There is a cliff whose high and bending head

Looks fearfully on the confined deep

Bring me but to the very brim of it . . .

...From that place

I shall no leading need.

 

What follows is one of the most resonant scenes in English Literature. Poor Tom (who is really Gloucester's estranged son Edgar in disguise) leads his father part way up the 'horrible steep', convinces him that he stands on the brink. Renouncing the world, begging forgiveness from his son, the blind man hurls himself forward to a certain death. But Gloucester is deceived. He falls forward on the grass. Returning in the guise of a local peasant, Edgar persuades Gloucester he has fallen the height of ten masts. The old man's life is a miracle. He is purged of his despair. In a single scene the cathartic power of tragedy is expressed: an imaginary fall that restores us to solid ground.

Everything in Shakespeare's description suggests that Aycliffe, renamed after dramatist at least 200 years ago, is the setting he had in mind. Given that this is a key scene in a core work of Western Literature, one might expect it would be a favoured destination on the literary trail: a locus classicus, like the Brontë's Haworth or Wordsworth's lakes. But you are unlikely to meet a cultural tourist retracing Gloucester's steps. The cliff bears no plaques to its pedigree other than its name (and a King Lear Pub in the estate behind). While every adventitious biographical trace has been themed in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Industry has left this monument to the dramatist's conscious poetic powers virtually untouched.

The cliff may have escaped the deadening hand of the heritage business, but it has not been forgotten by history. A few hundred yards towards Folkestone are the remains of gun-emplacement. A little further on, a vast concrete acoustic ear looks out to sea, a means of detecting incoming planes before radar was invented. Behind, a Battle of Britain monument is planned. One of the closest mainland points to France, the cliff tops are studded with relics of our ambivalence to Europe.

The cliff is riddled with symbolism. Seven thousand years ago these chalk downs were separated from France. Now powerful forces are at work again, reversing the process. It was under Shakespeare Cliff that 2000 metres were dug of the first channel tunnel in 1880. The excavations were stopped due to fears of invasion, but coal was discovered in the process; 'Shakespeare colliery' became the first in the Kent coalfield. A century on, in 1974, tunnelling began again only to be halted by the oil crisis. Today that tunnel, which connects the upper cliff with the shoreline, is used by TransManche Link, the consortium responsible for building EuroTunnel.

A heap of office blocks, cars and fencing now surrounds the old tunnel entrance, the operational headquarters for TML. At the cliff foot diggers and bulldozers, scuttling around like giant steel crustaceans, have filled an artificial lagoon with almost five million cubic metres of spoil from the excavations undersea. A mile of new coastline has emerged, bringing England 250 metres closer to France. Half the chalk slopes have been scooped away.

On this, the most precipitous of the white cliffs of Dover, it is also possible to feel a kind of cultural vertigo. A headland that figures prominently in English Literature, that protrudes deep into national legend and dream, the view from Shakespeare Cliff looks out over the fractured myth of Englishness.

*

Most myths are compounded of cliche and inspiration, history and deceit, and the white cliffs of Dover are no exception. Bluff and obdurate, their significance hardly needs comment: they are the face Britain presents to the world: more specifically, the face England turns towards Europe.

The white cliffs look better from a distance. Indeed, the greater the distance the better. Walter Kent, the lyricist of their most celebrated song, who improbably put 'blue birds over/The white cliffs of Dover', was an American who had not been within 3,000 miles of the place. But reality never bothered a good myth. The cliffs loom larger, whiter, and sturdier in the imagination than they do in fact.

'The eyes of homecomers thank these historical cliffs', wrote Auden in the poem Dover 1937. One might add it is not only the homesick who are grateful, the sea-sick too. My own first impression was from a storm buffeted ferry in the 70s, as it fought the waves to enter Dover harbour. For an hour or more the white chalk matched the colour of my knuckles as I tried to retain my stomach contents by gripping the deck rails. In direct contrast to Gloucester's vertiginous image, from the seaward side, the cliffs have represented stability, a fixed reference point in a shifting, reeling world.

Their whiteness is also essential. It recurs constantly in depictions of English landscape, the plain ground on which the countryside's 'greenness' can be spread. Charles Kingsley compared the cliffs the 'soft limbs of Mother Hertha' (a Germanic earth goddess), and during the Celtic revival this whiteness is often associated with native druidic purity. A crude racial metaphor is also often at work.

