The Seven Sisters

The Channel is that silver strip of sea which severs merry England from the tardy realms of Europe.

--Unknown author, found in "Church and State Review" from 1863

Have you ever seen the beginning of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, right when they're getting away from the portkey and heading to the tent village, and then to the Quidditch world cup arena? Have you ever looked at the background right there? Probably not (I certainly hadn't until my teacher pointed this out yesterday), but it you'd like to check, it can be seen in this video right around the 5:55-6:10 minute mark.

Or have you heard the song "(There'll Be Bluebirds over) The White Cliffs of Dover"? It was a popular during WWII, sung by Vera Lynn.

Or have you ever heard of The White Cliffs, by Alice Duer Miller? I actually have a copy on my dresser at home, as it was one of my grandmother's favorite poems (that's what it is, a long narrative poem covering the time span between 1914 and 1940), and it was given to me when she passed away. It's a lovely book, sort of a dark blue. I haven't read it yet. I do believe there's a movie based on it, though.

Well, I didn't go to Dover, but it's only in the next county over to the east (Dover is in the county Kent; Brighton and this University are in the county Sussex, but they're side-by-side in southeast England), and the chalk cliffs are all part of the same formation. We started off in Eastbourne, actually, which is only a short bus ride off campus--well, one bus to get into Brighton, and then another bus to get to the eastern countryside, but it's only like half an hour's journey total.

The Seven Sisters are chalk cliffs, and when I say chalk cliffs, it's hard to picture exactly how beautiful and impressive they are, but maybe this picture will help:

Even that doesn't fully capture it. These are breathtakingly gorgeous. Doesn't the water look Mediterranean here? It's the English Channel. In fact, you can see these chalk cliffs from France, although you can't really see France from this point on the coast (I think Dover is the closest point between England and France, which is another reason why it gets a lot of attention). Our guide told us that during WWII, you could see the smoke from bombings in France from the cliffs. I found this incredibly interesting, but then, I love history.

We had to get up very early on Sunday morning considering how tired we all had been from Stonehenge and Bath the day before, but it was worth it. It was awesome in the most literal, old-fashioned, not-meant-in-the-casual-yeah-that's-awesome-context way. Epic would be a good word for it, actually.

This is the first place we went--the Beachy Head pub, located right off Beachy Head (it's the first cliff before the Seven Sisters begin). It was a charming place of window-panes, weathered gray wood, mismatched chairs and fireplaces.

They were serving Sunday Roasts, so that's what most of us got. You ordered at the bar and your table got a wooden spoon painted with a number to stick into the cutlery holder.

I loved to look out the window--fresh air, green fields of sheep, small brown buildings with exposed external timbers (Tudor-style). It's like that through a lot of England, so far as I've been able to tell. The frequent rain is what makes it so green everywhere.

I ordered a turkey roast and (although I would have liked tea) (or milk) (or anything with flavor and substance) tap water, and it was at the table I shared with a few other kids and one of the guides fairly quickly.

So: slices of turkey in a savory brown gravy. Carrots cooked whole. Beans, peas, broccoli, cauliflower boiled and piled on the plate. A sausage patty that I actually ate and enjoyed (they're usually not my favorite things; I like the little smokey types better, and those ones that are like really big little smokeys and you cut them into halves and fry them. Does anybody know what I'm talking about?), and then a hot dog-like sausage wrapped in a piece of bacon, both resting on top of the turkey. Roasted potatoes. Parsnip chips. And a Yorkshire pudding, drizzled with gravy. I had no idea that a Yorkshire pudding was just a batter cooked into something akin to a bread bowl, but it was delicious and I want to try and make it at home sometime. Basically, it's a pancake batter--eggs, flour, milk, salt, oil--ladled into a large, greased muffin tin and baked in a very hot oven. Way back when everybody in England had like twelve kids and they were mostly all poor, serving Yorkshire puddings with a little gravy was how families would make more expensive foods, like meat, stretch further. They'd serve the cheap-to-make puddings first and let the kids fill up on them, then give everybody a smaller portion of the meat than they would need if they hadn't had the bread first. Anyway. It was a very good meal, except for the potatoes, which were overly mushy and oddly sweet. I don't want my potatoes to be sweet unless they're proper sweet potatoes with butter and brown sugar and maybe cinnamon if I'm feeling adventurous.

