St Margaret's Bay slipway
St Margaret's Bay is a pebble beach at the narrowest point of the English Channel, set below chalk cliffs and the clifftop village of St Margaret's at Cliffe. Leathercote Point, at its northern end, marks the western end of the line the International Hydrographic Organization draws between the Channel and the North Sea. The bay has long been a departure point for Channel swimmers, and the submarine telegraph cable laid to Sangatte in 1851 ran from here.
The beach runs from Ness Point in the south west to The Spit in the north east, divided by groynes and held behind a concrete sea wall and promenade, both built in the early 1950s after the war-damaged sea front was cleared. The Coastguard, the pub at the foot of Bay Hill, is the most prominent building on the front.
The water off the bay sits inside the Dover to Deal Marine Conservation Zone, designated in 2016 over 10 square kilometres of the Kent coast. Chalk platforms at the foot of the cliffs form reefs cut by deep gullies, and the zone holds the best example in the region of wave-cut platforms. Ross worm reef lies on the lower shore where sand meets the edge of the chalk, a pairing recorded nowhere else in the UK.
South Foreland Lighthouse stands on the cliffs about a mile from the bay, built to warn mariners off the shifting sands and guide them through the Strait of Dover. Footpaths reach it from the beach along Beach Road and the South Foreland valley, and the England Coast Path and the Saxon Shore Way both run along this stretch of cliff.
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Conditions to check
Over 400 commercial vessels a day use the Dover Strait, along with more than 100 cross-Channel freight and passenger ferry movements.
SourceThe flood runs up the Channel towards the North Sea from 1.5 hours before high water at Dover until 4.5 hours after, and the ebb runs back down the Channel from 4.5 hours after high water until 2 hours before the next.
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