The Secret Life of Sea Cliffs 2 Coast

This is Coast.

Our stunning sea cliffs.

An imperious borderline, stitched with a rainbow tapestry of stone.

Deceptive and dramatic, yielding and treacherous.

Over millennia, we've learnt to negotiate this tricky terrain...

..and carve surprising uses from its rocky skeleton.

My quest has brought me to the Isle of Wight.

I'm on a mission to delve into the hidden world of our sea cliffs,

and I'm going to start with this key.

MUSIC: Mission: Impossible Theme

Over a century ago, the locals unlocked a secret.

This solid sea cliff had a helpfully soft core.

Behind this grill is a disused lift shaft.

A man-made hole bored straight into the cliff.

I'm going to extreme lengths, investigating mysteries

at the heart of our sea cliffs.

And I'm not alone.

Tessa is on the south coast,

discovering a cliff that went to war.

These cliffs were the perfect testing ground for the tactics

that would be used for the D-day landings.

And new experts Cassie Newland and Sarah Beynon

share insider knowledge of unexpected treasures.

These guys can shift serious amounts of poo.

We've got all this amazingly interesting stuff that's just falling out of the cliff.

And I'll be exploring the surprising shores of Yorkshire,

where cliffs are towers of strength, and soft as butter.

Road to nowhere.

Our island's edge, as you've never seen it before.

This is The Secret Life of Sea Cliffs.

My journey will take me on a 70 mile adventure

across the vast and varied cliffs of Yorkshire.

But first, I need to free myself from the depths of the Isle of Wight.

Here, the sea has bitten chunks out of the headland.

If nature could carve through the chalk, why not man?

I've walked across cliffs, I've climbed up cliffs,

but I've never abseiled through a cliff.

And it's completely other-worldly.

In the late 19th century,

the Government had the cliff's centre scooped out.

Part of a secret defence plan.

This looks like a spur tunnel, this.

It's got a very high roof and it's full of debris.

This one looks like the main one.

These tunnels have lain untouched for decades,

but clues to their use still remain.

Old electrical cables carried in this rusty steel pipe.

There's a gigantic rusting engine.

This must have been used to power the lift.

A window ahead sheds some light.

Look at this! Unbelievable!

What could be more secure than a fortress built into a cliff face?

Beginning in 1860, the military chiselled out the chalk

to create a rock-solid defence.

A fort dug into the cliff top.

And near sea level, camouflaged gun positions,

ideal for troops facing hostile warships in the Channel.

They had worked a way to make the most of their cliff edge.

And this rocky border can lead me to further surprises.

Imagine following this seam of chalk back inland.

It would be an underground journey

through the soft underbelly of England,

emerging on the east coast in God's own country.

The chalk rears its head again here.

These are the White Cliffs of Yorkshire.

This is the ideal location to celebrate our sea cliffs

at their most splendid, and their most scary.

While I explore the Yorkshire shore,

the team will discover their own highlights.

Every cliff has its own secret and surprising story to tell.

With thousands of miles of cliffs circling the UK,

there's an adventure waiting around every corner.

But it's impossible to see the whole extraordinary mosaic at once.

Or is it?

I've brought together rocks from around our coast

to create a unique map of the UK.

These pieces of a puzzle build up a picture of the birth of our isles.

An epic saga I want to unpick.

Under my feet are the White Cliffs of Yorkshire made up of chalk,

the remains of microscopic plants about a 100 million years old.

# I'm building an empire

# Starting from scratch It began with stone. #

Now layers of long-gone sea life provide a perch for birdlife.

And where there's chalk, you find an even softer, scarier specimen.

In East Yorkshire, the cliffs are smothered in boulder clay.

It's all very soft material this.

This is a coast that's been eaten away at a ferocious rate.

# Empire

# Oh-oh-oh

# Oh-oh-oh. #

Travel to Cornwall and the granite rock is much harder.

But locals make the most of chinks in their rugged border.

In Wales, some cliffs are chewed away.

Evidence of a slate industry which quarried cash from the cliff face.

# I'm building an empire

# I'm building With the stones in mind. #

The oldest rocks on our coast can be found here in the Outer Hebrides.

