The Call of the Coast

One of the few down sides of living in the UK's oldest National Park is its distance from our island's  coastline. I grew up in Sussex, born a skimming stone's throw from the English Channel. While one could never boast this as the UK's most beautiful coastline, it nevertheless has its charms: groyns, run-down Victorian and Edwardian piers with tacky amusements, sugary pink tooth-rotting Brighton rock, seaweed and tar-stained pebbles. I hear you gasping with envy! - yet the faded grandeur of the seafront villas, the intimacy of the cobbled Lanes of Brighton, the exoticism of Brighton Pavilion, the briny air of Rottingdean with its rock pools and crabs, the imposing chalk white cliffs linking England with France (a common land sliced and separated some millennia ago) seeps into your soul and stays firmly lodged till the day you die. We all have somewhere we call 'Home' and for me it has to be Sussex. I have travelled and lived far and wide but as I walked a few weeks back by the banks of the river at Cuckmere Haven towards the blue of the English Channel, I have never felt more connected with the land of my birth.