off this coast and two of them are covered twice a day. The third has a chapel on it that nobody serves and a burial ground that nobody attends, which is a great deal of trouble for eleven acres.”
The Whelps are the first thing a hull meets coming down this coast from the north and are the reason the second stretch exists. They are a scatter of low rocks over about a mile and a half of water, a mile off the shore, covered at any tide above half and showing as a broken line of white at anything less. They have no soil, no height and no name for any individual rock except among the pilots, who have eleven names for them and use them constantly. Sowe Reef is the worse of the two dangers on this stretch, being a single ledge two miles west that covers at half flood. The noise they make in a swell is what they are called for, and the sound off Sowe Reef in the same weather is a good deal quieter, which is the whole of the trouble with it.
Beacon Rock is the only stack on this coast that a person may stand on. It is about the size of a small field, has perhaps forty feet of freeboard at its highest, and carries the stump of a light that was kept for a hundred and sixty years. It has not been kept for eighty. Why it was given up is a matter of record and is unedifying. The corporation that kept it and the corporation that paid for it stopped agreeing about which was which, and the argument outlasted the keeper. The Board has proposed rebuilding it twice.
The shore keeps one better light and talks about it very differently. Saint Elric’s Lantern stands on the Dover side above a worked landing, part beacon and part chapel, and the distinction is deliberately blurred. Its lamp is maintained because masters use it; its chapel is maintained because the coast has buried too many men whose families were left looking at that light from the land. The place is consequently spoken of as a promise to sailors’ widows as much as a navigational aid. A contribution to the lantern may be entered as oil, chapel money, or widow relief according to the book in which it appears, and nobody on the coast thinks the three purposes need separating. A company passing it by water sees a light. A family at Dover sees evidence that somebody has accepted responsibility for the men who sailed under it.
That double use is characteristic of the Kentish shore. A beacon that only guides is useful; a beacon tied to burial, relief and remembered loss becomes an institution. Saint Elric’s has no great jurisdiction and no officer of rank. It persists because pilots expect the light, the shore expects the chapel to answer when a body comes in, and the families of lost men expect the collection to be made without being asked. The coast contains larger works than this and few that explain it better.
Cold Isle is eleven acres, lies four miles out, and is the only real ground off Kent. It has turf, a spring that does not fail, the remains of a chapel with a standing gable, and a burial ground of about a quarter acre inside a wall that is still a wall. Who was there is not known with any certainty. The chapter at Canterbury holds two mentions of a cell on an island in its earliest act books, both before the Obedience, and has never been able to say whether they mean this one.
What is certain is that the ground is consecrated and that nobody attends it. That puts Cold Isle in the same condition as the Four Grounds that the chapter minutes every year, with the single difference that this one can be found. It has been raised at the chapter three times in a century, has been referred each time, and the referral fails for a reason that has nothing to do with doubt: there is no parish that will accept the isle, because accepting it means undertaking to reach it, and it is reachable for perhaps forty days in a year.
The landings go out to it all the same. Two boats from the nearest gap put a party on the isle in the first settled week of every summer, and what that party does is cut the turf back off the wall, clear the gable, and sit in the burial ground for an afternoon. Nobody has ever called it attendance. It has never been entered in any account. The boats are not paid. Asked about it, the gap says that somebody ought to go.
The isles are a place of work and a difficulty in equal measure. A party may be hired to go out to Cold Isle by an antiquary, by the chapter, or once within memory by an owner who believed a cargo had been landed on it. All three have the same problem, which is that the party may be there a good deal longer than it intended. The rule the boats keep is that nobody is left on the isle overnight, ever, for any fee, and the two men who have been left there by weather are both willing to say why the rule exists.
The Wind, and Why It Is Never Out of the Reckoning
“The wind that grows the fruit is not the wind that matters. Ours comes off the land nine days in ten and we are grateful for it. The tenth day it comes off the sea, and on the tenth day there is no harbour between the port and the estuary that a boat may run for.”
