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Coastal erosion on the chalk cliffs at Hope Gap, Seaford

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 7 May 2015, 13:32

Hope Gap towards the Seven Sisters, July 2010

Hope Gap towards the Seven Sisters, August 2012

Hope Gap towards the Seven Sisters, August 2012

 Hope Gap towards the Seven Sisters, March 2014

 Hope Gap towards the Seven Sisters, February 2015

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The Seven Sisters towards Beachy Head from Seaford Head

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 25 Mar 2015, 07:42

 Fig. 1 Jeremy Irvine (War House) and Dakota Fanning (loads of films) on Seaford Head looking towrds the Seven Sisters.

This gem of a film is also from the director of "The Magnificent Marigold Hotel.' Dakota Fanning is a 17 year old dying of cancer with a wish list. Her performance is wonderful and she totally credible as English.

What's odd here is that the bench is pointed away from the view towards some gorse bushes and lacks a dedication which all such chairs have up there. I know because I walk the dog here often. Today I stumbled upon the largest camp of film lighting, catering, wardrobes and other support services I have yet seen. Are they filming Iron Man IV down there?

I have thus far stumbled upon the filming of a scenes from Atonement, what I was told was an Eastenders special, a TV commercial and picking up shots for Harry Potter (It's where the World Quidditch game is played).

Do you live next to a regularly used film location?

As a boy we had Alnwick Castle up the road. Long before Harry Potter they filmed something called 'King Arthur and the Spaceman' in which I was an extra all one summer. I was 16. I was the 'King's Guard Special' to Kenneth Moor's Arthur.

 

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The best walk in the world

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 18 May 2010, 10:56

The best walk in the world just got better - not a plane in the sky. The walk from High Barn down to Hope Gap with the view of the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters and the English Channel is inspiring any day. It is glorious at 5.00am with a clear sky - a sky devoid of the usual tapestry of vapour trails, an experience all the better without the repetitive distance rocket roar of jet engines.

This is, I understand, some of the busiest air space on the planet. It is called Seaford and takes in air traffic leaving and landing in Gatwick, Heathrow and Stanstead ... and no doubt intercontinental flights from Europe heading to North America.

On a no-fly day the sky is open to the heavens. Otherwise the vapour trials like lines drawn to a distant vanishing point on an artist's sketch cage you in. I shouldn't be so poetic, it is graffiti. We should not have to tolerate any of their pollution, not the fouling of the air, not the noise or these visual intrusions on the natural world.

The busiest shipping lane in the world looks it. There are ships and tankers and ferries of various enormous sizes strung out along an horizon some ten miles or more away to the South.

The tide is further out than I have ever known; I have walked here often for ten years. It must be a spring tide. I take this advantage to walk out to the water's edge and look back and forth along the coast, East to the lighthouse of Beachy Head and and West far beyond Brighton & Hove to Littlehampton.

There is a single yacht heading West. I wish to be on it.

The walk takes me around to the mouth of the Cuckmere River where I lay down to enjoy the empty ceiling above my head. It won't last long. I need a fish eyes lens to capture it all. A rare sight.

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