On The Edge Stock Image

Sweeping panorama of british chalk cliff coastline with distant people standing on the very edge. Contemplative, dramatic moody sky. Beachy Head. From the French beau chef (“beautiful headland”), Beachy Head is a four-mile bulge of white chalk coastline stretching from Eastbourne—a Victorian resort town referred to by the locals as “God’s Waiting Room” for its preponderance of retirees—to Birling Gap, a hamlet that was a popular smugglers’ haunt in the eighteenth century. Beachy Head is the sea-sliced eastern end of Kipling’s beloved “blunt, bow-headed, whale backed Downs,” a sixty-mile chain of chalk hills formed when the African continent bumped into Europe some 50 million years ago, folding and lifting the chalk sea bed over a period of 30 million years. At the foot of the last of the hills of the Downs, in the village of Meads, the South Downs Way begins, a 100-mile path that meanders the length of the Downs from Eastbourne to Hampshire.