The prevailing wind in Kent is from the south-west, comes off the land, and is the reason the county is warm, dry and early. It is why the fruit grows, why the hop grows, and why the gardens can crop three times. Inland the county thinks of wind as weather. On the eastern shore it is not weather. It is the standing condition that everything else is arranged around, and the arrangement is entirely about the days when the wind is in the other quarter.
An easterly puts this whole coast on a lee shore. The sea is driven onto forty miles of chalk and shingle with no harbour of refuge on any of it: the port is the only place a hull may get into, and getting into it in an easterly is the thing the pilot roll exists for. A boat off one of the gaps in an easterly has three choices, which are to get ashore at once, to run for the port, or to stand out to sea and wait. Beach men will tell a company that the third is safer than it sounds and is the one their sons will not take.
The wind is also why the beaching works the way it does. Every boat on this shore is hauled out every night because a boat left at a mooring off a lee shore is a boat lost at some point in the first winter. The capstans at the eleven gaps are the heaviest permanent gear on the Kentish coast, are maintained by the gap in common, and are the one piece of property in these villages that nobody owns individually. Langdon Gap is the largest of the eleven, holds nine boats and about forty families, and keeps the heaviest capstan of them all. A family that will argue for a generation about a share in a boat will not argue about the capstan.
Ashore, the wind shapes what grows and what stands. There is no timber within a mile of the cliff edge on the eastern shore and no orchard within two. The villages in the gaps are built in the bottom of the gap and not on its shoulders, which looks like shelter and is. The roofs of the older houses on this coast are pinned in a way no inland Kentish roof is pinned. A party lodging in a gap in February will hear the difference before it sees it.
The wind has one other consequence a company should have in mind, which is that it governs sound. A village in a gap hears everything that happens on its own beach and nothing at all that happens on the beach at the next gap, a mile away, because the chalk shoulders between them carry nothing, which is why a bad night at Langdon Gap is not heard at the next beach. Conversely, in an easterly, the whole run of the coast hears the sea and hears nothing else. Both facts have been used, by the trade and by other people, and the second is the reason the closed months are the closed months for reasons besides the water.
The county keeps no record of the wind and the trade keeps a very good one. Every boat book at every gap notes the quarter of the wind at the start of the day, for the plain reason that it decides whether there is a day. Those books go back further than any official series of any kind on this coast, they are in eleven different hands in eleven villages, and to anybody who wanted to know what the weather off Kent has actually done for two hundred years they are the whole of the answer. They have never been read together.
The Storms, and What a Bad One Does
“A gale takes the boats. A storm takes the beach. We have had four of the second sort since my grandmother and the parish is still paying for the last of them.”
The county distinguishes a gale from a storm and the distinction is practical rather than meteorological. A gale is a hard blow that stops the boats, closes the crossing for a day or two, and does damage that a village mends itself. A storm is what happens when a hard blow from the east meets a spring tide, and it is a different order of event: it moves shingle, it takes the foot out of cliffs, it puts water over the sea wall on the level, and it is remembered by name for a century afterwards.
There have been four such storms in the last eighty years and the coast can date all four without looking anything up. What they did is the same every time in different proportions. The ness moved. Two or three of the gaps lost boats off the beach, which is to say off dry land, because the sea came up past the capstans. A stretch of the chalk face came down. The level flooded at the known places and stayed flooded for the better part of a week. And the wreck lists for those four years carry between nine and nineteen entries apiece against a usual three.
What a storm does to the marsh is set out with the levels and is a matter of the wall. What it does to the eastern shore is different and is less discussed: it takes the beach away. Shingle that has been in front of a gap for a generation goes north in a night and comes back over the following four or five years, or does not come back, and a gap whose beach has gone is a gap that cannot haul its boats. Two of the eleven have had to move their capstans within memory for exactly that reason, at a cost the corporations would not meet.
