Beachy Head · Rock Sublime: The Sussex Coast in the British Imagination

Beachy Head is a great chalk headland and local promontory — easily one of the most recognisable elements of the Sussex coast. It is visible periodically as one travels east further down the coast, even as far as Hastings or Rye. It is the first place one would sight land on particular routes from France, and so, like other such locations on the coast, carries an outsized geopolitical role, particularly historically. Today it is primarily known as a site of tremendous natural beauty, of tragedy, and for climbing. Gilchrist refers to it as having an “enduring topography of mortal terror,” in which the sublime can be captured both in the Romantic poetry of Charlotte Smith and in the perilous adventures of modern British climbers.

This illustration of Beachy Head shows the headland at its most towering and impressive. One of its spires appears precarious, leaning as though it may fall at any moment into the cold waters of the sea below – which on occasion, they do. While a travel guide rather than an intentional Romantic work, it nevertheless captures the sublime elements of it about which poets wrote.

This guide details Beachy Head and the area around it — including the springs at Holywell, to which the Curator has been to drink from its waters. It documents the propensity of its spires to fall, and combines written description with a work of poetry about the place “by a Schoolmaster,” intentionally playing up the Romantic elements of its landscape as part of the advertisement of the area.

This classic work of Romantic poetry by Charlotte Smith juxtaposes the natural beauty of Beachy Head with its geographical and political position directly across from where the English at the time worried the French may invade. Smith contrasts the inevitability of the landscape and its separation from the continent, ordained by God, with the only seeming inevitability of English enmity with France.