The bullseye of the national park

During the filming of The Battle of Britain some 30 years ago three Spitfires were being filmed flying alongside these iconic images to represent Britain's threatened but indomitable image of defence against invasion.

I was watching this from the seat of a little old Massey Ferguson tractor as I cut invading scrub along the top of the cliffs.

Fortunately the tiny red dot of the tractor did not appear on the celluloid, although I used to search for it as heroes Stanford Tuck and Douglas Bader, Keith Park and Ginger Lacey seemed to come to life again in my mind, as they will again this coming September on the 70th anniversary of that turning point in British history.

So I have a special affection for the Sisters, though for me they are not my own top site in the park; that will come in a week or two.

Other memories are vivid too.

One was the sight of an otter far below sliding for fun down a slippery, seaweedy slope made by a boulder.

The gentle swell of an idle summer sea sometimes lifted him back onto the rock again so that he could again have his slide back into that glinting water shining with reflected sunlight off the cliffs.

Then another memory was of one day, thinking of the last time a peregrine falcon nested on the cliffs, a tiercel glided past a little out to sea but on my eye level.

He was just having a look at the place, wondering perhaps whether to set up a territory, breeding last having been attempted there ten years before in 1954.

He was just one of the wintering peregrines that found these seabird larders very comfortable before moving onto Scottish eyries to start a family.

One day at Birling Gap I climbed down to the water's edge and wandered eastward for a while, and saw one of the most wonderful archaeological sights of my life.

In a cliff fall a Stone Age mine shaft had been exposed, running hundreds of feet down in a dead straight plumb-line from the ground above.

The shaft had been split in two, exposing hundreds of foot-holds in the vertical tunnel where the ancient men had descended with their rush tallow candles.

The sea of large blue flints as big as rugby balls which they had been mining was there at my feet.

Presumably having got down to them and they branched out sideways in all directions.

There were no Seven Sisters then of course.

Those brave men were all inland so how on earth did they know they had to go down so deep for these valuable future weapons.

Did they too have to defend their land in their own battles with foreign invaders from the south-east?

To go so deep seems as brave as those pilots who went so high, ten thousand years later.