History
The name Beachy Head appears as 'Beauchef' in 1274, and was 'Beaucheif' in 1317, becoming consistently Beachy Head by 1724, and has nothing to do with beach. Instead it is a corruption of the original French words meaning "beautiful headland".
In 1929 Eastbourne bought 4,000 acres (16 km2) of land surrounding Beachy Head to save it from development at a cost of about £100,000.
The prominence of Beachy Head has made it a landmark for sailors in the English Channel. It is noted as such in the sea shanty Spanish Ladies:
- "The first land we sighted was called the Dodman,
- Next Rame Head off Plymouth, off Portsmouth the Wight;
- We sailed by Beachy, by Fairlight and Dover,
- And then we bore up for the South Foreland light."
The ashes of German social scientist and philosopher Friedrich Engels, one of the fathers of communism, were scattered off the cliffs at Beachy Head into the Channel, as he had requested.
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“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
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