This is the great, great, great, great-grandfather

of our coastal geology.

This beautiful stripy rock is three billion years old.

That's more than half the age of planet earth.

Mother Nature carved these rocks,

making a maze out of the Isle of Mingulay.

In Orkney, people sculpted the softer sandstone

to build our oldest village - Skara Brae.

Cliffs tell us where our isles were once a desert landscape.

The dinosaurs roamed here.

And volcanoes bubbled lava.

Those stories make sea cliffs so exciting.

In all, over 100 rock types.

There you go, the bare bones that make up the skeleton of our islands.

Our white cliffs are the famous face of the British Isles.

During the Second World War, our chalky southern shore

was immortalised in song.

A reminder of peace.

# There'll be bluebirds over

# The White Cliffs of Dover

# Tomorrow

# Just you wait and see. #

But this coastline wasn't remote from the war. It helped to win it.

Courageous exploits are remembered in Burton Bradstock.

For centuries, this rocky precipice protected the tiny village,

but when the Second World War came knocking,

a door opened to an extraordinary invasion.

Tessa's discovering a cliff that went to war.

In 1944 the tide was about to turn in Europe,

and Britain's un-breached borders

were braced for a new chapter in their long history.

This line of defence was about to play a crucial role

in an attack on the enemy.

In early 1944, a line of assault craft

was advancing on our south coast.

The sleepy village of Burton Bradstock

was about to be exposed to war.

Janet Guppy was 13 at the time.

The cliffs brought danger to her doorstep.

We weren't allowed to use the cliff at all.

It was just barbed wire all the way along here, right the way along the coast.

And one morning, Janet, you saw something untoward, didn't you?

Yes, I noticed something on the cliff top.

Looking through the wire I could see this dark shape.

-There were several of them there.

-Did you go and investigate?

No, we couldn't get there because of all this barbed wire.

I had to go off because I had to go to school.

Grappling hooks were hurled on to the cliff top.

Unique film shows the cliff face under siege.

But the threat wasn't what the villagers feared.

Look closely and you can see the American uniforms.

This wasn't an enemy invasion. The Yanks were coming.

Burton Bradstock had become a training ground

for America's elite cliff assault team.

The leading men race to the top.

Two men can climb each ladder at the same time.

The US Rangers were preparing for a daring mission

to decide the fate of Europe.

These cliffs were the perfect testing ground

for the tactics used during the D-day landings.

120 miles away over the Channel lay the Normandy coast.

The cliffs there are a mirror image of those at Burton Bradstock.

30 metres high, the same stone, they loomed over the beach.

High ground the Americans had to take.

The cliffs at Burton Bradstock

were chosen to test the troops' equipment for real.

If they could successfully scale these cliffs in England,

then they had a chance of overcoming the German fortifications

on the cliffs of occupied France.

Waiting for D-day, a group of GIs were stationed nearby.

Locals weren't usually allowed to access their camp,

but there's evidence of one exception to the rule.

A little girl posing for a publicity shot with the GIs all those years ago.

And here she is now.

-Hi, Liz.

-Hi, Tess.

Liz Mackay was six years old when she was picked to meet the troops.

Photos of her visits were published stateside,

part of a propaganda campaign to reassure American families

that the Brits were giving their boys a warm welcome.

-I have here some copies of those original photographs.

-Oh, gosh!

So here you are with your pigtails.

Yes!

Oh, yes!

-And this is my favourite. Isn't that special?

-Yes.

You were as cute as a button.

I bet they really indulged you, didn't they?

Oh, absolutely indulged.

We came out with armfuls of goodies, you know.

Chocolate and candies and hair ribbons.

Had you ever even met an American before?

No. No, I'd only seen them on film.

They were all like movie stars and I think we felt part of a big movie.

Were you aware of why they were stationed here?

Not really, no. I was a little too young to fully comprehend

the seriousness of what was going on.

For the Americans, their peaceful stay had an abrupt end.

Janet caught a remarkable glimpse of their top-secret departure.

-We were haymaking and...

-There you are.

There was a hayrick there and my uncle was at the top and he shouted to me and he said,

"Come up on to the top of the hayrick.

