by Wendy Fraser

Created on: June 05, 2010

Located 'twixt Deal and Dover from east to west, the English Channel and the A258 from south to north, St Margaret’s at Cliffe is in all respects a special east Kent coastal village. Perched upon the iconic White Cliffs overlooking the narrowest part of the English Channel, the secluded beach below is only 21 miles from the French coast, which is clearly visible on a fine day.

First noted in the Domesday Book as Sancta Margharita, and with little more mentioned until the 16th century, St Margaret’s is nevertheless full of remarkable and interesting historical episodes and claims to fame; much of this due to cliff top location, unspoilt chalk downlands to east and west and the close proximity of the French coast and narrowness of the Channel.

The parish church is dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch. Established on a Saxon foundation by the Priors of Dover, who controlled the parish until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536, and completed in 1150, it is of similar design to that in Creully in Calvados, Normandy, and built with Caen stone from that region with the integration of local split flint. As it is unusual for a small village to have such a large church it could be that the Benedictine monks used the church and surrounding village as a summer retreat.

On the road into St Margaret’s from the A258 is Wallett's Court, now a country house hotel. Listed as the Manor of Westcliffe in the Domesday Book, its history embraces such luminaries as Bishop Odo of Bayeux, Queen Eleanor of Castille, historian Edward Gibbon, Admiral Lord Aylmer and Prime Minister William Pitt.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the parish population reached about 100, which included survivors of shipwrecks who had been washed up in the bay. Some were yeoman farmers and tenants, but labourers working on the land, once harvest was gathered in, would have relied on the produce from their own subsistence plots. To increase their meagre income many resorted to smuggling, and it is believed that the church tower was used to store equipment for hauling the contraband up the cliffs.

The South Foreland Lighthouse, towards Dover, reminds us that the first lights to guide a safe sea passage below the cliffs into Dover Harbour and to warn sailors of the nearby treacherous Goodwin Sands (the ‘ship swallower’), clearly visible at low tide, would have been fire beacons. These were replaced by the Romans with lighthouses on the cliffs, one of which survives today as part

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