I have lived in England for over a decade but have yet to visit the famous cliffs. It’s Thursday, it’s sunny, I’ve nothing to do until my new job begins next week, so I get up early and hop on a train to the south coast.

It’s been suggested to me to walk from Deal to Dover, rather than the other way around; this way I’ll get the longest train journey out of the way first, and will see the scenery become more dramatic as I go.

I arrive into Deal around half past ten, coat myself in the factor 50 we bought in a Tokyo konbini, and set off.

Deal is a fairly typical English coastal town. Quiet, pretty, conservative. It was important in the age of sail but has become something of a retirement village since Britain moved on to more lucrative businesses like financial crimes and privatisation. I didn’t see anyone in their twenties other than a pair of stern-faced joggers, squinting and pounding against the sun.

I follow the coastal path south, steep shingle beach to my left. I pass by a fairground under construction. An older lady pushes another in a wheelchair, and they chat about how the helter-skelter was always their favourite. There’s a lot of past in Deal. The path is lined with memorial benches, enough for the whole town to take the weight off their feet. I lose count at around a hundred. One bench is in memory of a teenager, and someone has left a boxed copy of their favourite game on the bench, which tears something within me.

I’m reminded of a friend whose daughter thought people were buried under these benches, which is actually a fair display of deductive reasoning for a four-year-old. I remember that shortly before her death my grandmother commissioned a bench in memory of my grandfather. It was intended for the graveyard, but she kept it in the farmyard because she liked to sit on it. It’s in the graveyard now and we sit on it when we go to visit her. I hope when I die I turn into a bench.

The scenery is repetitive, but beautiful. The sun is hot and the crickets are out. Their singing makes me want to go barefoot like I always did as a child, but this is still England, and dog poo is still a risk, so I don’t. I make good time on the flat and by the end of the first hour I’ve walked about five kilometres. I stop for a while at a pub that looks out into sea, the honey smell of wild parsnip and gorse intoxicating in the heavy air. It’s about a kilometre after this, round the headland, that I see my first cliff.

I grew up in Northern Ireland, which has something of a monopoly on dramatic coastlines, so I was prepared to be a little underwhelmed. There is something, though, about the suddenness with which England suddenly stops and becomes sea, the starkness of the cliffs against the blue of the sky - I think I understand a little why the place is considered one end of this island. I climb up a little, then I’m walking along the tops of the cliffs.

Onwards. It’s hot. France lurks out at sea somewhere, behind a heat haze, but grabs my phone with its signal carrier just to prove it’s there. I time-travel an hour. I wave at a paraglider; they don’t wave back.

Onwards. I’m into farmland, and definitely into chalk country. I think immediately of Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, a book whose description of a connection to the land struck at something so fundamental in me it left me weeping on the Tube in my early twenties. The bottom of my boots turn white.

Onwards. Contrails cast shadows in the high noon. I’m playing peekaboo with the cliffs. I’ll occasionally see their heads poke up to look at me, then duck down as I get close. I am on the cliffs, but I have not yet really seen the cliffs, until I reach St Margaret’s Bay.

I stop for a while in this stunning place, and regret not bringing my swimming trunks. I eat too much whitebait at a little pub and buy an ice cream from a lady at a stall on the beach. We stare at the card machine while it struggles to get the sky to talk to it. “It has to go to France and back,” the lady says. “It’ll be fine.”

I later learn that St Margaret’s Bay is the closest point in Britain to France, so I feel like I’ve been on holiday.

Onwards, back on up to the cliffs, through a blob of greenery that still has a lingering smell of wild garlic despite the season being long past. It’s very hot now. I’m full of food, and without the cognitive overhead of needing to navigate - the sea always in sight - my mind bumbles along freely. I pass by skylark nesting sites, but don’t spot any. The worn paths through the grass, pure white with chalk in the sun, remind me of the lines on a tennis ball. I spot the slick hardness of flints embedded in the ground. There’s a lot of past here too.

Eventually I am within sight of Dover Port. It’s vast, and I can hear it even from this distance. As I get closer the paths become more busy. I pass by a probably-literal boatload of German tourists. They look tired and unimpressed. One older couple stops me along the way, asking “can you see anything from up there?”. I start to explain that the best views are about an hour back, at the bay, but they laugh at me, tell me they’ve done their cardio for the day. Fair enough.

The descent into Dover takes longer than expected, the port even bigger than I thought. The guide I found this walk on - the ever-reliable Saturday Walker’s Club - described it as “cheerless”, which feels unfair, but I will admit the place does have the air of a town in decline. I don’t know if this can be laid at the feet of Brexit but it can’t have helped. I don’t see many locals.

I do find one lovely spot. There’s a street, a little back from the seafront, where the houses are built up to, and indeed into, the cliffs. Looking up, I notice a few windows and doors built into them, perhaps fifty metres up. I don’t know what they’re for, but I find them delightful. Do people live in there? Is there a whole warren of tunnels and rooms? Most importantly: can I visit?

My train back to London is cancelled, and the next one isn’t for an hour, as if to remind me that I am in fact still in England and not on my holidays. My phone has switched back to a UK network. My connecting train is cancelled too. Back to reality, then.