"There's a sight that I hope you'll never see in the rest of your life."

And when we looked out across here, it was black, the sea.

You couldn't see the sea. It was just boats.

The water was thick with soldiers.

On the 6th June 1944, the Allied forces launched

their crucial landings on the Normandy coast.

The next few hours have been immortalised in drama.

The Americans stormed the beach and attacked higher ground

where German fire threatened GIs exposed on the sand below.

At the cliffs, the Rangers' training kicked in.

Thanks to practice in England, the first men were up in minutes

and heroically stood fast.

More than 100 US Rangers, over half the cliff assault force,

were killed or injured during the D-day operation.

The survivors were eventually relieved,

having held on to their lethal position.

Overcoming the cliffs of France,

the Allies secured the beaches and advanced.

Within a year, the war in Europe was won.

Back in Burton Bradstock, two women come again to the cliffs

to remember desperate days.

What about for both of you,

being so connected to such a significant moment?

It honed your sights in on what could go on on the cliffs.

-We were part of that.

-It's history.

And I feel quite proud of that.

Even though it's a tiny, tiny speck, it's good.

You were the poster girl for the GIs!

Don't tell everyone!

Our coastline can feel like a full stop.

But here, when destiny came knocking,

these cliffs opened us up to events beyond our imagining.

Nature is perpetually busy, remodelling our coast.

Grand pillars.

Majestic archways.

Vast halls.

Wild splendour that's home to our wildlife.

Where we keep clear, others congregate.

And there's no better residence than Ramsey Island.

Here on the knife edge of West Wales the rock face is daunting,

but look closely and you'll discover a secret community of cliff dwellers.

Insect expert Sarah Beynon is onboard to bring us a bug's-eye view.

Ramsey Island is about a mile from where I grew up.

I've been out here countless times but I never tire of the sea cliffs.

At 120 metres tall, they're not very people-friendly.

There are only two permanent residents, but a wealth of wildlife.

And a few surprise day-trippers.

Normally, it's the sea birds that entertain the tourists.

Ramsey Island is a bird watcher's paradise.

But I know a secret.

Some species only thrive thanks to remarkable insects

that stalk these cliffs.

The dung beetles.

I've studied these fascinating insects for years.

Fortunately, they're not hard to find.

There's always an 'X' to mark the spot.

Unfortunately, that 'X' is a cowpat.

Let's see what we find. It's a bit squishy.

Ah! Here we go.

So here is a dung beetle.

Now, this is one of the dung beetles that Ramsey Island is renowned for.

This one is called Anoplotrupes Stercorosus.

Not an easy name to remember.

This is a flightless dung beetle

that will potter along from dung pat to dung pat.

It will just hide itself underneath the dung

and then bury the dung in a tunnel it digs under the pat.

Observe them closely, and you'll discover these humble creatures

play an illustrious role in Ramsey's rich ecosystem.

They are the biggest draw for the island's more famous feathered residents.

Dung beetles attract other cliff dwellers

that bird watchers flock here to spot - the chough.

On the cliff tops, these rare red-billed birds have a field day.

They feast on the plentiful, protein-rich dung beetles.

RSPB warden Greg Morgan keeps a close eye on the precious chough.

They're a special breed on Ramsey for the fact they are scarce nationally

and this is one of the strongholds for them.

They're very charismatic birds. When you watch them as long as I do

you start noticing all these nuances.

They nest in sea caves and it doesn't matter

what the weather throws at them, they'll put up with that.

You just start to love these birds.

Where we're standing now, it's absolutely rife with insect life,

so is this the kind of place the chough would be feeding?

Absolutely. This is ideal for them.

This is what they need. They need the grass to be short.

If it gets too long they can't forage properly and as a result of livestock out on the island,

that helps to provide that environment and provide dung.

So the dung beetles, their only predator is really the chough

and other birds that are foraging in dung.

Exactly. It all starts at the bottom.

You get your insects right and then you get your birds right.

It's heartening to see Ramsey's cliff top food chain flourish.

Birds eat beetles.

Beetles eat dung.

Dung that comes from cattle and sheep, that feed on the flora

that thrives in the soil tilled and nourished by burrowing dung beetles.

