APR 2021 | words on nature

the Aftertaste of Place

About a week in winter spent by the sea

The Aftertaste of Place

The closing sequence in Joe Wright’s cinematic rendition of the 2001 novel Atonement, by Ian McEwan, is of the sea. Keira Knightley’s Cecilia Tallis and James McAvoy’s Robbie Turner tease the foaming waves and embrace in the wind on a shimmering pebble beach. They’re lovers parted by war and never permitted a reunion or old age. But in this alternate life by the sea, they’re cradled in the warmth of the sun. Behind them, the undulating cliffs of the Seven Sisters of Sussex rise together against the waves, a monument of the lives that were beaten, eroded, and lost.

In the winter of 2016, I bought a one-way train ticket from Edinburgh to Brighton. I was in the midst of preparing for final semester exams as a third-year geography student at Edinburgh University when I felt a familiar itch to be by the sea. Why Brighton seemed the place to go is still a mystery to me. Perhaps a classmate mentioned it once or maybe I read about it in passing. Regardless, I arranged a one-week stay at the Seadragon Backpackers and arrived with my camera, a book, and some clothes the day after my last exam in tranquil mid-December.

I travel light, in baggage and in knowledge of the place I’m going. Oftentimes, this means I would spend the first hour at my destination scouring a map and circling places of interest. Then I would set off connecting the dots, wandering from one circled place to another, exploring and detouring as I moved towards the next promising thing. It mattered that I glimpsed the iconic and especially the quotidian, and sometimes, I glimpse the extraordinary by way of a well-timed tip.

The Seven Sisters was one such instance. On the second to last day of my stay in Brighton, I got up and ate my usual cinnamon oatmeal breakfast. That day, having already strode the streets and rows of Brighton proper twice over, I had even less idea of where to go. It seemed like a day for stillness, so I opted for a quiet day at the beach. Saying hello to the receptionist on my way out, I felt suddenly nostalgic and lingered for a chat. I thanked him for the stay and gave a lackluster response when he asked what I had planned to do that day. Then came a question that was at once innocent and laden, for surely, he knew he could sell me something quite special.

“Why don’t you go see the Seven Sisters?”

Down by Brighton Beach, I followed the receptionist’s instructions and boarded the eastbound #12 bus towards Eastbourne. For the hour that we drove along the East Sussex shoreline, stratocumulus clouds draped unbroken overhead, softening the midday sun and saturating the ultramarine and cornflower hues of the rippling English Channel. The A259 road meandered and took us gently inland through the quaint towns of Newhaven and Seaford. Once we passed The Cuckmere Inn and arrived at the Seven Sisters Park Centre, I stepped off the bus and into a layered and misty silence.

I stood facing south, facing the sea. It was there because I knew it was. But in the space between me and it was an intermediary where dew seemed the perpetual climate. Crossing the road, I submerged into the haze, guided along the Cuckmere River by a single paved path that led me meter by meter deeper into the Seven Sisters Country Park. This must be where clouds came to rest their bellies, where the heavens greeted the earth. Within the 110-kilometer chalk range that forms the greater South Downs, this landscape was a fragile yet vibrant union of unlikely biomes.

Where soft and porous Cretaceous chalk was deposited on the seafloor 60 million years ago was now a saltmarsh that extended into vegetated shingle by the sea and rose into chalk grassland, maritime cliffs, and dry valleys that rolled east to Beachy Head. The lowland saltmarsh dipped gently as golden hour cast warmth over the jade and olive greens of the grass. Cuckmere River coursed through in two arms, one gliding lazily in four meanders and the other a straight and artificial cut rushing from farther inland. Resilient against the swelling and subsiding of saltwater tides, purple sea asters have learned to store freshwater in their fleshy leaves. Closer to the sea, low clumps of succulent glasswort erupted like antlers, thriving in the salinity.

The paved path of South Downs Way paused at a signposted junction where the arms of Cuckmere River met. Onwards south towards the beach, or up and over east to continue on South Downs Way. I checked the clouds still hanging low, the sea still shrouded. Only the sloping grassland called with the sound of sheep, so that’s where I headed. Veering east, I started towards the misty silhouettes of three leafless trees, bent at their waists, swept by a perpetual wind.