Others have been disappointed. Sheltering in Dover Harbour just after the sinking of the Belgrano, Jonathan Raban found the cliffs 'maculated with grime, drained of colour, under a ragged fringe of green'. The whiteness can also stand for sickliness, a pallid constitution, an atrophied state.

Above all, the cliffs form natural defences. Julius Caesar discovered as much when he first planned invasion in 55BC and remarked 'This was no place for disembarking'. By Elizabethan times it was already commonplace to describe the cliffs as England's 'bulwarks', the channel as its 'moat'. Not that nature went entirely unassisted. Dover Castle is the most blatant military complex in the area. Later, when cannons rendered the walls vulnerable, a vast submerged Grand Redoubt was constructed on the Western Heights.

But this fortress mentality also had its critics. Cobbett mocked the Grand Redoubt in his Rural Rides: 'What reason had you to suppose that the French would ever come to this hill to attack it, while the rest of the country was so much more easy to assail?' Caesar caught on quickly too, and took his invasion forces to land on the shingle beach at Walmer a few miles up the coast.

These properties converge to make the white cliffs stand out as an evocative emblem of British Resistance. Talk to local historians and they will remind you how Dover has always been a 'front line' town, suffering Dutch Merchantmen, Papist armadas, Jacobin revolutionaries and Bosch Zeppelins.

It was in the Second World War that the white cliffs reached their highest emotional pitch, and again, distance flattered their effect. In 1940 an anglophile American, Alice Duer Miller, wrote a long sentimental poem called 'The White Cliffs' as part of a concerted campaign to get America into the war. It ran to eleven editions, formed the basis of a film, and encouraged other images: Churchill standing on the cliffs looking over 'Hellfire Corner', a Lancaster limping home, a cartoon showing Hitler furiously hurling his planes against the implacable white walls. Ironically, the cliffs are made into a rallying cry by Vera Lynn just at the moment air power renders them militarily redundant. Blitzkrieg placed most English cities on the front line.

But even geology conspires with the myth. Under a powerful microscope the white chalk is comprised of the skeletons of millions of tiny coccoliths, sea creatures laid down on the seabed some 60 million years ago. It is tempting to see the white cliffs as a kind of ancestral graveyard, white with the bones of the heroic dead, a shrine to national sacrifice.

If this myth has a rival, an enemy of equal symbolic weight, a tunnel to France is the obvious candidate. The fixed link was first posited by a French Farmer in 1751 and for two hundred years since, the French have been suspiciously keen, the English paranoiacally wary. From this side of the Channel, the link has been perceived as a conduit for rabies and revolution, an act of foreign subterfuge, almost rape.

It is easy to overplay the symbolism. After all, the channel tunnel is merely a long overdue recognition of fifty years of European economic and political integration. But EuroTunnel does little to dispel the wider resonances. The very name itself, implying a tunnel to the Urals, is a grandiose gesture. Company publicity constantly talks in mythic terms of 'joining Britain to the heart of Europe', of a cultural abridgement, of overcoming 'the great divide'.

They might be right. When, by the end of this year, the first passenger service begins through the twin-bore tunnel, trains will dip underground at Santerre and emerge half an hour later north of Folkestone. Travellers will no longer hang on the horizon for the sight of white chalk, no longer suffer the turbulent currents and the relief of dry land. We are witnessing the denouement of a titanic struggle between two historic myths. In that sense, it seems only poetic justice that EuroTunnel should undermine Shakespeare Cliff.

Shakespeare's profile should be hewn into the chalk, just as American presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore. The dramatist is a key propagandist for Britain's splendid imperial isolation after Henry VIII had broken from Rome, Mary had lost Calais, and Elizabeth engaged in war with Spain. He is still a key component in the corporate image of the trading nation: Great Britain Plc. Henry V is quoted at Tory Party conferences as a rallying cry. John of Gaunt's speech (in Richard II) could form a good lyric for a second rap single from Baroness Thatcher, capitalising on her success with the Gettysburg Address:

 

'This other Eden, demi-paradise

This fortress built by nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house . . . '

 

Now the moat is broken. The fortress has been breached. There is a poetic justice - or tragic irony - to this as well. It was Margaret Thatcher who, with President Mitterand, finally signed the treaty which allowed EuroTunnel to begin. Like her other great continental initiative - the Single European Market - the project was supposed to be free trade project, to leave England's cultural identity intact. On both occasions, she now appears like Faust, conjuring with demons that would tear her apart.