Seemed a bit pricey, at 7.95 (conversion to dollars: $12.45), but then, it was a lot of food, and it was good. Moving on now.

The best word to describe seeing the English Channel from on top of these delightfully green hills is hard to find. I could say majestic, but I'll need that later on; I could say breathtaking, but I might need that later, too.

So, let's settle for beautiful, sweeping, color-saturated.

The water is very blue, and where it's not bright blue, it's foaming white against the cliff-face. Very lovely to see.

I can see where this place would have been an excellent thinking spot back before there were so many people here.

I liked it.

The rest of the group liked it, too. I must've taken about ten million goofy pictures with about fifteen different cameras through the day--everybody wants pictures!

It is a long walk--six to seven miles going up hills steep enough to make your legs burn and your lungs tighten, followed by going down hills steep enough that you have to take tiny, quick steps with your knees deeply bent, your toes hurt from being jammed into the tops of your shoes, and you worry about falling. No matter how slow you try to go, you end up practically galloping down the final quarter of the hill with your backpack bouncing behind you. Gravity--1; Students--0. The wind was stiff and against us (at least it kept our hair back), and it was chilly, but for those of us who stuck it out the whole way (we lost ten students about midway through), well...it was worth it. Even if we did get sunburned a little.

Yes, it occasionally is sunny for entire days here. Not frequently. But it does happen.

This black marble circle was warm and shiny from the sunshine, and it was on top of the very first hill.

It has the distances to the world's major cities engraved on it in gold. It's 5,622 kilometers to NYC--that's about 3,493 miles. Which is roughly how far my first flight will be to get from London to JFK in December. (Ok, I just looked it up exactly, and from one airport to the other it's 3,446.37 miles. In case anybody was curious.)

The inner circle is pointing to things that are in Britain, like the Seven Sisters and the Isle of Wight.

This was once a watchtower. If you think about it, this would have been an excellent place to see what was coming from the French side, considering how the British and the French can never have a simple, neutral-ish relationship but always have to be either attacking each other or being best friends. It's kind of like the British and Americans. Maybe it's just a British thing; they do seem to be the common denominator here.

Beachy Head is one of the most notorious suicide spots in the world, and consequently several crosses like this dot the cliff edge. Apparently only the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and this one place in Japan surpass it in suicide rates. It's a terribly unfortunate thing to be known for...on the other hand, I bet the locals get good ghost stories out of it.

Well, that just made me sound incredibly callous. I apologize. DISCLAIMER: I do not advocate jumping off cliffs in any way, shape, or form (including bungee jumping stuff and mountain climbing)...except when it's 6:00am and I've been up all night working on a thirty-page paper due at ten and I still only have twenty pages. That makes not only me want to jump off a cliff, but probably makes my roommate and parents and anybody else who comes within range of me want to do the same.

But that's the only exception.

You may have noticed that Beachy Head is definitely not very beachlike. While beaches in this part of England are very different from the beaches where I'm from, even English people will agree that this isn't a beach. It's called Beachy Head because it was once called Beauchef/Beaucheif in the 1200-1300s, when the Norman influence on naming things was very strong. Then the pre-Norman Britons who actually lived there corrupted the pronunciation (I expect it was on purpose; the British are snide like that to the French. Then the French are snide like that to everybody) until it became Beachy Head by the 1700s. Wikipedia told me this, but it was well-referenced.

"Beauchef/Beaucheif" means beautiful headland.

And rightly so, because it really is beautiful. The lighthouse is to prevent ships from running into the cliff. I suppose the bright white rock wall wasn't quite enough at night.

This is water. Not the sky. The water reflecting the sky. Glorious, isn't it?

I have no idea how this lighthouse is serviced. There is a zipline between the cliff and the front of the lighthouse, but that cannot be practical.

It doesn't matter, though. I love this little lighthouse. It looks brave and lonely and very Atlantic to me. I wish it could be pen pals with my lighthouses at home.

This lighthouse is actually on top of the hill (obviously, since you can see some of the people I was with walking towards it) but it's very short and I'm not actually a hundred percent sure they actually light it up. It seems kind of housey, and leads directly into a little courtyard with a snack stand.