The parishes have one arrangement against all of this and it is the same at every gap. Nothing is stored on the beach that cannot be carried up the gap by two people in a quarter of an hour. Every family on the shore keeps the arrangement, it is never written in any book, and it is taught to children before they are taught to swim. A company that leaves its gear on a beach in this county overnight in February has broken a local rule it was never told about, and will be told about it afterwards at some length.
The other arrangement is the watching. In a storm week every gap on this coast keeps somebody awake, at a fire, above the beach, all night, and the duty goes round the families in an order that nobody can produce and everybody knows. What that watch is for is stated plainly enough: a hull driven onto this shore in the dark has perhaps twenty minutes, and twenty minutes is how long it takes to get a line to a beach if there are already people on the beach. It is also, and the gaps do not say so, the same watch the landings keep over the foreshore plots.
A storm is the one weather in Kent that will actually stop a commission dead. The roads on the level flood and stay flooded. The gaps are unreachable from the sea and difficult from the land. The crossing does not run and the packet calendar simply stops, with the entries carried forward and the whole road backing up behind them. The houses that work this county write a storm clause into every coastal commission taken between October and March, and the clause is not about danger. It is about who pays for the days.
What Is Kept in the Caves
“There are three things in a cavern on this coast. The trade puts one there, the village puts the second there, and the third was there before either of them, which is why we do not take lights into the back of any of them.”
What the trade keeps in the caverns is no secret to anybody in the county and is worth stating plainly because a company will be shown it. Spirits, tobacco and silk, in transit, for a matter of days or weeks, in Cadman’s Hole and in two others, never in the Walled Hole. It is not hidden with any great care. The riding officers know the holes, have been into them, and the working arrangement is that a cargo found is a cargo seized and a cargo not found is a cargo nobody was looking very hard for. Everybody concerned regards this as satisfactory.
What the villages keep in them is older and is not spoken of in the same tone. Every one of the nine known caverns holds, somewhere in it, a walled or stacked recess that is not the trade’s and is not opened. What is in those recesses is what came ashore that the barns would not take: the coast’s own account is that a barn is for what may be claimed and a cavern is for what may not. A company that asks a gap what is in its cavern will get the trade’s half of the answer, courteously and completely, and will be walked back out.
The distinction between the two is kept physically. In every cavern the coast uses, the trade’s ground is the front and is lit. The other ground is the back and is not. There is no wall and no mark in most of them. There is simply a point past which the lanterns are set down rather than carried, and every man in that trade knows where the point is in every hole he works, and none of them has ever been told it by anybody who gave a reason.
The oldest thing in any of them is at the back of the third, and it is the nearest this coast comes to a shrine. It is a cut ledge with a lamp bracket over it, the bracket is older than the trade that uses the front of that cave, and there is a lamp in it, kept as the lamp on the wall of the Walled Hole is kept. Who fills the lamp is not a question the gap will answer. That it is filled can be established by anybody willing to go in twice a fortnight apart, which is what one riding officer did through the winter of 4591, and he wrote what he found in his own book and did not report it to anybody.
The fourth cave, the Walled Hole, holds nothing anybody has put there. That is the whole of what distinguishes it and is why the county treats it differently from the other eight. A cavern in use is a cavern somebody is in every few weeks, and the coast holds, without ever quite saying so, that a hole with people going in and out of it is a hole that stays quiet. The Walled Hole itself has had nobody in it for two hundred years except the three parties who renewed the wall, and the lamp on the outside of that wall is lit for the same reason the plot lanterns are lit.
The caves are the most dangerous kind of commission available in Kent, and not for the obvious reason. The tide and the roof are known quantities and the trade will give a party exact instructions about both for nothing. The danger is that a band hired to establish what is in a cavern will be given every assistance as far as the point where the lanterns go down, will find the assistance stop there without a word being said, and will have to decide for itself whether to go on with nobody from the county behind it. Three companies have. Two came back with nothing and the third did not come back at all.