A low wooden gate at the base of the slope gave way to steep chalk grassland groomed by agriculture and grazing sheep. The application of fertilizers and repeated bovine pruning, particularly during the mid- to late 20th-century, transformed a tall, scrubby, and woodland habitat into smoother pastures. There was seeming homogeneity to the grass and patches of shrubs, but winter didn’t do this habitat justice. In summer, the density of life here is serendipitous and alive with the rare. Longer days welcome blooming wild thyme, hound’s tongue, bird’s-foot-trefoil, and bloody nosed beetles that lumber among round-headed rampion. The sky teems with ochre fritillary and crisp Adonis and chalkhill blue butterflies, and majestic peregrine falcon that dive from the sun. Now in December, biodiversity was at peace but for the evergreens.

The mist dissolved as I reached the summit breathless, and sky peeked through for the first time that day. Before me, finally, was the sea. But more than just the sea, I emerged at the precipice of the first of seven brilliant chalk cliffs. The Seven Sisters. Atop Haven Brow, I gazed from 500 feet above the English Channel at the arcuate ease with which this brow slipped into a bottom and rose into another brow, again and again into the east. During the last Ice Age, the underlying chalk was saturated with frozen groundwater. Over it, rivers of meltwater from inland glaciers flowed directly to sea and cut valleys into the landscape. When the climate took a turn and ice began to thaw here 6,000 years ago, the rivers drained down through the permeable chalk, drying the valleys and leaving behind deep troughs that are now called bottoms.

Below me, humble waves lapped at the feet of the Seven Sisters as they had for the last six millennia like a chafing kiss. Indeed, it was the sea that forged the sisterly cliffs through repeated erosion. The valleyed landscape sloped into the sea during the Ice Age. But when temperatures increased and glaciers melted, sea levels rose over the last 12,000 years and submerged part of the land. Relentless waves undercut the chalk at its base, felling blocks of it and truncating the cliffs that, today, recede over half a meter every year. While the monolithic though yellowed White Cliffs of Dover are protected, and for better or for worse, the pristine whiteness of the Seven Sisters is owed to natural erosion and the replenishing of untouched chalk. Waves were the sculptors, working the demise and beauty of the Seven Sisters. And as they chiseled with growing passion, fueled by warming seas and angrier storms, an eighth sister has already begun to take shape.

From Haven Brow, I descended into Short Bottom and over Short Brow into Limekiln Bottom before finding a kind space to settle in the grass on Rough Brow. Seeing the expanse of untamed water below and beyond, my thoughts relaxed into a pool of vague impressions. Languid waves melted time. Distant silhouettes of black-legged kittiwake and northern fulmar dotted the sky, growing larger and louder as they approached their cliff-ledge nests.

I thought about the middle school friend I saw for the first time in six years in Tokyo that summer. We met for tsukemen and talked about our young lives as the syrup of Thom Yorke’s voice filled the space. I thought about the coffee shop in Edinburgh where the baristas know me as Emily, and the seat by the window where I watched locals weave among tourists on Nicolson Street at dusk. The uneven stream of pedestrians always flowed like ice did at varying velocities in Antarctica, plunging into the Southern Ocean where it would break, drift, and waste away. It was my favorite time of day, Nicolson Street at dusk. The streetlights blink on like startled fireflies and the city becomes embraced in periwinkle blue at the final finality of day. It was a moment that always slipped like a dream.

Periwinkle blue brings me back and my eyes refocus on the horizon, now a few shades darker from before my reverie. Here, away from streets and lights and streetlights, time was a solely analogue entity. The sun an artful drip of bold vermillion, I imagined a slow and faraway drum sending it off like a mourning ritual. As the drumming reached a crescendo, a gale rushed in and awakened my hair. I shuddered at the thrill of conversing with the wind and was suddenly sure that if I were to race across the high grasslands and leap from the chalk, the wind would catch me and give me flight.

In the last glimmers of light, my final thoughts were of this place. I admired its resilience and evolution over geological timescales that I could never fathom. That these cliffs and grasslands and salt marshes are being eroded with increasing intensity is a consequence perhaps most unbearable for you and me, for it is us who would lose the wildlife that collectively describes “biodiversity,” and it is us who would lose the natural wonders that we’ve deemed worthy. The planet will go on. The cliffs that have buckled, and the grasslands that go with them, aren’t lost forever because the cycle repeats as time unfurls – deposition, erosion, rise and fall. But even so, I didn’t want to let this place go so soon.

On my bus ride back to Brighton, I was reminded of tomorrow’s departure and the dark chocolate bittersweetness of it all. I pressed my eyes shut and rewound the tapes. The misty milkwort, salted zephyrs, the stroke of dazzling ivory against the blue. I flipped through the photos I took but they missed my wind-tousled hair and the delicate aftertaste of this place, one that would accompany every later recollection of a singular wintery day saved by the sea.