414 REPORT—1885. 
even marks ‘Langney Pointe,’ which, not being marked on Dean Nowell’s map, Mr. 
Maddock assumes not to have been in existence at that date. 
It will be best to divide this piece of coast-line into three, as there is a consider- 
able difference in these subdivisions. Going from east to west we have— 
(1) The Langney shingle beds, where the shore is composed entirely of shingle in 
fulls or ridges. 
(2) The low cliffs from the sea houses (‘Splash Point’) to the Wish Tower, com- 
posed principally of Upper Green Sandstone, but now obscured by the sea-wall and 
esplanade. 
(3) The chalk cliffs,in most places much higher than the last mentioned, from 
the Wish Tower to Beachy Head. 
In division (1) there is conclusive evidence of waste in recent times, though it is 
difficult to get any accurate information as to its extent and the rate of erosion. It 
is, however, quite evident that when the one-inch Ordnance Survey map was first 
published, in 1813, the Martello Towers numbered 69, 70, 71, 72 were some distance 
above high-water mark; they are now all destroyed, and only the ruins of two of 
them laid bare at low water, about half-way between high and low tide. 
In division (2), the part between the Sea Houses and the Wish Tower, the evidence 
of waste is most conclusive. Ina paper in the ‘ Phil. Trans.’ for 1717, Dr. Tabor, of 
Lewes, minutely describes the position of the Roman pavement which had been 
recently found at Eastbourne. This was at that time ‘ distant from high-water mark 
a furlong. In former times it might have been somewhat more, because from this 
point to the westward the sea is always gaining from the land.’ The position of this 
pavement is approximately known. It was not more than a few yards from ‘Splash ’ 
Point,’ the spot where stood the old house called the ‘Round House,’ which, being 
partly undermined by the sea, was pulled down in 1841. We have therefore the fact _ 
that between 1717 and 1841 nearly a furlong of land was destroyed by the encroach- 
ments of the sea in this particular spot. 
Further evidence of this is supplied in the following quotation from ‘ Homély 
Herbert’s Guide to Eastbourne,’ 1857 :— 
‘Immediately beneath where this house [the Round House] stood cattle were wont 
to feed in a delightful meadow. . . . It is supposed that within the last ten years 
no fewer than three acres of land have been washed away from hereabouts.’ 
Further to the westward the sea has also encroached much, as an ex-coastguards- 
man, who has been in Eastbourne for fifty-eight years, told me of a house which 
formerly stood east of the Wish Tower, the site of which is now covered with shingle, 
below high-water mark of highest tides. In front of this house he remembered a 
‘fair-sized garden,’ and he had spoken with a man who remembered playing cricket 
in a field between this garden and the sea. The bluff on which the Wish Tower 
stands appears to have offered more resistance to the encroachments of the sea, as in 
the Ordnance Survey of 1813 it does not appear as such a prominent projection as it 
now is. 
In the third division, from the Wish Tower westwards to Beachy Head, the chalk 
cliffs are higher, and there is less evidence of waste. Where the sea-wall now ex- 
tends (as far as the disused chalk quarry at Holywell) there used, five or six years 
ago, to be sheer cliffs, their base touched by the highest tides, but they do not appear 
to have been wasting at all fast; while between Holywell and Beachy Head the cliff 
face is mostly crumbled and overgrown with vegetation, in some places right down 
to the shingle, showing that there, at all events, little appreciable erosion has taken 
place for some years. 
At Beachy Head itself, the great height of the cliffs rising to 532 feet, and the 
immense mass which the sea has in consequence to wear down, prevents anything like 
rapid erosion, and, moreover, the base of these cliffs is, except for 200 or 300 yards at 
the actual point, composed of the hard Lower Chalk (without flints), which offers great 
resistance to the sea. It appears, indeed, that the upper part of the cliffs, under the 
influence of rain, frost, and salt spray, wastes more quickly than the lower from the 
attacks of the waves, as the latter usually protrudes, allowing the formation of the 
grassy slopes and green ledges which are the conspicuous beauty of Beachy Head. 
The occasional falls of the upper cliff slip over the lower strata, and form a talus of 
chalk ruin, sometimes jutting far enough into the sea to allow the shingle to collect 
to westward. This protects the cliff still more from the sea. Such a fall occurred 
about the year 1848, a little westward of the highest cliffs, and its effect in stopping 
the shingle was so great that the Commissioners of Pevensey Level took steps to hasten 
its destruction by blowing up the largest blocks of chalk with gunpowder. There 