And it had a blue door and a little red lamp in the upstairs window, so naturally I fell in love with it immediately.

I loved how bright the umbrellas were. The landscape was super-saturated with blues and greens and white, so the reds and orange really popped.

It's like the Secret Garden 2.0: The Cliffs. In which Mary, Colin, and Dickon, on holiday together, discover a pretty gate which leads them to the chalk cliffs of Dover, and must learn about being joyful and full of life somewhere other than the garden.

Sorry. I can stop that now.

Why look, it's the Shire right after Frodo--no, wait, I just said I'd stop that.

Pretty, though.

We spent a long time leaning off this cliff, bellies pressed against the grass and little white pebbles, throwing rocks towards the water below. We watched them fall...and fall...and fall, so far that the wind caught them and curved them under the rock face. We never managed to see them hit the water.

There are thousands of small white pebbles on this particular hill, and people take them and make them into designs. Mostly there were hearts and peace signs and KATIE <3>

The pebbles, by the way, are chalk. They'll easily write in white on your hands; I colored a small stick entirely white, just because.

One of the next hills has steps built off it because there's a bit of beach up beside the cliff. There was a little cafe at the top of the hill where some of us got cake.

Mine was maple butter cake, and it was delectable. The cake part was a lot like coffee cake, but the icing was mapley and buttery and brown sugary and had pecans and walnuts in it.

Sara didn't have such good luck with hers. She ordered flapjack, just to check it out since obviously British flapjacks don't equate with American flapjacks...because in America flapjacks are pancakes. It was very dry and salty, which didn't go well with the fruit and oats part. I know this because I had some. Our guide tasted it too, though, and promised that flapjack is usually good and this was just a bad sample.

Here's the beach below--keep in mind, it was only about 63 degrees out and the water was frigid, so I don't know why people were swimming in it.

But the rocks were glistening and the water looked glittery, and that made me quite happy.

It's not my beach. But it'll do.

There are blackberries everywhere we go, and there's no restriction on not eating them or real reason not to--so we did. I love picking blackberries. It reminds me of being at my grandparents' house.

There were lots of old wooden fences and gates and little paths

but mostly there were fields.

A couple girls got misplaced and we had to wait for them to catch up. So I read Winnie-the-Pooh. It felt very appropriate.

This fence goes nowhere and holds nothing in, so I'm not sure of its function. However, it is very photogenic. Can you imagine taking senior pictures out here? One of the girls in our group said she wanted her wedding pictures done here, and although she was joking, I bet it's been done before. The Seven Sisters seem to be popular with couples (we didn't see many actually climbing, but there were LOTS milling around Beachy Head) holding hands and taking kissing pictures and being cute.

Another one of the girls in the group turned to walk backwards for a minute and fell rear-first into this thistle bush. She now says that she does not know how Eeyore possibly eats these things all the time without dying. I say that maybe that's why he's always gloomy.

You walk right through cows and sheep, in the same pasture. This wouldn't happen in a national park in America, because some teenager would have managed to vandalize a cow or something, and PETA would've freaked out and demanded equal rights for grazing cows and yeah.

This cow snorted at me, but all I could think was

"The friendly cow all red and white,

I love with all my heart:

She gives me cream with all her might,

To eat with apple tart.

She wanders lowing here and there

And yet she cannot stray,

All in the pleasant open air,

The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass

And wet with all the showers,

She walks among the meadow grass

And eats the meadow flowers."

It's from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. You very possibly recognize it.

This sort of made me want to turn to my mother and giggle and say "Can't go over it, can't go under it, got to go through it!" like in the kid's book We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. But this would be impossible, since my mother's over 3000 miles away, and besides that it's a lapse in logic, as we are not going through the fence. We are, in fact, going over it, so I can't say that we can't go over it. But I thought it anyway.

I guess a gate would have been too much trouble to put in?

This is what you find when you finally come to the end of the trail, utterly exhausted and with aching legs. The pictures I took really don't display well just how steep and uneven these hills are--and if I forgot to mention before, there are actually eight of them. Whoever came up with the Seven Sisters name apparently couldn't count.

Hello, autumn.

It was nice to catch a glimpse of red berries and a quiet green field on the way to the bus stop.

It all looked very pretty in the late afternoon light.

Yes, I think it really was a lovely, lovely day.