To ensure this food cycle remains unbroken,

I monitor the beetle population.

A harmless trap, baited with a cowpat, lures them in.

So here's one of the dung pats we laid a few days ago,

and hopefully, there'll be something inside.

Oh, look at this! What have we got?

This one here is called Trypocopris Vernalis.

You can see its front legs that he's waving around here have got lots and lots of spines on them.

They're so strong, these legs.

They use them for digging

and pulling the dung down into the burrows.

They can push the equivalent to me pushing

three-and-a-half double-decker buses!

Ramsey's miniature world is going from strength to strength,

thanks to the giant sea cliffs.

For us, this margin is inhospitable.

But where we fear to tread, nature can roam free.

The ribbon of sea cliffs around Ramsey is a precious place.

I wish we could manage more of our land like this,

so the beetles are left alone to do their bit for the environment.

We've learnt to keep a safe distance from our cliff edge.

But what happens when cliffs edge closer to us?

Our shore shrinks by the day here in Yorkshire.

Rising some 200 metres,

these white precipices are among the loftiest in England.

But they have a secret.

They stretch much further than it seems on the surface.

In many places, the white cliffs are actually brown.

The gleaming face of the chalk

is covered in a thick layer of sand and clay.

This false facade extends for miles.

The clay of an ancient seabed

that was smeared up over the chalk during the ice age.

Now, the sea's reclaiming her lost property.

Seen from a distance, this cliff might look fairly solid,

but up close it reveals its alarming secret.

This stuff is so soft, it falls apart in your hand.

As sea levels rise,

this boulder clay along our east coast is crumbling.

This massive structure from the Second World War

is just lying on its back on the beach.

It's made of brick, concrete, steel.

Once upon a time, it stood up there on top of a cliff,

and it was constructed to defend Britain from enemy forces.

But it's been brought to its knees

not by war, but by the attacking sea.

In 2006, our cameras captured the same tower

sitting a few metres from the cliff edge.

Just three years later, the ground disappeared beneath it.

Here's the present cliff.

It's been receding over the last century-and-a-half

at an astonishing average of 1.27 metres for every year,

which means that since 1941 when that military emplacement was built,

this cliff has receded about 76 metres.

So I'm going to take a walk back through time,

one pace for every year.

One, two, three, four...

30 paces in, I'm back in the 1980s.

Ten paces more, I hit the glam rock days of the 1970s.

# Ch-Ch-Changes. #

Through to the swinging '60s.

# Talking about my generation

# I'm not trying to cause... #

And after 72 paces...

# As time goes by

This...

was the line of the cliff in the 1940s. Look at it now!

Extraordinary.

# As time goes by. #

Knowing how quickly this cliff is eroding

makes you feel uneasy standing on the edge.

So imagine living here!

Since Roman times, over 30 villages on the east Yorkshire coast

have been lost to erosion.

Now the community of Aldbrough is under threat.

While I'm at the seaside end of the village, it all looks pretty normal.

Pretty little houses, village pub.

What's not normal...

..is this!

A road to nowhere.

Our edge is a precarious place to be.

But some refuse to see this as the end of the line.

I'm meeting Nigel Fairclough.

Less than 20 years ago, he bought a seafront house here.

But as the cliff started to nibble at his garden,

it was condemned as unsafe.

Now only a ghost house remains.

We'd be walking up the front footpath here to the house?

That's correct, yeah.

So if we go in here and we turn left...

you're in the living room.

Lovely and cosy when the storms were from the sea.

You walk straight through the living room.

We had like a galley kitchen running along the back of the bungalow.

So this is where we'd be standing here to make a pot of tea.

Yeah. And you could stand here and look out.

Beautiful view. You can see Bridlington.

Could you hear the sea at night?

Yeah. Odd stormy nights, the house would shake.

Literally, we had a lot of ornaments up

and when the sea were banging in on the cliff, the whole house shook.

-You're kidding?

-No, no.

-The ornaments would tremble?

-Yeah, yeah.

We've had to move them back, if they were on a shelf,

sometimes we had to push them back

because they were working their way forward.

Didn't that tell you that you were living somewhere quite precarious?

