Unfortunately, the service was very slow and we were starving.  It did leave some time to take pictures, though.

And Molly managed to get some knitting done, so it wasn’t time entirely wasted.

The coast at Botany Bay is just amazing.  The chalk cliffs at the back of the beach are stunning.

We discovered that there were lots of little hand and foot holds that enable easy climbing.  The kids decided the sand made a nice, soft place to land and spent quite a bit of time climbing up so they could leap down again and again.

The chalk did prove to be quite soft, not quite what you’d like for real climbing, but it was fun to scramble around a bit.  I’ve been going fairly regularly to the indoor climbing centre in Nottingham, which is fun but not quite the same as being outside on real rock.

We’d heard quite a bit about the geology of chalk in Terry Pratchett’s novels for kids about Tiffany Aiken.  If you haven’t read The Wee Free Men (Discworld) and enjoy smart, incisive fantasies, I highly recommend it. The others in the series are excellent as well. Apparently, the witches in Terry Pratchett’s world cannot perform magic on the chalk since it is not true rock, but Tiffany gets her power from the flints embedded in the chalk matrix. Seeing the flint in Botany Bay and Ramsgate and on houses and walls all through Kent, I really got an understanding of this sort of geology.

It does make an attractive wall finish.  We brought a few pieces of flint and chalk home to add to the growing rock and fossil collection.