The Secret Life Of Sea Cliffs 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.

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 bird life.

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.

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 cow pat.

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 cow pat, 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...

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

# Holiday... #

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.