Yeah, but...

comparing where you live, living in a town to living somewhere like this,

it were well worth putting up with it.

Do you remember the day your house was knocked down?

Yeah. We had to watch while they came in with their digger

and virtually crushed it, turned it into matchwood

and loaded it in a skip and took it away.

Today, the street is slowly being bulldozed house by house

as the cliff edge inches closer.

It just seemed so solid.

And you never expected this to happen to it.

But Nigel is undeterred.

He's just bought a new house 100 metres down the road.

They reckon that's got 50 years, so it won't worry me one little bit.

That one is going to be to see me out now, you know.

It's a lovely area, it is great.

It's just sad it's going.

All our cliffs are shifting structures

slowly being reclaimed by the sea.

As they know in Scarborough.

In 1993, the Holbeck Hall Hotel was demolished

after its east wing was lost to coastal erosion.

When cracks started to show in Cornwall,

a local geologist was lucky enough

to capture a Rocky Horror Show on his phone.

SHRIEKING

Stretches of our coast do tumble into the sea.

A story they recognise at Lyme Regis.

These gentle slopes are evidence of the cliff's downfall.

And as the land slips, it spills the beans on its past life.

Cassie Newland is an archaeologist with a difference.

She's raking up history the town thought it had buried long ago.

Some archaeologists love Roman villas or Saxon hoards.

I like more unusual things.

And today, I'm trawling for trash.

The 1950s is the birth of our modern throwaway society.

But what we chuck away as rubbish,

we're not expecting to get confronted by again.

Here at Lyme Regis, we can do just that,

and get into all the details

of people's everyday lives in the past,

when the sea cliffs give up their secrets.

Remarkably, these cliffs were once used as a rubbish dump.

Right on the edge of town, the locals can re-live past lives,

revealed from the old dump.

As the cliff crumbles, its curious contents litter the beach below.

We've got an actual kitchen sink!

And it's enamel. How '50s is that?

It's fascinating to think that these domestic relics

have lain hidden in the cliffs for decades.

I'm meeting local geologists Paddy and Chris

to make sense of the jumble.

They've sifted out some prize pieces.

-Chris, Paddy.

-Hi.

-Hello.

This looks interesting. Is there anything you know dates of?

That's 1937, that's a beer bottle top from Bridport.

-Fantastic.

-So that's got a date.

Oh, I like that.

That was actually found the day before yesterday...

So that's George V.

..by my youngest son, Leon.

These ones you see give you a bit of a telltale.

They're...they're machine-made.

You can see that because they've got a seam going all the way down.

And the reason you can tell is it also goes all the way over the top,

so we know that these have to be after 1909,

when the machine that did that was invented.

We've got all of this interesting stuff

that's just falling out of the cliff. Is that normal?

When it gets wet, particularly in the winter,

the rocks over on that side, they fail and they slide down.

And it so happens the rubbish dump was up at the top of the cliff

and all of that came with it.

And all of this material fell down in May 2008

when there was a very big fall,

-about three-quarters-of-a-million tonnes.

-Gosh!

So we've got archaeology and geology.

Archaeology and geology literally all muddled up and all mixed up.

Out of sight and out of mind.

No-one gave a thought to the cliff top dump.

But oddly, the bin men who collected

the town's trash became local treasures.

No-one knew them better than Ken Gollop.

So, Ken, your dad was a dustman?

Yes. My old man was a dustman.

# He wears a dustman's hat

# He wears cor blimey trousers

# And he lives in a council flat. #

-Which one's your dad?

-There you are. The big one.

-Actually, it does look like you.

-The big one.

-They're amazing!

-Yeah.

They were on their rounds one day and a gentleman was moving house.

And he had loads of bowler hats, top hats,

dress coats, morning coats and things.

He said to the dustmen,

"Look, I got all these, do what you like with them."

So, of course, Father being Father,

he put a set straight on

and they went around the town emptying dustcarts in top hats.

-Fantastic!

-They were so popular and that,

that people used to stop and take photographs of them.

The sartorial binmen were tourist favourites.

But Lyme Regis was no holiday for them.

So, this is very steep, isn't it?

-This is a dustman's nightmare.

-It is, isn't it?