*

Back on Shakespeare Cliff, on a clear breezy day, the misty symbolism of nationhood quickly evaporates. Look across, and there are white cliffs on the French coast too. The continent is only a day trip away.

Nevertheless, there is something distinctly English about the white cliffs. First, they are exceptionally pure, some 98% calcium carbonate. Secondly, they are surprisingly rare. There are none in Scotland or Wales: a few in France, Denmark and Germany. Such coastal chalk cliffs are only to be found in Europe, but southern England has the monopoly.

The geology of the cliffs also gives rise to another peculiarly English landscape: ancient chalk grassland. Formed when the downs were deforested by slash and burn, then grazed with sheep or cattle, the thin chalky soil does not allow any single type of vegetation to predominate. The result is a stunning diversity. On average, 30 species of flora pack every square metre of chalk: spider orchids, wild beat, wild marjoram. This has led some to call ancient chalk grassland England's equivalent to the rain forest.

Squeezed between fingers of urban Dover and an abrasive sea, a thin strip of ancient grassland persists on Shakespeare cliff. The jackdaws and the rock samphire are still here, just as Edgar describes them in King Lear. And if one had to isolate a quality that makes Shakespeare particularly English, the outcrops of patriotic bombast are beside the point. One would look for his true Englishness in the texture of his language, the mix of wildness and cultivation, roughness and delicacy, a verbal variety itself rooted in local landscapes. This is true, above all, of King Lear: the open heath in the storm, the 'poor pelting farms', the flowers with which the mad king garlands his head.

Some 80 percent of ancient chalk grassland has disappeared in the last fifty years. As Twyford Down shows, the habitat is under constant threat. Over the last year a tumultuous change has also taken place on Shakespeare Cliff, but with less publicity, even though the site also has its sacredness. The council estate has lost a dozen houses and a school - demolished. The once quiet valley now swarms with men in hard hats and florescent vests. You have to watch out for traffic when crossing over to the coastal path. If a modern day Gloucester wanted to kill himself, he'd be better off throwing himself under a passing JCB.

A great white gash, smeared by rusty bulldozer tracks currently disfigures Shakespeare cliff, has sliced it in two. Unlike the mythic battle, this devastation does not come from some external threat. It has little to do with EuroTunnel or the fixed link. TML's offices here will soon be dismantled, the site replanted with native plants. Keen to win (or buy) public opinion, EuroTunnel has sponsored numerous conservation schemes.

Our own Ministry of Transport, however, has no such qualms. Equipped with compulsory purchase orders they have bulldozed an extension of the M20 to Dover Harbour, across cliff top sites of special scientific interest, over the objections of local residents, right through the centre of Dover, severing the town from its sea promenade. All this by way of compensating the Harbour authority and the Ferry companies for any loss of trade when EuroTunnel opens. In a few months time, Shakespeare Cliff will be another noisy if spectacular motorway verge.

This is not the first time the cliff has been betrayed. 18,000 tons of gunpowder blew a large section away to make a platform for the Dover to Folkestone Railway in 1843. When it comes to undermining emblems of Englishness, we are our own worse enemies.

Yet we cling to the wreckage. Two years ago year Dover Council opened a 'White Cliffs Experience' in town: an animatronic, multi-media attraction about the 'Heritage Coast'. The so-called 'historium' recreates scenes from the Roman invasion to World War II. The ferries get a big plug, but there's no mention of Gloucester's imaginary fall. Nor is the current destruction of the clifftops touched upon. Once again, our national heritage seems to consist of elevating images while burying the facts.

Meanwhile, if you want the 'Gloucester Experience' there is still a little time left to climb the real Shakespeare cliff. Looking over the brim, you may recall how a blind man found his feet by a leap of faith. Or perhaps you will remember the story of Lear, a tyrannical old English King, who only awoke from his madness when his daughter arrived here with liberating forces from France. Or you might just listen out for the sea quietly milling the shingle, before the cars drown it out for ever.

 

Published in the Independent on Sunday May 1993