What about your trip

In Dover, the cliffs are white. The cliffs, massive walls of chalk, rise up straight from the grey-blue waters of the English Channel. This massive wall stands at the closest point to continental Europe, just 22 miles from the coast of France, and has for the last millennium kept all invaders from English soil. More important than physical defence, though, is the emotional place that the white cliffs have in the geography of the English psyche. In the days before planes flew vacationers back and forth from Mallorca and trains sped under the Channel, an Englishman returning home in Europe would most likely get his first glimpse of his homeland on a ferry from Calais, and the first thing he would see was those white cliffs. For England, the white cliffs symbolize home.

I’d been wanting to see the white cliffs since arriving in London. A psychologist might suggest it is to fill an emotional need upon returning to the land of my ancestors, that I need to see this symbol of home to find my place here in my ancient and current home. I would probably counter that I just thought it was cool.(...)

I came out on the waterfront and got my first really good look at the cliffs rising up above the town. The centre of Dover is in a valley in the cliffs, making it a natural port. To the East and the West though the cliffs tower up above the water.

Walking up the path I got my first close look at the cliffs. I ran my finger along the cliff face, and it came away covered with white chalk dust. “Just like back in school,” I thought.

Nowadays, I am sure that kids in school use whiteboards and dry erase markers, or electronic presentation boards or maybe even some manner of technology where they text their answers to the front of the class, but back when I was in school we had black boards and white chalk. Chalk always seemed to break into pieces when you tried to write with it. It seemed so frail. I looked up at the cliff face rising above me, and wondered how often chunks of frail chalk came falling down.

Often, it turns out. The cliffs recede about 2 to 5 cm a year, and large fractures can cause up to a metre of cliff face to careen down into the ocean at a single time. In fact, visitors are warned to stay a few metres back from the cliff face just in case. Actually, visitors aren’t warned. Some visitors, those that read the correct brochure are warned. The rest of us only find out about these warning post trip when researching about the cliffs online for our blogs.

While chalk is frail, it is also very hard, which anyone who has been hit in the head by a flying piece of chalk can attest to. How a substance can crumble in one case and become rock hard in the other is a mystery to science, and if I recall correctly it is one of the main discoveries that scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are hoping to unravel.

Thinking of this dual property of chalk while reading the BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS sign, and decided that I didn’t want a big chunk of Dover chalk hitting me in the head. I imagine that it would probably hurt exponentially more than a small piece of blackboard chalk.

2nd part

Greg Wesson (posted on 28-10-2008)