The cliff edge is a top spot to share some lost treasure.

Hidden in the BBC archives,

I've dug up a recording Ken's never heard.

Now, Ken, tell me if you recognise this at all.

"You sound as though you enjoy your job. You're very happy."

"Oh, we four are the happiest men in Lyme.

-"Yes, happiest men in Lyme, sir."

-That's my father.

"Oh, yes! We've had so many as 20 or 30 around us taking our photos.

"We've had our photos took over a thousand times this summer."

"You're very interested in hats."

"Hats? Yes, sir. I expect I've got more hats than anybody in the land."

He was taking the mickey out of the interviewer, wasn't he?

He was, he was just...he was a clown all the time.

And he made the best of everything.

He really enjoyed his life.

And he made a lot of people happy,

and I think he realised he did that.

-I loved that!

-Oh, that was really wonderful, that was.

The top-hatted dustmen of Lyme Regis are now long gone,

but this cliff top time capsule continues to reveal its secrets.

Oh, my goodness!

These are crittal windows, these metal-framed windows.

If these were still in your house,

you wouldn't be allowed to take them out.

These may not be the jewels and relics some archaeologists crave,

but to me, they are priceless.

They tell the story of everyday people.

It's the archaeology of us.

Scaling our coastal cliffs can test brains, as well as brawn.

There's more than one way to rise to the top.

One final, uplifting experience awaits me back in Yorkshire,

here at Saltburn-by-the-Sea.

This Victorian seaside resort is sitting pretty on the cliff edge.

And it's the spectacular cliff lift

that's the secret of the town's success.

This glorious invention allows holiday-makers to reach the beach.

The two carriages might look independent,

but they're ingeniously linked on a pulley system.

As one falls, its twin rises.

I'm meeting Paul Wakeford to get the full low-down.

-Hello, there.

-Hello!

-Mind if I have a snoop?

-What an incredible engine room.

-It is.

How does it work?

Well, these trams weigh the same as each other.

I've just filled one with water

and it gets heavy and down it goes, pulls the other one up.

Close the doors...

..turn the tap on, start filling it.

How do you know when it's heavy enough?

There you go. It's now heavy enough with water.

-It goes off on its own.

-Yes.

Down she goes. The sheer weight of it.

Gravity is making it work.

It can be people. If you had 12 people going down, no-one coming up,

you wouldn't need water.

The tram, when it gets to the bottom,

will empty all of the water out automatically.

-The water's down the bottom?

-Yes.

It collects in a tank at the bottom.

And then we set the pump going, that's the only power needed

is to pump the water from the bottom tank back up to our top tank.

What do you call it? They're not carriages, are they?

It's a funicular tramway.

And it's funicular, not "funny colour", funicular!

There you go. Thank you very much.

It was in 1870 that the first cliff lift opened the beach to tourism.

But it took a few goes to get it right.

Originally, it did have a vertical drop

of 120 feet.

But the walk out to the gantry to get it down,

you would have had to be brave.

The gantry out to the lift dissuaded Victorians

from braving a visit to the newly-built pier below.

But the lone hotel in this photo is now one of many.

Tourism took off, thanks to the funicular railway.

And on rainy days when holiday business is slow,

Paul finds a way to raise spirits, if not passengers.

# Until a certain little lady comes by

# Oh, me, oh, my

# She's absolutely wonderful marvellous and beautiful

# And everyone will understand why

# I'm leaning on the lamppost at the corner of the street

# Until a certain little lady comes by. #

Originally, the Victorians would career down the cliff in 33 seconds.

A white-knuckle ride.

Today, for health and safety reasons,

it's a much more leisurely 55-second journey.

While the lift did the hard work,

the visitors could relax and take in the view

until they were deposited safely beside the seaside.

-Hello, there!

-Thank you.

As I reach the end of my journey

perhaps I've arrived at the best secret of all.

How we've managed to surmount the challenges

presented by our sea cliffs.

Coming up with solutions to coastal conundrums

has created some of our most exciting environments.

Cliffs might look like dead-ends,

but they're where we think outside the box.

Where the edge of land is steepest, we're really tested.

On our sea cliffs, a secret and surprising world awaits.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd